THE POWER OF FILM TO EXPOSE THE MEAT INDUSTRY AND CHANGE LIVES
Director of Speciesism: The Movie
Today’s meat industry does everything it can to stop us from seeing and hearing what takes place inside factory farms. It has deployed tactics ranging from lobbying for the criminalization of hidden-camera investigations of agricultural facilities to paying for front groups to launch smear campaigns against the individuals and organizations that do such investigations. It does this, quite simply, because there is no more powerful indictment of the industry than a straightforward image of it.
I am a documentary filmmaker, and a primary focus of mine has been exposing the animal welfare and environmental impacts of factory farming. While directing my first documentary, Speciesism: The Movie, I came face-to-face with one of the most disturbing and little-known environmental catastrophes in the United States. Thousands of factory pig farms dot the eastern North Carolina countryside, and within each one, hundreds or thousands of pigs spend their lives standing on concrete floors. Their waste falls through slats in these floors, and is collected in giant, open-air cesspools, often the size of several football fields, and often near homes and communities. Far more than cow manure, pig waste can produce a truly sickening odor while being flushed into the cesspools. As a result, neighbors’ homes are regularly, and without any warning, invaded by the overwhelming stench of raw sewage. Most disturbingly, cesspools are emptied by having their contents sprayed high into the air, where the sewage turns into a fine mist that can settle on—and sometimes in—neighbors’ homes.
I captured footage of these facilities from an airplane for Speciesism: The Movie, and returned to North Carolina recently to document them closer up using a camera-equipped drone. The resulting short documentary, at FactoryFarmDrones.com, far exceeded my expectations, now having been viewed over 18 million times between Facebook and YouTube. I believe that it was successful for the same reason that factory farms are hidden: When people can see what is taking place, they can see that something is wrong. Footage, whether collected undercover by employees or overhead by a drone, is one of the central keys to effecting change.
Film can also be used to solidify abstract ideas. When I began filming Speciesism: The Movie several years ago, I did not understand that I was documenting an unprecedented, historic, cultural shift in the way humankind views nonhuman animals. Now, things are changing at an even more rapid pace. In 2015 alone, a New York court discussed the prospect of viewing chimpanzees as legal persons; The New York Times ran a front-and-center opinion piece by a former animal experimenter denouncing his career’s work; and Ringling Bros. announced that it would soon stop using elephants in its shows, to name just a few examples.
The argument for this change is straightforward: Among the most fundamental principles of all plausible ethical theories is that causing harm, all else being equal, is a bad thing. Nonhuman animals are capable of being harmed; in fact, the scientific evidence strongly indicates that they are capable of suffering physically and emotionally to the same level of intensity as human animals. Therefore, the unreflective assumption that nonhuman animals are ethically insignificant may reflect a form of prejudice, similar in kind to prejudices against groups of humans—speciesism.
My first thought upon hearing this argument was something like, this can’t be right; there must be an obvious flaw, if I just think about it for a moment. So I thought about it, for more than a moment; then I read about it; then I interviewed some of the world’s most influential scientists and scholars about it for Speciesism: The Movie. And the deeper I investigated, the more it seemed like—against everything I had been taught and grown up assuming about the status of humans in the world—there was indeed something to this philosophical argument, and it could not be ignored.
The first objection to taking nonhuman animals seriously would seem to be, “humans are in fact superior” (we’re smarter, we use language, we create art . . .). The problem, animal advocates will quickly point out, is that many humans are not “superior” in any of these ways. There are young children, severely senile people, and intellectually disabled people who lack whatever special characteristic we might try to claim separates us and makes us more important. And yet, of course we do not consider these people to be outside our sphere of ethical concern. As a result, the characteristics they lack could not possibly be some kind of prerequisite for moral status.
The second inevitable objection is that even if we are not superior by virtue of some characteristic that we possess, is it not simply part of some natural order for us to consider other species less important? The problem with this argument is that, however one defines natural (perhaps “behavior that served a direct evolutionary benefit,” or “behavior that existed before advanced technological civilization”), it will always include behaviors that are decidedly unethical. Racism, for example, appears to be a result of psychological tendencies that served direct evolutionary benefits, and warfare surely existed since long before advanced technology. Yet, the “natural-ness” of such behaviors hardly provides an argument against seeking to minimize and prevent them.
If we can no longer justify the traditional sharp ethical distinction between humans and nonhuman animals, it seems to follow that our view of humankind’s place in the world must radically shift. We share this planet with countless other species, and our decisions—political and personal—affect them. One decision, though, stands out from the rest: Considering that billions of animals experience the most immense suffering conceivable in the factories where they are raised to become food, the present societal shift away from meat consumption may be among the most ethically significant events in our history.