Animals died during the film shooting?

I think someone manufactured a story based on really horrible animal abuses found in the source Munchausen stories themselves and not Gilliam's movie, or even older versions that might have been able to get away with animal abuse.

From Off Screen:

Some preliminary observations come to mind when viewing a great deal of this work. All the films deal with essentially the same select source material that amounts to about half of the original book’s adventures.3 The other half of the book essentially consists of viciously described hunting expeditions by the Baron. He recounts that he “rammed the head [of a decapitated lion] further into the throat of the crocodile, and destroyed him by suffocation.”4 Later, dressed in the skin of a polar bear, Baron Munchausen kills thousands of other polar bears by stabbing each in the back of the neck with a knife. These occasions are by no means the grisliest of his tales.5 None of the Munchausen films available to me has contained even one of these expeditions; there is a silent and tacit refinement taking place by each filmmaker. This may be explained by the changing tastes of children (children who are, I must occasionally remind myself, the primary audience of the Munchausen books and films); inexplicable, however, is the lack of animal death in the earliest films, when it might still have been acceptable. Consider, for example, another children’s work from as late as the thirties: Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo run in Le Petit Vingtième. Tintin explodes a rhinoceros and stones a buffalo with abandon, and it was years before this was modified to the current animal-friendly version. The filmmakers’ restraint is perplexing. And encouraging—the filmmakers respond to Munchausen the fabulist, not the brute.