1.
COSTLY GIFTS
Multi-million dollar campaigns through
which charities give farmed animals to people in impoverished
nations are being denounced by animal protection organizations
and the World Land Trust (WLT). Animal Aid and WLT
say it is “madness” to send farmed animals
to areas where they will aggravate drought conditions
and desertification. Goats, for example, are particularly
damaging to arid, degraded areas while cows require
tremendous amounts of feed and water. Animal Aid alleges
that various charities raise up to £10 million
($19.6 million) every year this way while ignoring
the damage it causes. "But while donating animals
might make the donor feel good, such gifts simply
add to the burden of the impoverished recipients.
There are many worthwhile initiatives to help people
in developing countries that do not involve the exploitation
of animals,” said Animal Aid’s Andrew
Tyler. "I was prepared to put this down to ignorance
of the issues last year, but now it seems utterly
cynical. They seem to be doing this just to make money
at Christmas. It's a gimmick," said WLT director
John Burton, adding that “…in the long-term
the quality of life for [the recipients] will slowly
be reduced with devastating effect."
The charities claim they provide fencing, veterinary
care and other support needed for the animals, whom
they say are usually obtained locally. Send a Cow,
one such charity, counters that it insists on a zero-grazing
policy, with animals instead kept in spacious shelters
and given fodder. Another, Christian Aid, said that
money donated to purchase a goat wouldn’t necessarily
be spent that way but would instead go into an agriculture
fund to be distributed by local managers. "We
strongly dispute these claims by Animal Aid and the
World Land Trust. We work closely with the communities
where we have worked for over 60 years to provide
them with exactly what they need to lift themselves
out of poverty,” said an Oxfam spokesperson.
"We work with local organisations on the ground
who know the needs of the community better than anyone
else,” concurs a Christian Aid representative.
See also “MORE HYPE THAN HOPE”
at: http://tinyurl.com/y4k7y3
An on-line discussion about this issue
is taking place on The Inspired Protagonist, the blog
of Seventh Generation, at: http://tinyurl.com/yfxgu6
WHY GIVING A GOAT FOR CHRISTMAS 'HINDERS
THOSE IN POVERTY'
This is London, Nov. 30, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/wy8cf
BRITISH CHARITIES URGED NOT TO SEND ANIMALS TO POOR
COUNTRIES
Crosswalk, Kevin McCandless
http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1458048.html
CRITICS URGE CHARITIES TO GIVE UP THE GOAT
The Times, Sean O'Neill, November 30, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2478857,00.html
2. MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
The November/December issue of Mother
Jones magazine includes a photo essay (accessible
on-line) by Dutch photographer Jan van Ijken who has
“spent the past several years watching humans
interact with animals in a range of settings—from
research labs and factory farms to exotic bird shows.”
The magazine notes: “The result is a series
of remarkable ../images documenting the shifting and
ambivalent ways we value other creatures.” Entitled
More Equal than Others, the essay includes numerous
photos of intensively confined farmed animals.
According to van Ijken’s website,
the essay originates from a photographic project entitled
“Precious Animals,” part of a series commissioned
by the Netherland’s Rijksmuseum jointly with
the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad under the title
Document Nederland. The project “is about the
complex relationship people have with animals: animals
as efficiently produced consumer products for people,
animals as objects for medical research to benefit
humans, and animals as objects of human love and affection.
In his photos Jan van Ijken examines the value attached
to animals in the Netherlands. He makes no judgment,
but encourages us to reflect about our own values
and our occasional double standards”: http://tinyurl.com/tzkp8
PHOTO ESSAY BY JAN VAN IJKEN
Text by Mother Jones, November/December 2006
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/11/more_equal_than_others.html
3. THE DARK SIDE OF THE ALL-AMERICAN MEAL
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the
All-American Meal debuted in U.S. theaters on November
17th. Eric Schlosser, author of the book on which
it is based (see item #2 of: http://tinyurl.com/y2wvgz
), explained that the movie was done as a fictional
narrative rather than a documentary because of the
clout the fast-food industry wields with networks
that might have aired it. “Even PBS -- you know
McDonald's is a big sponsor of Sesame Street,”
he remarks.
Revolving around a fictional chain called
Mickey's, it includes scenes filmed in a Mexican slaughterplant.
“It is horrendous stuff to watch, animals being
killed and gutted en masse, their bowels falling dangerously
near the prime cuts of meat that make it to American
tables each night. It is, quite simply, sickening,”
writes Detroit News film critic Tom
Long. The bloody scenes are placed late in the
movie for two reasons, explains Barbara
Vancheri of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “Moviegoers
aren't likely to bolt at that point, and they've come
to care about the woman sent to work where cows are
stunned, killed, sawed and skinned and internal organs
removed.” Rebecca
Weiss relates in The Cornell Daily Sun: “There
are a few scenes of unrelenting carnage, more mercilessly
graphic than anything you’ll have ever seen
in the theatres. Worse, there’s no way to console
yourself afterwards — everything you’ve
seen is 100% real and all true to life. From the decapitations
to the skinning to the disemboweling…”
She cautions: “The amount of times that innards
and giblet are depicted onscreen may convert the most
staunch carnivore into a cow-hugging tofu-championing
vegetarian, nay, vegan.”
Director Richard Linklater muses: "It's
funny, people know everything about how movies are
made - something that fundamentally makes no difference
in your life. Everyone knows everything about sports,
and run their own fantasy sports team. But the more
important something is to your health, your kids'
health, the attitude is, let's leave that to the experts,
let's not think too much about it." Fast Food
Nation “aims to… shock, to demystify and
to force a kind of horrified, questioning clarity,”
explains The New York Times’s A.O.
Scott: “[T]here's no question that a vegetarian
diet is much more sustainable for the land, is much
more sustainable for many of the people eating that
way,” Schlosser states, “The simplest
thing people can do is be conscious of where they
spend their money. As a consumer, you can think of
each purchase as a vote. When you go to fast-food
chains and buy industrial meat, you're endorsing those
practices” (see also item #4 of: http://tinyurl.com/y8vtvx
). Linklater concurs: “Once you see what goes
into your burger, why not choose a healthy alternative,
like a veggie burger?”
“Animal rights activists won't
necessarily like the movie, since they are portrayed
as earnest bumblers when they attempt to liberate
cattle from a feedlot only to discover that the animals
don't want to leave,” notes the National Chicken
Council’s Richard
L. Lobb.
FAST FOOD DAMNATION
Grist, Sarah van Schagen, Nov. 17, 2006
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/11/17/schlosser/
ON FOOD CHOICES, SAYS LINKLATER, MOST PEOPLE WEAR
BLINDERS
Philadelphia Daily News, Gary Thompson, Nov. 17, 2006
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/living/16034508.htm
GRAZED AND ABUSED
Mother Jones, Interviewed By Rob Nelson, October 27,
2006
http://www.motherjones.com/arts/qa/2006/11/linklater_extended.html
4. OUR DAILY BREAD
Between October 2003 and October 2005,
Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter and his crew
traveled across Europe recording scenes from the industrial
food chain. The result, Our Daily Bread, “is
an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial
food production from field to factory,” writes
The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis. Commenting
on the film’s lack of narration or location
identification, he states: “Considering the
homogeneity of industrial agricultural practices,
these strategies make sense. The opening scene of
a uniformed man hosing down a floor flanked by two
rows of gutted pigs could have been shot just about
anywhere in the modern world, as could the image of
live chickens being scooped up by a machine and then
loaded by hand into small processing trays. The man
slamming one of those trays closed on the head of
a chicken frantically bobbing its head could be French
or Austrian; nationality here is as irrelevant to
the animals as to the consumers who will later buy
that chicken after it has been killed, plucked and
cleaned, all of which Mr. Geyrhalter shows us through
one precisely framed shot after another.
The scenes on the killing floor are predictably brutal,
though not for all the obvious reasons. Mr. Geyrhalter
doesn’t flinch from showing us the panic of
the animals as they head toward the killing floor
or the barbarism of their deaths. There’s a
haunting scene of a woman, seated seemingly alone
and cutting the necks of the chickens that survived
the initial kill room. Hers is actually an act of
mercy. If she does her job properly, the birds will
be dead by the time they are cleaned and butchered,
which isn’t always the case in industrial slaughterhouses.”
Writing for Final Call, Kam Williams relates: “Our
Daily Bread graphically depicts, not merely death,
but the mistreatment doled out to these unfortunate
factory animals at every stage of their lifecycles.
What could be more shocking than to see a baby calf
birthed, not from its mother’s womb, but from
a gaping, man-made hole arbitrarily gouged in the
cow’s side? Maybe the sight of baby chicks being
jettisoned out of pneumatics tubes at breakneck speed
onto conveyor belts that then drop the bewildered
newborns into crates, which, in turn, cart them off
to another equally mechanized, indoor environment
for fattening. Then, there are the scenes of fish,
hogs and cattle being shuttled to their fates, to
be drawn and quartered assembly line-style, with their
carcasses carefully hacked away in a fully-automated
process that makes use of virtually every bit of their
bodies besides the tail. The few employees featured
in the film have deadened eyes that ostensibly reflect
their having long since capitulated spiritually to
their soul-draining line of work. None exhibits even
an ounce of compassion for any of the creatures in
their care.”
Michael Joshua Rowin concurs: “It's an alienation
effect rather than a shock tactic--to watch the droning
mindlessness behind the dusting of crops, the picking
of cucumbers, or the disemboweling of pigs is to conceivably
watch an unfeeling race of androids from a totalitarian
planet going about their nightmarish daily routine.”
Williams concludes: “[A]s un-indicted co-conspirators
in an ethical compromise of unthinkable proportions,
the picture prods you to prevent agri-business from
leading the planet down a path to complete moral and
ecological collapse.”
And Dargis advises: “‘Our Daily Bread’
can be extremely difficult to watch, but the film’s
formal elegance, moral underpinning and intellectually
stimulating point of view also make it essential.”
See: http://tinyurl.com/pxbrw
and: http://www.frif.com/new2006/odb.html
WHAT'S FOR DINNER? YOU DON'T WANT TO
KNOW
The New York Times, Manohla Dargis, November 24, 2006
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/movies/24brea.html
HORRIFYING DOCUMENTARY OFFERS PEEK AT FOOD INDUSTRY
Final Call, Kam Williams, Dec 7, 2006
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_3094.shtml
AGRICULTURE CLASH
Indywire (from Reverse Shot), Michael Joshua Rowin,
November 25, 2006
http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2006/11/review_gricultu.html
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