Worth: $14.00
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Cast:
Farmers, Natalie Portman (Narrator)
Intro:
… some of the insights would be revelatory and thought-provoking to anyone.
Eating Animals was adapted and extended from the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s non-fiction book of the same name. Despite the title, and also despite its potentially distressing theme, it begins as an evidence-based argument against factory farming rather than animal consumption in general. Some of the people featured most onscreen are in fact small-scale chicken or pig farmers, albeit with very serious qualms and a disposition (at least) towards activism.
As the doco goes on, though, the focus broadens and we are presented with a litany of woes resulting from industrial-scale meat production; some impact hugely on the environment, others on human health or animal cruelty. The latter are probably the most affecting, as there is some horrendous footage from slaughterhouses and the aforementioned factory farms. (It’s used sparingly, as incidentally, are statistics and expert reports.) The prospect of a lethal flu pandemic coming to our own species from the antibiotics in genetically modified birds is sobering too. As is, for example, the aerial film of North Carolina’s innumerable pink ‘hog lagoons’, so-called because of their concentrated animal faeces. Not surprisingly, fish die in them. “We are the Goliath”, as someone pithily puts it, “and nature is the David”.
There are other kinds of horror stories in this film, poignant ones about failing marriages and struggling ‘little people’, and infuriating ones about government corruption and the Ag-Gag laws. If you eat meat, you should see it but quite probably won’t. On the other hand, if you don’t eat meat there’ll be an element of it which is preaching to the converted. Not a very large element though, fortunately, because some of the insights would be revelatory and thought-provoking to anyone.
Screening here: https://au.demand.film/eating-animals/
