An Incredible (and Short) Must-See Film!

This film - from Mercy for Animals - is extraordinary and short. Please have a look. It poses a question that many people are afraid to ask: Where does my food come from? The mini-film is an extraordinary mixture of pathos and humor. I've always thought the movement needs more humor, but we should never lose sight of the tragedy all around us. This commercial is the perfect blend of the two. Please watch it if you get a chance.

"Not in My Name": An Extraordinary Short Film, a Must-See

Please take 13 minutes to watch this powerful short documentary, "Not in My Name." But be warned: It contains very graphic scenes of violence and brutality. It should be required viewing for all meat eaters. Joanna Lumley, Paul McCartney and Chrissie Hynde and other celebrities (mostly British in this case) offer commentary.

Planet of the Apes (1968): A Profound Critique of the Human Race

There is a new Planet of the Apes film out, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a prequel that explains how the story began. I will probably end up seeing it, although with some reluctance. You see, I'm a hardcore fan of the original 1968 Franklin J. Schaffner film, starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans and James Whitmore.

Long before I went vegan, long before I embraced animal rights, Planet of the Apes helped plant the seeds in my mind that blossomed into those commitments.

WARNING: For those of you who still haven't seen this superb science fiction film, you may not want to continue reading this Blog post, especially if you're someone who doesn't like spoilers (i.e., a piece of writing that divulges a surprise or twist in a film).

The plot: Sometime in the future, Colonel George Taylor and his fellow astronauts awaken from deep-sleep hibernation (a state they've been in for thousands of years) when their ship crashes on a planet. They escape the ship as it sinks into a lake and when they reach the barren landscape, they search for signs of life. Eventually, they encounter human beings who behave like wild savages: mute, fleeing through cornfields, behaving like primitive cavemen.

At this point, the astronauts and the wild humans clash with apes on horseback. One of the astronauts is killed and the other two, Taylor and Landon, are captured and separated. Landon is later lobotomized. The apes give Taylor to two chimpanzee scientists, the open-minded and kind-hearted Zira (Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowall).

Over time, Zira develops a friendship with Taylor. Cornelius is slower to come around, but he also warms up to the astronaut. Because Taylor has been shot in the throat by the apes who captured him, he has to use pantomime to communicate. At some point, he tries to escape, and when he's captured by ape soldiers, his voice returns. "Take your paws off me, you damned, dirty ape!" Taylor shouts.

Taylor is later brought before a tribunal, led by the venerable Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) to explain why he can do things that other human beings cannot. The "wise" orangutans who head the tribunal threaten to punish and lobotomize Taylor for being a subversive, but Zira and Cornelius plot to free Taylor with the help of Zira's nephew Lucius. Their plot succeeds. They free Taylor, along with Nova (Linda Harrison), a mute female human with whom he has fallen in love.

Zaius reveals that humans and apes once lived side by side, but human beings destroyed their civilization thousands of years earlier in warfare. The cradle of this dead civilization is called the Forbidden Zone.

Taylor and Nova leave the apes behind and travel a great distance until they reach the Forbidden Zone. When they arrive, they find the top of the Statue of Liberty, revealing that they are on earth, and that human civilization collapsed, presumably in nuclear annihilation.

In 1968, Planet of the Apes was a radical critique of the human race, based on a 1963 book Monkey Planet (or Planet of the Apes) by French novelist and screenwriter Pierre Boulle. The screenplay to Planet of the Apes was co-written by Rod (The Twilight Zone) Serling and Michael Wilson, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter (he netted the Oscar for 1952's A Place in the Sun) who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. He wrote several screenplays under pseudonyms or using "front writers" during the 1950s and early 1960s (including, ironically, for Bridge on the River Kwai, which was credited to "front" writer . . . Pierre Boulle). Wilson also wrote the screenplay to Salt of the Earth (1954), a pro-labor movie about a miners strike in New Mexico made entirely by blacklisted filmmakers. Salt of the Earth, like Planet of the Apes, has become a cult film.

Serling and Wilson very deliberately set out to write a subversive script that challenged some widely held assumptions of the day. Amazingly, the concept of speciesism - the notion of or belief in the superiority of one species over all others (in this case, apes) - came under intense assault in Planet of the Apes. I remain convinced this film was actually a thinly veiled attack on human speciesism.

Despite their backwardness and arrogance, the apes in Planet of the Apes despise human beings for very good reasons. At one point in the film, Cornelius reads from the ancient, sacred ape scriptures:

Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.

Throughout Planet of the Apes, the "wise" orangutan leaders harbor a deep distrust of the chimpanzee intellectuals, who are the gentlest and most thoughtful and inquisitive of the apes. At one point, Dr. Zaius warns Zira that her faith in science puts her in danger of being judged as subversive. Zaius tells Zira:

Dr. Zira, I must caution you. Experimental brain surgery on these creatures is one thing, and I'm all in favor of it. But your behavior studies are another matter. To suggest that we can learn anything about the simian nature from a study of man is sheer nonsense. Why, man is a nuisance. He eats up his food supply in the forest, then migrates to our green belts and ravages our crops. The sooner he is exterminated, the better. It's a question of simian survival.

And to Cornelius, Zaius cautions:

Ah, yes - the young ape with a shovel. I hear you're planning another archeological expedition. Cornelius, a friendly word of warning - as you dig for artifacts, be sure you don't bury your reputation.

Zaius is the voice of conservatism in this ape civilization. He is a brilliant simian, a sort of Grand Inquisitor, who fully understands the past and knows that certain truths have to be kept a secret to keep ape civilization intact. Before Taylor wanders off into the Forbidden Zone with Nova, he turns with his firearm to Zaius and the following exchange occurs:

Taylor: Don't try to follow me. I'm pretty handy with this.
Zaius: Of that I'm sure. All my life I've awaited your coming and dreaded it.

All along, Zaius knew something that naive Zira and Cornelius did not: Human beings lacked humanity and destroyed themselves. To prevent the calamity from occurring again, the apes brutally repressed the wild humans in their midst. But Zaius understood, more than any other character in the film, that this repression was a necessary evil.

Planet of the Apes showed the gorilla soldiers handling human beings like animals. And yet, as awful as human beings are treated in this film - trapped in nets, thrown into cages, occasionally beaten or shot - they are not murdered en masse the way that human beings destroy animals. Repressive as the apes in Planet of the Apes were, there was a method to their madness, and a decency completely lacking in human beings.

Planet of the Apes may have been the most radical film to ever have come out of Hollywood. This should come as no surprise. Earlier in the decade, Rod Serling - eager to keep finding work as a writer at a time when Cold War attitudes were still strong in America - disguised social critique in the form of science fiction in The Twilight Zone. In adapting Planet of the Apes to the screen, Rod Serling and Michael Wilson wrote a profound and deeply pessimistic tale about the human race that remains as relevant and powerful in today's world as it was 43 years ago.

(Left: Dr. Zaius, who understood the evil of human beings more than any other character in Planet of the Apes.)

Another undercover documentary having a big impact...

In the UK, the animal rights organization Viva! has filmed a very important undercover documentary about the egg hatchery racket. Even if you think you know what's happening in this business, please take four minutes and 53 seconds out of your day and watch this short film.

As Viva! points out in this film, about 40-50 million chicks are killed per year in Britain alone, most of them dying in electric mincers or gassed alive, as shown in this film.

This is heartbreaking footage. And if you don't live in England (and I don't), please don't go thinking, "Those are terrible conditions they've got in the UK. Good thing it's not that way here."

Remember: What you see in this film is Standard Operating Procedure in the egg-hatching industry all over the world. It is a profound immoral business, and this film shows precisely why that is the case.

Good for Viva! for filming these horrors. Films like this one are making a huge difference. Videos such as this one are getting lots and lots of hits on YouTube, and they're winning new converts for our side every day.

Are the Do-Gooders Really Doing Much Good?

Last night, I watched a show called Beef Inc., a Canadian documentary made about 10 years ago. It was one of those lefty documentaries that excoriates big corporations. The bad guy, in this case, was Cargill, a gargantuan agribusiness and the largest private corporation in the United States. Cargill is about twice the size of the Empire in Star Wars and owns damn near half the planet. Not only did the film attack Cargill, it was also a celebration of the independent, small cattle farmers.

Like I said, the movie is a little more than a decade old, so it's sort of a forerunner of the contemporary "Happy Meat"/"Conscientious Carnivore" movements. The film's message was clear: Giant, impersonal corporations = Bad Guys. Small farmers who allow their animals to enjoy nature = Good Guys. All of the commentators on the show, who were mostly academics, reinforced this decidedly populist point of view.

On the surface, it's a sensible position. In Canada and the United States, small farmers are almost regarded as sacrosanct in the popular imagination (indeed, Thomas Jefferson called them "God's chosen people"). And who wouldn't support the underdog - the small farmer - over huge and powerful agribusinesses that have been gobbling up land and resources and making gargantuan profits for decades?

Interestingly, at the end of the documentary, the interviewer - perhaps hoping to end on a note of levity - asked the pundits on the show how they like their steaks prepared. Most of them laughingly answered "medium rare." Only one said, "I prefer my steak inside the cow, and I like the cow to be playing happily in the field."

Right on!

I must admit, I was taken aback when I watched the film that these liberal anti-corporate types - preaching the virtues of the small farmer over the big corporation - had NO ability to relate to the animals that were being slaughtered. Before I came around to veganism, I probably would've sounded a lot like one of these people if asked about the deleterious effects of gigantic agribusinesses. I most likely would've attacked the big guys and stood up for the small farmers.

Thanks to the efforts of brave souls like Gary Francione, more and more people are starting to see right through the phoniness of the "Happy Meat" and "Conscientious Carnivore" movements. True, the animals in these free range settings are better off than those held captive in the factory farm system while they are actually alive. But make no mistake about it: These animals are still enslaved and exploited, slaughtered for their meat to feed human beings who do not actually need that meat to survive. To quote Francione:

The “happy meat” movement is intended to make the public feel more comfortable about animal exploitation and to ensure that social discussion about animal ethics remains focused away from the relevant question—why are we eating animals in the first place given that it is not necessary for human health, is an ecological disaster, and, most importantly, results in our imposing suffering and death on sentient nonhumans? The “happy meat” movement is achieving these goals, and that does not represent any sort of progress. Quite the contrary. The “happy meat” movement represents a significant step backwards.

As I watched Beef Inc., I thought: What a sad thing that most of these anti-corporate commentators cannot recognize that the very same impersonal forces that drive corporations to exploit people, deplete communities, maximize profits, quash small competitors and sacrifice their own (through downsizing and relocating overseas) - that these very same institutions also stun billions of animals, hold them upside down by metal clamps, slash their throats and drain them of all of their precious lifeblood.

It is far easier to relate to small farmers who have a human face than to gigantic corporations. We can understand their challenges and dilemmas, their vulnerability and courage in the face of adversity. It is possible to be sympathetic to these farmers and their plight, yet also see right through the delusion of "humane slaughtering." I have no problem with peacefully coexisting with meat eaters. As I've said before, I ate meat most of my life, and I wouldn't have wanted some over-zealous vegan to pass judgment on me.

But I do wish the "progressive" do-gooders would abandon all this B.S. about Conscientious Carnivorism. The "free range" cow whose artery is slit open feels the agony of death every bit as much as the cow who was confined to a coffin-like space in a factory farm, yet the people who insist on devouring "happy meat" are in a complete state of denial about this fact. "What is a Conscientious Carnivore to do?" asked the Website Eco Child's Play. "The answer is three-fold: Buy small, buy local, buy grass-fed."

At least the Sarah Palins of this world don't fool themselves into believing there's a nice way to slaughter animals. When she proclaimed in her memoir Going Rogue her love for hamburgers, pork chops and the "seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak" and said "there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals - right next to the mashed potatoes," at least she didn't try to place a lot of politically correct widow dressing around her decisions. You could almost envision Palin wearing a bib, tearing into the T-bone, and letting the juices run down her chin.

There's far more honesty in that sort of Red State gusto than in all of this mealy-mouthed talk of Conscientious Carnivorism.