Amarand Journal

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wow.  Just… wow.

In a nutshell:  Humans really suck.

And now for the long form:

I’m really glad that I had already made the decision to become vegan before I saw this movie.  I don’t think I could have continued eating meat after watching it.  It never ceases to amaze me how incredibly selfish the human race is.  It’s all about what we want, what we “need”, what’s the hot new thing that we simply must have—no matter who or what may be exploited in the process.

Here are a few vignettes that made me cry:

–Some garbage men in Mexico throwing a still-living, struggling stray dog into the back of a garbage truck and then compacting it.  (Sean asked me if I was okay after that one.  I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t going to quit that early into the movie.)
–A mother seal nuzzling her slaughtered, skinned calf after watching a hunter kill it.  (I remember watching that on PBS when I was a kid, and I still cried just as hard nearly 30 years later.)
–Cows purchased from poor Indian farmers (who were promised that the cows would live out their days on farms) crowded into trucks, starved, beaten, and eventually slaughtered for their hides to make leather.
–Wild animals—including foxes, wolves, sables, and raccoons—housed in tiny cages, starved, receiving anal electrocution that may or may not kill them on the first try, and eventually skinned, some of them while they were still alive and blinking.  (FYI:  There are no government regulations regarding the humane killing of animals destined to be fur coats.)
–Dolphins herded into tiny harbors in Japanese coastal towns to be injured, beaten, and eventually killed for meat that is labeled as “whale meat”.  And the whale hunting is a whole different story…

Any doubts I might have had about our decision to become vegan are pretty much gone now.  Though the movie does start to get a bit preachy at the end, it’s still very effective and moving.  However diligent I had thought I was in the last few weeks since the big switch in lifestyle, I intend to be that much more diligent from this point on.

Suddenly, the $77 I spent tonight on organic, non-GMO, vegan-friendly foods doesn’t seem like that big a sacrifice.

The movie is Earthlings.  Buy it here.  Rent it here.  Check it out from your local library.  Just watch it.  Even if you continue eating meat after watching, if you at least feel bad about doing it, you’re a better person.