Speciesism – The Movie

“Hey don’t treat me like a cow” -Said No Cow Ever

Speaking of movies this week, while the people that produced Farmland are taking folks on a behind-the-scenes look at today’s modern farmers and, you know, actually educating people, some animal rights activists also produced a movie.

Speciesim – The Movie.

What the heck is ‘specieism?’

According to Wikipedia:

Speciesism (also referred to as human supremacism) involves the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individuals solely on the basis of their species membership. The term is mostly used by animal rights advocates, who argue that speciesism is a prejudice similar to racism or sexism, in that the treatment of individuals is predicated on group membership and morally irrelevant physical differences. The argument is that species membership has no moral significance.

In other words, a rat is the same as a cow which is the same as a bird which is the same as a human being.

Yeah, sounds like a lot of hogwash to me too.

Like most movies aimed at attacking modern farming (think: Food, Inc.) it has little substance and a whole lot of garbage. The people at HumaneWatch willingly endured the movie in order to report back and, in part, this is what they saw:

The film then moves from “modern farming is bad” to a discussion of speciesism, including interviews with Princeton professor Peter Singer, who authored Animal Liberation, and Tom Regan, another longtime animal rights philosopher. And this is where the film’s weakness shows.

The filmmaker interviews the animal rights activists on the side of “anti-speciesism” who have had decades of experience discussing and pondering the issue.
Then, for countering arguments, the filmmaker asks people on the street for their opinion on why speciesism is OK.

Naturally, the people look a little flabbergasted and stammer through an answer and, of course, look poor in comparison to the intellectuals like Singer and Regan. Things get even more eye-rolling when the filmmaker challenges people on the street by poking holes in their logic.
The problem is that he’s had lots of time to think about and adopt this point of view, and some guy on the street has probably never thought about it before.

Thankfully, the movie has limited screenings, so hopefully too many people won’t be exposed to this nonsense.

But, it makes you wonder: with all that money that groups like PETA and HSUS bring in from unsuspecting late-night televisions commercial viewers,  how is this actually helping animals? (Hint: It isn’t.)