| Peaceable Kingdom Screening Looking at Our Relationship with Animals |
| Peaceable Kingdom Screening Looking at Our Relationship with Animals |
A free screening of the documentary film, Peaceable Kingdom, was held in the SJA Church on the evening of Wednesday September 28, 2005. This 70-minute documentary was filmed to help educate consumers on the horrors of our modern agricultural practices and to share the stories of several people struggling with their conscience in relation to some of our society’s most fundamental assumptions, while also exploring …”the human-animal bond and speaks to the potential for goodness in each of us, offering a life-changing vision of a peaceful world that is well within our reach.”
The film was shot largely on location at Farm Sanctuary, www.farmsanctuary.org in Watkins Glen, New York by Tribe of Heart, www.tribeofheart.org a company dedicated to making films about ordinary people making extraordinary differences for others. One of the Farm’s employees, Harold Brown, who is also featured in the film, was in attendance for the screening.
Farm Sanctuary was created because, in the words of one of the founders: "Family farms are being replaced with large-scale factory farms, where animals are treated like unfeeling commodities and subjected to institutionalized abuse…"
One of the main functions of Farm Sanctuary is to rescue animals that have been left on “dead piles” at trading houses and stockyards. Having been injured during the process of loading, shipping, unloading or the melee that awaits them inside, they have been dragged out of the way in the most efficient and cruel ways and left to suffer and die in piles. These animals die slow agonizing deaths, sometimes over the period of days. This was all graphically documented in the film.
The people from Farm Sanctuary rescue as many animals as they can and bring them to their farm where they are given medical attention, human love, and are allowed to live out there lives. The Farm invites visitors and encourages human – animal interaction. Some of the inter-species bonds created are illustrated in the film and are amazing.
While showing in graphic detail the terror of our “standard” corporate farming practices, the film also features several persons that grew up as farmers and discuss how they knew at some deep level that what happened to these animals was wrong but were taught to “turn it off.” They did not consider themselves to be extra-sensitive or different but thought that many people felt or feel the same way but that it is something “you just do.” At least three of these people are now vegetarian or vegan and have become active in raising public awareness to the plight of these animals and our own human health while seeking to change these “accepted” practices.
During the Q&A with Harold(right), after the film, we learned that the United States now has the largest consolidation of agriculture in the world, concentrated in the hands of a handful of multi-national corporations. Quite simply, these corporations control our food and almost everything about it: what is raised for consumption, how it is raised, how it is harvested, how it is treated and to a large extent they control the flow of information we receive about these issues. (Harold makes a note of interest that we as consumers, for example, gather reams of information before we purchase a laptop computer or an automobile, but when it comes to what we put in our mouths, products that actually become part of us, we know very little and he begs us to become informed.) Millions upon millions of dollars go toward marketing these animal products to consumers and to lobby our public servants in Washington DC.
We learned that the banking industry is not the biggest lobby in Washington but that number one on the list is Pharmaceuticals followed by Agribusiness. This brought up another interesting reality…2/3s of all pharmaceuticals produced in this country go to livestock not people. The “standard” factory farming processes are so cruel and unhealthy that the livestock raised for human consumption are medicated more than we are. One of the people in the film said he had to feed his cattle antibiotics every day or they would die. These chemicals then end up in our bodies, in our cells, in our soil and water. We get sick from extended exposure to theses products and the pharmaceutical companies receive even more business. What a vicious yet profitable cycle.
Someone from the audience half-jokingly asked, “When is the last time you saw a Television advertisement for cauliflower, or broccoli?” Harold responded with, “that is an excellent point” and said it is an example of the power wielded by the American Beef and Dairy Councils and their ability to control public perception and policy.
For example, we discovered that 70% of all plant crops in this country are used for livestock feed (mostly soybean and corn) and that our government subsidizes these farms but doesn’t subsidize farms that grow produce for human consumption.
Excuse me? What is wrong with this picture?!
He also discussed how we are increasingly becoming more and more mono-crop and livestock. We mostly grow one type of engineered corn and soybean over and over again in same field. We know this drains the soil of nutrients and in order to keep growing plants farmers need to purchase more chemicals to treat the soil as it has been robbed of its life. There are basically two types of cows, one type of chicken, one type of turkey, etc, for consumption and we are setting ourselves up for a biological catastrophe of unfathomable proportions.
Harold advocates a vegan diet (lack of animal products.) He says we can live unbelievably happy and healthy lives without animal products and that we become even happier and healthier when we begin to live our lives in union with our core values of compassion, justice and stewardship of the earth.
Harold quoted M.K. Gandhi, saying, “The moral climate of a nation can be judged by how it treats its animals.” This is quite in keeping with our own Catholic tradition. In a recent interview, German journalist, Peter Seewald, asked Pope Benedict XVI, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about his views on animal welfare. The future Pope responded with empathy, calling animals our "companions in creation." He went on to advise that, “We cannot just do whatever we want with them. ... Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.”
We extend a special “Thank You” to our own SJA parishioner, Jane Kathryn Kolles(right), for bringing this film and these issues to our attention and to Harold Brown for his witness and presence.
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