From Cruelty to Compassion

Abstract

Cruelty has been enmeshed in films from the time of Edison in the late nineteenth century. Audiences have delighted in violence meted out on animals in animated films, and have proven willing watchers of live-action depictions of the torture and slaughter of farmed animals in narrative films in particular. Such portrayals have been a universal feature in films from across the world, as seen in over thirty examples from eleven countries referred to in this chapter. Although there have been formal structures and regulations in the USA and UK aimed at preventing harm, these have considered welfare rather than rights, and filmmakers have found ways to get around them as seen in various films up till the present. Those who write on animal rights generally forget to include film as a means that could be used to influence the public to turn from accepting cruelty to calling for and acting on compassion. However, documentary films of all kinds, as well as narrative films made with compassion or inspiring it, have a role that can be a major factor in complementing advocacy.

We can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals. Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us from disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, dairy cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

Yuval Noah Harari—Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (2011: 424–425).

Come you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood;

Stop up the access and passage of remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature.

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between.

The effect and it!

Lady Macbeth in Macbeth I v 41–48.

William Shakespeare (1956 [1606]: 841).