Earthlings revision

November 8^th, 2012

Earthlings 2^nd Draft

Mr. Garrioch / English Composition

11b4 111150 Ho InHee

Indeed, humans are ‘humans’ and we can learn things, but we also forget things we learn ‘as humans’. We learn to be nice to animals, but forget few minutes later. This is partly why many films and literatures may not have a much less powerful impact than intended. But Earthlings is much more effective. It has successfully affected thousands of people. In fact, about half of the ‘Earthlings review’ videos show how people announce to be a vegetarian from the moment they watched Earthlings. And the other half? Surprisingly, they are those disapproving Earthlings.

Those deprecating Earthlings say the film is too graphic. The film IS indeed graphic. A pig is hung from the ceiling and slashed its neck so that the blood could spatter as it writhes in pain. Scrawny cow, staggering from bachaching labor, is put peppermint into its eyes. A white fluffy fox is skinned alive and left uncured, with blood seeping from all over the body. These all are surely more than simply unpleasant, they are awful. The graphic images blow human’s vulnerable mind so hard that they make humans feel like barbarians whenever eating a mouth-watering meat loaf. How wicked it is to show ignorant (or even innocent) consumers like me such a horrifying footage. I mean, I don’t play any role in that barbaric meat packing process. I’m a mere consumer, and am totally unrelated to evil matters. I don’t deserve such nauseous uncomfortableness that makes me want to throw the meat I had this morning up.

Earthlings is also blamed for being excessively one-sided. In fact, it takes than five minutes to notice how biased this film is. No, a two-minute trailer is enough. The film, from its start to its end, quite explicitly shows its strong conviction to human evilness. It categorizes how humans act their evilness on animals into three sub sections: eating, cloth, pet, entertainment, and scientific research. The film then devotes whole two hours illustrating how these are done. We all understand how Shaun Monson, the director, intended to accuse human’s egoistic sins on animals, but despite this clear intention, he should have put some human goodness into the film. Dystopian literatures are okay to solely convey a rather ‘biased’ theme of human evilness, but Earthlings is not okay, because, maybe, it is a ‘film’.

The last accusation against Earthlings is that it is meaningless. The film contains invalid information. Most of the footage used in the film- slaughterhouse actualities, circus exploitation, and all- is from 1990s. All the footage is invalid because it is now 21^st century. The world has changed. Though we use more animals for scientific research (actually, we use 17-22 million annually[1]), and though we consume more meat (more than 120kg per capita every year[2]), we kill those animals more hygienically, more humanistically. Even more, the film doesn’t have any solution. We, humans, need to sacrifice millions of animals for the nature’s good as a whole. We, as creatures, need to consume more than 300kg of meat every day. We need to consume leather products to avoid freezing from death, keep pets to avoid unbearable loneliness, and visit zoos to make our children happy. And the film doesn’t give a perfect solution for these inevitable acts. Many essays, films, TV programs, and speeches all deal with animal rights issues, and none of them actually gives any good solution (because if they had, there won’t be any more animal right issues going on). The Earthlings, however, SHOULD know the solution that might not even exist, and offer that solution to us.

I shut my eyes tight in the most brutal scenes and frowned in less brutal scenes. I was depressed in spirits after watching Earthlings and passively practiced vegetarianism for next couple of days by not eating meat dish (yet still having meat soups). But it was a huge change to me-since I never changed behavior so significantly. Apparently, I wasn’t alone to be temporary vegetarian, and Earthlings successfully affected millions of people. But it was very unsuccessful at the same time: because the film displayed so barbaric scenes that it almost seemed unlikely, omitted how good humans innately are, and didn’t give the perfect solution that no other source actually have ever given till now.

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[1] http://www.animaltestingfacts.zoomshare.com/

[2] http://coolgeography.co.uk/Alevel/AQA/Year%2012/Food%20supply/Patterns%20and%20intro/Patterns%20of%20food%20supply.htm