"Earthlings" (the documentary)

Glow

Has anyone seen this film? I have rented it and plan to watch it sometimes this week.

Everything I have heard about it has scared me a little. Someone I know told me it "broke" them...

Invincible_summer

It is definitely disturbing, but more in an eye-opening way than "I can't sleep for days" way.

It's probably my favourite animal advocacy film - it covers a lot of bases and is quite compelling. But it is indeed heavy stuff.

BhikkhuJayasara

Show a couple cute animals being tortured and everyone goes nuts, then they squish a bug crawling on them or put out a mouse trap. As long as the animal makes people go "aww" it's effective emotional tugging. The other ones few people care about.

Dennis Leary did a skit about only wanting to save the cute animals back in his no cure for cancer bit, still hilariously true.

Also you can watch the full doc here, good on them for putting it out there for free.
http://earthlings.com/?page_id=32

anataman

Thank you @Jayantha - I am going to sit and watch it sometime in the next few days. I already know what I will conclude, I used to defend animal liberation, but always got shouted down. Now parts of the world are starting to accept that other human beings are not our slaves, perhaps, other parts will open to equality of species.

Someones gonna say 'if a big grizzly bear shows it's ugly mug near me I'll shoot it dead, ask it questions later', but who am I kidding; theres a lot of selfishness to overcome yet, this is going to take time, hey we've got time, haven't we?

Glow

I've just finished watching it. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to handle it, but it was very well done and I think they conveyed the horror of many of these practices without crossing into shock territory. (Although, I've seen a lot of this information, especially in the Food section, in other documentaries, such as The Cove and Food, Inc..) I appreciate that the film focused on the philosophical and ethical issues involved -- somewhere most popular films on these topics only turn cursorily, which then fails to convey to audiences the why of animal welfare.

Before I even studied Buddhism, I went out of my way never to willingly kill an animal (including insects), except for food. And with food, I eat less and less meat over the years. It's not very difficult nowadays, and cheaper in the long run. In fact, when I was a kid, I used to scoop up earthworms that had been brought up by the rain and move them from the sidewalk to the grass if they were still moving. I don't know if that actually saved them, but I wanted to give them a fighting chance to burrow back underground.

I can trace this caution back to being in first grade at a Catholic school. A nun there was a vegetarian and one of the kids asked her why she didn't eat meat. Her response stuck in my memory for decades. She said, "You can spend a million years trying to bring a fly you've swatted back to life, but you'll never be able to put life back into it. God granted these creatures the gift of life, just as He gave it to us. What right do we have to take it away?"

I didn't become a vegetarian (and later, I became agnostic and finally a non-deist), but that line of reasoning still resonates with me. These things deeply disturb me, and I'm glad there seem to be more and more people getting the message that the convenient distance we've established from the slaughterhouses, the tanneries, and the carny tents is just putting curtains over something which rightfully should disgust us.