Open up the closet and drawers in your room. What do you see? You may find thick clothes that contain wool and keep you warm in winter. Or vitamin supplements that went through an animal experiment. It seems most of the product we use every day received help from animals in the process of manufacturing. Even the diet without meat is impossible to imagine for some people, as meat consumption per capita for South Korea increased tenfold from 4.1 kilograms to 48 kilograms.

But despite the heavy human reliance on animals, only few know about how animal products come into use of people. ‘Earthlings’, a 2005 documentary movie directed by Shaun Monson, an animal rights activist, exposes cruel brutality conducted by humans on animals in response to the ignorance. It contains countless footage collected over six years through hidden cameras and offers them in five categories: Pets, Food, Clothes, Entertainment, and Science.

The film utilizes emotional aspects to convey the message. Background music is rather calm and even peaceful, contradicting the images of animals in pain. Also, no interview was included in the movie to make the footage speak for itself.

“I wrote the narrative, but beyond that I wanted the footage to speak for itself. And nothing more ... no talking heads utilized in an effort to agree with me. “said Shaun Monson. 

The movie is also logically organized, coherently structured to show the sequence of how animals are treated. For example, it starts from showing Indian cows embarking on a harrowing ‘death march’, transported in a careless way and slaughtered to finally end up in hands of a customer. This way of stating facts divulges a process of how animal products come into use step by step, blatantly exposing the system which most people are unaware of or choose not to discover. The use of statistics and quotes by famous figures such as Mark Twain strengthen the director’s opinion as well and establishes credibility to the film’s voice.

Watching a series of footage was a big shock and made me take a negative point of view regarding the use of animals. All five categories included violence carried out by humans and their motive could be summed up in two words. The first one is profit. Every procedure of manufacturing a product is manipulated to maximize the profit. For example, chicken beaks are chopped up to prevent them from pecking one another, and a large group of cows are haphazardly put in a truck without the care of sanitation. The desire for profit is most highlighted in the entertainment section, greatly shown in the footage of circus preparation. In the video, an elephant is brutally treated by a trainer until it obeys orders. They advertise that animals are trained with positive enforcement, but in fact, the reality is completely different from what most people know about the event. It is easy to distinguish if the motive is the profit when we think the event would still occur in a world without capitalism. Without the motive to earn money, would people still train giant elephants with the risk of hurting themselves? Would there be bizarre events like pigeon bowling? I highly doubt it.



The second word is superiority. The logic lying beneath taking off an animal's skin alive, killing a dog using a gas chamber, and bullfighting is that humans are superior to animals. I do not mean to argue against the historical fact that the strong rules and feed on the weak. But respecting the feelings and emotions is a different matter. It is a matter of how we choose to place ourselves in the planet. If we truly respect animals for being alive just like us, we should learn to hold our desires and seek for alternatives even if it makes up a part of food diet, culture or scientific research. Humans have evolved to exert power over the nature, but we still remain a tiny portion of it and should know to live together with other creatures.

I believe the movie is heavily one-sided and suggest only the dark side of human reliance on animals with detailed graphics. For instance, the average mouse gene is about 85% similar to its human homolog and is frequently used to test the safety of new medicine. But it does not point out the roles animals played to promote the health of humankind. Nonetheless, I think the message the film implies is perfectly valid because animals did not have an appropriate chance to express their opinions. In the beginning, the film presents the three stages of truth and tries to make the connection between speciesism and other types of discrimination like racism and sexism. The second step in the three stages of truth is ‘violent opposition’, which animals clearly did not deserve unlike African-Americans or women who fought for universal suffrage. This movie speaks in behalf of animals, which I think is the factor that makes the film so powerful and effective. I would recommend for everyone, even meat-eaters and leather lovers, as it offers a new perspective and a chance for them to learn to treat animals with respect.

Animals have maintained a close relationship with humans throughout the whole history. It developed to shape essential parts of cultures, food diet, and even scientific progress. However, we should never forget that animals have a nerve system and brain like humans that enable them to feel pain and emotions. They just developed different abilities and senses in the process of adaptation to diverse surroundings, which does not make them as underlings or inferior organisms. There are alternatives to improve this relationship in a way that preserves the whole earth. Animals will sustain their lives with less pain, enabling humans to live with them, not ‘above’ them. Most importantly, nature will be a cleaner and more harmonious place to live in for all earthlings. 

Chapter Four begins by stating that Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar live in a sub-cellar of a forgotten Victorian hospital. Interestingly, early hospitals were seen as a gateway to death because of poor conditions such as overcrowded rooms. Considering this, I assumed the characters in London Below represent those who were ‘abandoned’ in modern society. This led me to a question; why don’t people in London Below cooperate? London Below is not completely disconnected from the world above since Illaster escaped from there. That means it is possible to return to London Above. Since they all share the harshness of the real world, I expected them work together to prove their existence and value to people in London Above, as a form of a riot. Instead, the rat-speakers built their own society underground. Why did they choose not to be seen by strangers like rats?

I could find my answer to the question from Anesthesia. She was staying under an overpass in Notting Hill, running away from violence of her aunt and her husband. Notting Hill is an affluent area, but it is also a cold place that shows no understanding for other people’s suffering, as can be seen in the daunting description of the excerpt of ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill’. If people in Notting Hill were sympathetic enough to care about Anesthesia, she would have not come down to London Below. However, people see in different perspectives according to the situation they are in. For rich people with a high social status, they do not understand nor feel the need to notice problems the poor face every day. For example, when a politician Chung Mong-joon was asked how much a bus fare is in 2008, he answered “70 won.” I wonder if people in modern, materialized society are growing more selfish.

The part where Croup answers a phone call was also interesting. He is cruel and kills people together with Mr. Vandemar, but becomes a lamb when he is on the phone with his employer. Actually, they are just taking orders and doing what their boss ordered them to do. So, can we blame for what they do if they are kind-hearted in nature, but only kill innocent people as an order? There are times when people must do something even though it is against their will. A soldier in a war is one example. He may not like the idea of taking away a person’s life, but he has to kill enemies to win the battle and save his own life. If Croup and Vandemar were ordered to make a donation to the homeless, they would appear as generous characters. I thought understanding how authority can change a person’s behavior would useful when making a decision as a member of society.

Chapter Five shows Richard in the Floating Market. He sees stuff being sold in the market and thinks they are quite bizarre. From fresh nightmares, rubbish, mended clothes to jewelry made from antique radios, they sell and buy things that people in London Above would mostly find useless and have not much interest in. In addition, it does not fit to the place the market is being held, Harrods, an upmarket department store. I think there can be two ways to think about this. First, it can be thought that what people want to possess and value highly in these days is actually nothing. Products made by famous brands, such as bags, shoes, and makeup accessories are not ‘efficient’. They are not necessary in life and can be replaced with other cheaper and more efficient products. The reason people want to purchase them, however, is because of the honor and attention they will bring, not the utility. They want to raise their social status by possessing those products, but it takes more than luxuries to gain true respect from others.

From a different perspective, it can be suggested that seemingly useless things are in fact valuable in our lives. For example, an antique radio may have fewer features than up-to-date ones, but it also contains properties and beauty that modern products do not have. With rapid technological advances, we may forget the value of things we already have in possession. However, old products had once been cutting edge technologies and new products will become old in the future as well. Everything holds its own value in its own way.

Richard finding violence exhilarating was worth thinking about too. I feel people these days are under too much pretenses to present a better image of themselves. During that process, we are forced hide our emotions and change words since not doing so would draw others’ attention and jeopardize our social positions. Politicians, office workers, and even teachers are not exceptions. A society where people are afraid to speak the truth deceives every member of it, and we should equip ours with proper measures so that more whistle blowers can come up front.

In chapter Six, the characters head to Islington to find an angel. This is funny since there is a Tube station named Angel in Angel, Islington. We do not know if there is an angel in Islington or if an angel really exists. However, we cannot disprove an argument that an angel exists because we can only make assumptions. People once believed that the Earth rotated around the sun. They also thought that all matter consisted of water, fire, earth, and air. But both theories proved to be false with advances in science. This suggests that knowledge we have about the world we live in can be false because we do not know everything about it. For example, it is possible that our lives are controlled and planned just like the Truman show. Maybe emotions, relationships, history, and even family are fabricated. Therefore, I believe we have to keep learning and suspecting what’s around us because we may not be seeing something that clearly exists. We don’t know what is there until we decide to look inside like Schrödinger’s cat, a famous thought experiment, tells us. A complex mathematical equation means nothing to a person with no knowledge in math while it can indicate the power of an atomic bomb to an expert in the field. It’s the same with people in London Below. There may be people out there who desperately need help from London Above. It may be that they are sending signals for rescue but we are not recognizing them. Thus, we should never stop asking questions because everything can turn out to be false.