We, As an Earthling

We, As an Earthling

           Movie ‘Earthling’ shows us how cruel we are when we treat the other earthlings; things that inhabits on the earth. Making the film, director uses 5 ways to abuse animals, pet, food, clothe, entertaining, and science (as experiment) and makes us be sorry for treating animals (earthlings). Director explained us three types of ‘-ism’ about discrimination, racism, sexism, and specism. Some races accept racism and ignore the rights of the other races for their profits. And one gender accepts sexism and ignores the rights of the other gender for their profits. Similarly, some species accept ‘specism’ and ignore the rights of the other gender for their profits. Among these three types of ‘-ism’, there are not big difference in terms of cruelness, discrimination and inhumane attitude. In this review, readers can focus on the background of this video, that is, what made people so cruel.

          

At first, these earthlings are used to be clothes or leathers. Basically, it doesn’t matter that people wear animal fur. What the matter is in the way treating the India cows. Slaughtering cows in the many cities in India is strictly banned by law, people carry the cows to the places where slaughtering is allowed. Problems happen while cows are carried. Considering most of cows are first with truck and its sound, this experience will be scaring for them. The rougher people treat them, the more scaring experience will be. Without any food or water while they are carried, they definitely would fall in pain. As a result, about half of cows are killed when they arrive at the slaughterhouse. This video is enough to persuade people to rethink about their clothes made of fur. On the other hand, this video may make people abhor the human nature because of cruelness.

Someone may wonder “why they should be so cruel?” Then here is an answer. Readers may remember ‘foot and mouth disease’ that hit Korea last year. Here’s a link shows how people treated pigs influenced by the disease.

(Subtitles of this video will be posted on my blog).

As film maker of this video (treating foot-and-mouth disease) says, we treat these animals because of ‘economic value’. In this point, readers can get the clue to understand the cruelness in the movie Earthling. In terms of ‘economic value’, readers can remind another abuse in our society based on not only in specism but also in racism and sexism. For readers’ understanding, here’s a link of interesting article from ‘In These Times’.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2270/

          

Movie ‘Earthling’ mainly shows us the result of ‘specism’, however it is impossible to separate three types of ‘-ism’, racism, sexism and specism in terms of Capitalism. About 300 years ago in America, North and South fought for the black slaves. South struggled for maintaining slaves so that capitalist can exploit them. Nowadays, many advertisements appear sexy girls to attract consumers so that companies may get more profits. Similarly, many clothe companies and stock farmers treat animals harshly so that they can reduce productive cost. Like this, in front of the capital, people can be cruel though they were NOT that cruel before.

We can find that in part 2, food. In part 2, narrator says “There’s no anodyne or anesthetic during castration, and it is conducted for making good marbling or soft fleshiness.” Readers can find other specism in that sentence. Remind that castration of sexual-criminal had been controversial issue for several days. For instance, after one member of government party insisted that we should make the law that allows physical castration, some civic groups acted against his idea. On the contrast, people castrate little pigs without any sense of guilty, but they are full of expectation of making money.

Part 5, about earthling and science, reminded me one video showed Sunday morning when I came here for KMLA entrance interview. It treated some drugs safe for animals, but not for people. The Thalidomide Tragedy was highly highlighted in this video. For readers who don’t know this tragedy, here’s the link.

http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/online/research/thalid2.html

          

           It’s quite sad story, isn’t it? In fact, as narrator says in the movie, there’s no conviction that doctors can adopt the results from animal experiments to people. Since the basic presupposition, result from animal can be adopted is wrong, many drugs have made troubles so far, and will continue to make problems. While on the other, some scientists, including Charles Robert Darwin who claimed the theory of evolution, insisted animal experiment is necessary in terms of expansion of human knowledge. Moreover, some of them thought like rats, good at spreading, should be used for experiments. However, fact is that all of them including rats, Pavlov’s dog, and Schrodinger’s cat are all earthling. As Darwin explained to justify animal experiment, they can feel the pain or loneliness.

             In the beginning of this movie, there are words that Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote on his novel “All men are like Nazis when they face animals.” Sadly, his sentence is still true in many different aspects. And I wrote about term ‘specism’ related with racism and sexism to help you think background of those cruel things. And lastly, with tragedy, I wrote about animal experiment. Overall, this is not interesting movie and essay. But what we should remind is 3 stage of truth. The last stage is ACCEPTANCE.