Folly Overuse

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.