Meat and you: a partnership for freedom?

What really shocked me was footage of feedlots for cattle in the US, essentially the factory farming of cattle, crowded together with little space to move - an abomination. This was followed by footage of a major burger chain whose PR specialists told children that the burgers were grown like plants. All the cruelty had been airbrushed out of the picture. It was a moment I still remember today with horror.

The grinning burgers, complete with eyes, bouncing up and down in joyous anticipation of being eaten by toddlers, reminds me today of the fake information film promoting meat in the classic Lisa the Vegetarian episode of The Simpsons: "The Meat Council Presents: Meat and You: Partners in Freedom". I have not eaten a burger since 1984.



Animal rights matters, green politics should not be just what benefits us and has no regard for other species.

My animal rights interest was sparked partly by the Animals Film out 25 years ago, of course if we look at factory farming the dodgy practices of pharmaceutical firms and assaults on global ecology, animal abuse often damages us as well.

Read more from my Guardian newspaper blog here.

You can buy the new updated Animals Film here.

Victor Shonfeld writes about his film also in the Guardian here.

He notes:

My own immersion in the human-animal relationship set me on the path to making it. Kibbutz Revadim, just north of the Negev desert in Israel, may have been suffering a muddy winter of grief after its losses in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, but I, as a volunteer, was revelling in the muck. I'd been brought up in a middle-class Jewish family where we thought twice before dirtying our hands. So when I found myself crawling through the shit under the turkey nest-boxes to gather stray eggs, and enjoying it, I was astonished. The fact that the birds were confined indoors all their lives caused me, then an unreconstructed carnivore, only passing disquiet.