Every single person should view this documentary and understand what happens to animals at the hands of humans. What humans do to animals on a daily basis in industry, for sport and entertainment, and in vivisection laboratories is abhorrent; it is barbaric and unnecessarily cruel.
If only people would take a little time out to consider the cruelty done in their name:
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.
--Dr. Albert Schweitzer
Earthlings highlights, through multi-source video footage capturing real-life animal treatment, the usual way mankind behaves. This documentary shows the regular way man treats animals. The cases it highlights are, to the greater part, not isolated and not unusual. That is what makes the situation here on Earth all the more harrowing.
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated... I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.
--Mahatma Gandhi
I challenge you to make the connection.
"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals... We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far beneath ourselves. And therein we err, we greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complex than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
-Henry Beston
There are so many people who "Don't want to know" or who don't want to "Spoil their supper" I've always been on the band wagon that you "should know" so that you can make your own clear, concious decision. You should know how your food got to your table, how the leather couch in your living room is skin but... is not decaying... how the entertainment animals in zoos and circus' live on a day to day basis. Also the effects we as humans have on the millions of "house pets" unwanted, abandoned and destined for euthenasia and "cheaper" methods of killing.
Large companies "Manufacture" so they like to call it millions upon millions of animals in living spaces that are too small, too crowded. Pigglets are castrated, tails docked, and ears clipped without anesthetics as well as bulls dehorned & chicks de-beaked. The fact that these animals are treated with no dignity and respect is heart breaking and whats worse is that people are ignorant as to what really can & does go on behind the scenes.
I am so thankful to have come across it, and I hope that all of our readers take time to view it. There are so many options for us out there.. I think it is important for everyone to know how the mass producers deliver 8+ million chickens per week in USA alone.
This isn't to say you are wrong for eating meat or buying leather & furr. Rather, perhaps we all need to remind ourselves of how it got there. Is it wrong, is it right? Do animals feel or are they simply here for mans benefit & use. Should you buy from large chains or the farmer up the road? Are the hormones & chemicals making us sick? How do fast food restaurants meet the needs of the millions of people worldwide?
The only way one can educate themselves is to have the need to learn, the want for change, and the desire to do whats right.
Tue Aug 23, 2011 9:33 am
