Original subtitles

([music] "Mind" by Talking Heads)

[Music] Time won't change you

[music] Money won't change you

[music] I haven't got the faintest idea

[music] Everything seems to be up in the air at this point

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] Drugs won't change you

[music] Religion won't change you

[music] What's the matter with you?

[Music] I haven't got the faintest idea

[music] Everything seems to be up in the air at this time

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] Mind

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] Mind

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] Mind

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] Mind

[music] Science won't change you

[music] Looks like I can't change you

[music] I try to talk to you, to make things clear

[music] But you're not even

[music] Listening to me

[music] And it comes directly from my heart to you

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] Mind

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] Mind

[music] I need something to change your mind

[music] I need something to change your mind

(narrator) The dark world of human relationships to animals is absent here.

Here, in these children's paintings,

animals are wondrous creatures,

living out their own lives free and unmolested...

in companionship with people and in the wild.

Absent - the view of animals as property and objects of amusement.

Absent here - the uses of animals for human needs and pleasures.

And here, animals are not some lesser form of human beings

whose suffering matters little.

We fill our children's world with animal playthings.

Do you wanna look at the animals for a minute?

Before we go upstairs we have 20 minutes to kill.

(narrator) Safe, sanitary toys...

crowding out reality.

They're good pets.

(narrator) The ones we know and love,

casualties of an urban society that administers social problems

but is unable to cure them.

Pets - pleasing gifts one day, expensive luxuries the next.

In New York, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

takes into its shelters some 60,000 abandoned pets each year.

In England, the RSPCA

receives some 200,000 unwanted dogs and cats each year.

Governments prefer it this way.

Charity employees, lowly paid and overwhelmed by the numbers,

do the dirty work.

(interviewer) Do you think there are enough good homes for animals

where they don't end up strays or abused?

- Not really. Not really. - They're selling too many animals?

The pet shop is in business for one thing - to make money.

Come here, Jason. Come here, Jason.

Stop.

Stop, Jason.

Goddamn!

- That way, come on. - (man) Come on up.

Watch out for stairs.

(whistles)

Come on, come on, come on. Let's goddamn move.

- He's going up, yo. - Spook him! Spook him! Come on!

- Ya! Ya! - Come on.

Goddamn.

Come on. Come on.

(whistles)

- You got him on a leash, right? - But I only have one leash. That's why.

(narrator) His other dog is in the truck. It'll cost him to collect it at the shelter.

After two days in the shelter, it will be put up for adoption.

And usually, not having been adopted after a couple of days, it will be killed.

In Britain, the practice of dog catching doesn't exist.

The RSPCA sees no purpose in it.

(man) Come on, Hooky.

A day like today, nobody wants to walk them, so they let them walk themselves.

When they're walking, this is when we get them.

(narrator) The animal shelters serve as a dumping ground for unwanted pets.

The organisations formed to help animals

are compelled to waste resources in collecting and destroying them.

Most of these animals will never see new homes.

A vet, employed examining the unwanted pets, notes their ailments.

These puppies have ear mites and are judged not suitable for adoption.

Three simple measures could halt the overpopulation of pets -

a ban on mass breeding of pets for profits,

a ban on pet shops,

and mandatory low-cost spaying and neutering.

A cheap spaying and neutering programme in Los Angeles

reduced the city's death toll of animals by 56,000 within a few years.

Killing methods vary internationally,

including poisoning, decompression chambers, electrocution.

Many organisations supply former pets to laboratories for experimentation,

but the ASPCA and the RSPCA do not.

Emaciated, but otherwise healthy, the dog submits to the injection -

a massive overdose of barbiturates,

one of 33,000 such doses administered annually by the ASPCA.

The RSPCA also uses the injection method,

although some units still use electrocution.

Corpses, sent to the renderer, turned into animal fat,

used for bars of soap and glue.

One might imagine that nations of pet lovers

could demand that this processing of excess cats and dogs be stopped

and the alternatives substituted,

but this would clash with the interests of the multibillion-dollar pet-food industry.

Genuine social responsibility for pet keeping

means an upheaval of great vested interests.

I love animals, that's all I can say for myself.

- (interviewer) Do you buy animals? - Of course. I buy for other people.

I tame it, I train it, and I give it to my children.

What do you think about people making money from selling animals?

What do I think of people doing it? I don't like them.

- Isn't that what pet shops do? - Well, they do.

That's why I don't like the pet shops. I never did.

What do you think about eating animals?

Eating? well, that we... Look, don't we all eat?

- I don't. - You're vegetarian, right?

Yeah.

I was brought up with meat so it isn't my fault.

- Have you thought of changing? - I do.

A lot of times I get fed up eating meat, so I don't.

- But not permanently? - No, cos you're brought up with that.

I have a daughter who's a vegetarian, she won't eat any meat. It's OK with me.

I never... whatever you feel like doing, you just do.

See, I was brought up to eat chicken, meat, so...

It isn't that I go out of my way for it, it's just it's a habit.

Habit forming, like everything else.

(man) This is a picture of one of my best cows that my wife just painted.

She looks at cows a little differently than I do, I guess.

This is a closed-circuit television

that we use for watching the cows in the freestyle barn.

We use it mainly for catching cows in heat.

And with the time-lapse recorder here, we can watch 18 hours in 40 minutes.

Cows walking out on pasture use up a lot of energy.

This way they don't.

I wish they could go outside, but I don't know...

They're OK inside. I mean, they get air and stuff so it's OK.

- (interviewer) They don't mind it? - Sometimes. But they can run around.

- Can you ever see how they feel? - When you let them loose, they run.

But some, their hooves are too long and they can't walk well so we have to wait.

Other than that, they're OK.

(narrator) Masses of farm animals in controlled environments,

automated feeding and waste removal -

this is the worldwide trend in animal agriculture, factory farming.

One half of all dairy cows in the United States are permanently confined.

It's not really cruel.

We probably keep better track of the cows in a barn like this

than we would out on pasture, but...

I guess it's more with nature to let them go out and graze.

(narrator) Udders are used intensively, as if detached from the living creature,

as if part of the milk machine.

The infection of the udders known as mastitis

is unavoidably aggravated by factory farming.

Disinfectant applied liberally to the udders remedies the situation,

according to this chemical company's advertisement in a farming journal.

Human beings are the only animals which drink milk beyond infancy

and drink the milk of other species.

Meanwhile, powdered milk

makes the only food veal calves are given for their entire lives.

Separated from their mothers within a couple of days after birth,

these calves spend their lives in a windowless shed,

in darkness, except for feeding times,

tied in their crates so they cannot even turn around.

The way I got started, I wanted to get out of school administration.

So I went to my banker and he suggested veal operation.

So I looked at it and I enjoyed it very much. I liked what I saw.

Some feel that it's rather cruel to the animals to keep them tied in there,

but I point out that they're in a controlled environment. The weather is...

They never get real hot, or in the wintertime it's never zero weather.

There's no fly problem and as a result they got a pretty good life in there,

although they are chained.

(narrator) The slotted wood floors simplify waste removal.

The extreme restrictions on movement,

the all-liquid, iron-deficient diet, the low light levels, all serve one end -

to keep the calves' flesh pale and tender.

In a word, anaemic.

The calves are penned so that they could not lick the urine-soaked floor,

which they would do to satisfy their craving for iron.

It's been a very profitable business.

We've really enjoyed every phase of it, except the confining.

(interviewer) what do you mean, "confining"?

Someone has to be here seven days a week, two times a day for feeding.

And it has to be done on schedule.

If we're not on schedule, the calves will not eat properly and don't gain as well.

And it makes stress in the animal,

and when you get stress, you get into red-meat problems.

(narrator) Diseases such as pneumonia and acute diarrhoea are prevalent,

and commonly wipe out 10% of calves raised in such conditions.

The purpose is to make the meat real light-coloured and pink,

and as a result it's a much more delicacy-type veal.

And special milk-fed makes it strictly a delicacy,

and it's used mainly in restaurants, hotels.

(narrator) This life for 100 days, then slaughter.

In Britain, anaesthetics must be used.

But in America, routine mutilations such as branding, castration and dehorning

are carried out with no anaesthesia.

In the United States,

most beef calves are allowed to graze for only a few months

before they are rounded up and trucked long distances to feed lots.

Penned in, the steers live out the last few months of their lives

being fattened on high-energy grains.

As many steers as the population of a medium-sized city live in this feed lot.

Similar enterprises are owned by giant oil and insurance companies.

There are now one half as many farms in America as there were 50 years ago.

The family cattle ranch is rapidly becoming a relic of the past.

With these new methods of beef production has arrived a new disease -

cattle-shipping fever.

This is the single biggest killer of American cattle

and is caused by trucking calves many hundreds of miles

without adequate ventilation, without food, water or rest,

to the feed lots.

Antibiotic feed additives are used to lessen the mortality rate.

Growth-promoting chemicals are also routinely mixed in feed.

Upjohn agricultural sales? $295 million annually.

The beef producers' view of steers

as food machines rather than living creatures

yields some amazing ways of economising on fuel costs.

Cement dust mixed with grains accelerates weight gain,

lowers costs and increases profits.

And even cattle's own excrement can be processed and mixed into their feed.

Both these dietary innovations were developed

by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Meat is regarded as the only good solid food,

yet meat eating is not universal to all cultures,

nor is it the most nutritious diet.

20 pounds of plant protein fed to cattle

yields only one pound of animal protein fed to people.

The amount of food which could be freed for human consumption

were beef eating abandoned could help end world starvation.

To me, it was all-inclusive.

It was Irish to the Irish, it sounded Scotch to the Scotch.

It was a typical English-American word.

It flowed. "McDonald's."

It was easy for the kids to say and remember. And...

I liked the sound of it. It sounded wholesome,

and it sounded genuine, you know?

I don't like these gimmick-type names, you know?

Uh...

"Burger this, burger that", and all that kind of stuff.

McDonald's - it's got a nice-sounding name.

It sounds like Tiffany's,

and I think we are the Tiffany's of the hamburger business.

(narrator) The average American

eats almost twice the protein his body can use.

American livestock are fed as much grain

as all the people of India and China eat in a year.

Meat eating is successfully promoted as an emblem of affluence.

In the Third world, more and more intensive poultry units are being built.

Yeah, chicken. How about that?

(narrator) Hatcheries specialise in one strain of bird

for either egg laying or meat production.

The strains for egg laying aren't good enough for meat,

thus the males of the layer strain are dumped.

Small or injured birds are selected for the same fate -

slow suffocation,

or the quicker way...

to be ground up into animal feed.

Separation of parent and offspring is always the first step

in intensive animal agriculture.

A mother hen would have helped it out.

Modern poultry production

is not designed for the needs of individual birds.

When thousands of birds are crowded indoors,

the weak cannot escape the dominant.

In frustrating conditions, the birds peck each other bloody.

To prevent loss of carcass value, poultry are subdued in darkness

and their beaks are cut off.

Debeaking. "lt's like cutting toenails, " a poultry producer remarked.

Yet the shock is great enough to kill and it often does.

Mutilations such as debeaking

are factory farming's solutions to the problems this system itself generates.

Disinfected sheds without windows to guard against disease.

Temperature, air flow, lighting - all automatically controlled.

Not yet automated is the daily collection of the dead.

Bred indoors, poultry have little disease resistance.

The remedy? Spray vaccines - antibiotics mixed in food.

Chickens were the first animals confined indoors,

in disused army buildings after World War II,

and the complete manipulation of their life cycles which has developed,

stands as the model for the exploitation of all other farm animals.

90% of all poultry in industrialised countries

live in these conditions of confinement,

in extremes of crowding 24 hours a day, day after day,

for their entire lives.

Four or five months of this life and they are sent to slaughter.

The natural life span of turkeys is seven to twelve years.

Egg-laying chickens in cages -

the ultimate factory farm.

Automatic feeding, watering, waste and egg removal.

One man can tend up to 50,000 birds,

just a few hours' work a day.

30,000 units such as this produce 95% of Britain's eggs.

In the United States, 250 million birds are living in cages for egg laying.

Worldwide, the numbers reach into the billions.

Powerless to help themselves if the automatic system malfunctions,

the birds are entirely at the mercy of technology.

A hen's egg production declines after a year or so,

when they are sent to slaughter and used for soups and pet food.

You can gain a faster buck, but you can lose the bucks faster, too.

You get a chicken disease in there, it can wipe you out overnight.

(narrator) The deep pit waste-removal system

accumulates the chickens' excrement underneath the cages.

Those birds that have been allowed somehow to fall through

will eventually starve to death in their own wastes,

to be tractored out at the end of the cycle.

I was never particularly emotionally committed to animals,

I didn't have pets or things like that,

but when I was a philosophy student at the University of Oxford,

I was interested in philosophical problems about human rights and so on,

and I got to meet some people who were vegetarians for ethical reasons.

Naturally, when you have friends and you find they don't eat what you eat,

you ask them why they're being so fussy.

And they started to tell me,

and the more they told me, the more it seemed there was a problem.

If we believed in equality or rights for human beings,

then there was no good philosophical reason

why we could say that they stopped just at the end of our species

and don't extend to other animals as well.

Since they can feel pain, they can suffer just as we can.

(narrator) Of all farm animals, the most feeling, intelligent creatures are pigs,

naturally exploring and playful.

In this modern hog farm, the sows are tied to the floor.

The boar takes them at will.

"It's the rape rack, " joked the pig farmer.

Continuously reimpregnated sows are completely immobilised for weeks

before, during and after birth.

The piglets are born onto metal gratings and concrete.

Crowded sows tend to fall and crush their young.

The pork producer does not consider giving these sows more space.

A more economical solution is to give them no space at all.

The farrowing stall is a cage slightly larger than a sow's body.

The farrowing stall provides the remedy

to another one of factory farming's self-generated problems.

95 million pigs are slaughtered in the USA each year.

Half are raised on factory farms.

Slotted floors allow excrement and urine to fall through to underground canals,

which lead into slurry lagoons.

10,000 pigs confined in two buildings

presents an intensive waste-disposal problem.

Lakes of excrement ferment for months in the open air,

an ecologically hazardous system.

Trade magazines persuade the farmer to keep up with the trends.

These publications are supported by big corporate advertising.

They promote capital-intensive, technology-intensive farming,

and, of course, this benefits their corporate advertisers.

The worldwide trend to intensification of animal agriculture

is also advanced by research projects funded by tax moneys.

Whether it's a centre in Cambridge, England,

in Missouri, USA,

or here at the Agricultural Research Institute in Ottawa, Canada,

research pursues the application of technology

to further develop the profitability of the animal machine.

Here, the next candidate for factory farming is being prepared.

Lambs may soon be living on metal gratings,

suckling on rubber teats.

A fistulated goat, used for the study of digestion.

Its digestive fluids are pumped from the fistula, the permanent hole in its side,

once a week, every week, for its entire life for five or six years.

The director of this institute, Dr Gowe, has stated:

"We are trying to breed animals without legs

and chickens without feathers."

No need for cowboys.

A new way of making seed bulls exercise

without having to round them up or herd them outdoors.

Bulls used for artificial insemination are to be kept chained all their lives,

except for the once-a-week occasion when they are allowed a 20-minute run.

During transport of farm animals,

a number die or are injured

from the shocks of a completely disorientating process.

Chickens are dragged from their cages in darkness

and hurled into bright sunlight.

What do I think of nonhuman animals?

I haven't given them a lot of thought.

Terrible.

(narrator) Pigs are driven into the trucks with electric prods.

I use this bat here for loading up boars.

If you get two boars fighting, they can cut themselves up pretty good.

I go through and I bust their noses.

After you bust their nose it gives them something else to think about

and then it's easier to load them that way.

- I love them. - (interviewer) Do you eat them?

- No. - You're vegetarian?

- Yeah. - How long have you been vegetarian?

About six, seven years.

I think it's wrong to kill an animal, because we are two-legged animals

but we could've very well been four-legged animals, too.

(narrator) In loading cattle, the same is true as for all farm animals -

speed is what counts.

- I like animals. - (interviewer) Do you eat animals?

- Yeah. - Is that OK?

- Yeah. - You like animals, but you eat them?

- Uh-huh. - No contradiction there?

Logically, there is.

(narrator) The slaughter of poultry at its most modern and humane.

Birds are electrically stunned before killing.

If I see them get killed, I wouldn't eat it, but if I don't see it, I wouldn't mind.

(narrator) In the course of one year, American slaughterhouses process

over three billion chickens, turkeys and ducks.

Do I eat animals? Yes, I do. I'm a meat packer.

- (interviewer) You're a meat packer? - Yeah.

How do you feel about that?

Um...

I... I never thought about it.

Well, now that you're thinking about it?

- About eating an animal? - Yeah.

Well, I wouldn't eat a dog or a cat.

Well, why not?

I don't know. They don't seem too tasty.

Because they can't talk, they think it's right because they're four-legged beasts.

"Let's take them and do anything to them." But they got feelings.

(narrator) Electricity knocks them unconscious before they are killed.

The modern, humane slaughtering of pigs.

- Pork. - Steak, liver, chicken.

- (interviewer) Is that OK? - Yeah.

- It's OK. It's good. - You like them, but you eat them?

(narrator) Every day in the United States,

360,000 pigs are slaughtered.

Providing the slaughterer accurately aims,

the captive bolt pistol knocks the cattle unconscious before they are killed.

Yes, unfortunately, I eat animals.

I once thought that if I really only ate what I could kill,

I would stick to fish and chicken, but I eat other animals also.

(interviewer) why do you say "unfortunately"?

Because I'd like to live by my principles, but I don't.

It's the only way I can survive. How else can you survive?

No, I just don't eat no meat, period. It's no good for your digestive system.

(narrator) American cattle are slaughtered

at a rate of 100,000 a day.

This huge process - the transformation of animals into food.

(man) In McDonaldland, there's a hamburger patch.

The story opens with Ronald harvesting hamburgers from the hamburger patch.

We feel that the children have a great deal of influence on their parents

about where to go to eat.

That's particularly true in America.

We're probably one of the largest children's advertisers in the US.

We spend the most money on children's television.

(man #2) Don't underrate the strength of the vested interests of various kinds.

Agricultural, scientific,

particularly the chemical and pharmaceutical industries,

and especially, of course, factory farming.

All these are enormously strong vested interests

With great amounts of capital invested in them.

I better talk to the home secretary's office in the light of that fact,

that I wasn't able to say just what the society had or had not done.

The trouble with animal organisations is that they're fragmented.

In many cases they're rivals, in some cases they're overlapping.

The reason why the animal-welfare movement

has failed to achieve its purpose over the years

is because it hasn't understood politics, it hasn't understood Parliament,

and it hasn't had the will and the courage

to exert the maximum pressure on the political position.

(narrator) Animal-welfare organisations internationally are in crisis.

While traditionalists cling to original concerns,

progressives are campaigning also against the uses of animals

in factory farming and laboratory research.

The oldest and wealthiest animal-welfare charity, the RSPCA,

has been at the centre of the struggle,

with traditionalists moving to oust the progressives.

We cannot approve of an action

which has lost the society an exceptional opportunity

to influence changes in legislation.

This action has slighted a Minister of the Crown.

"Compromise" - a very interesting word.

Your council does not believe in compromise.

We live compromise day to day.

This society must not compromise.

We have to stand up for the animals and have to fight hard against the exploiters.

- We have to guard against infiltration. - (applause)

If the RSPCA has been so successful for the last 150 years,

how come we've got 400 million animals in this country

suffering in terms of our own policy?

We expel members from the council

from the society, not just the council,

for promoting what they think is the right thing in animal welfare.

There is no motion to expel factory farmers from the RSPCA, is there?

(narrator) Six months later, the RSPCA Council meets behind closed doors

to consider the expulsion of Richard Ryder,

leader of the RSPCA progressives.

However, traditionalists have a failure of nerve and withdraw their motion.

(man) My major concern is the RSPCA is not campaigning for animal welfare.

It's become a puppet of Peter Walker's Ministry of Agriculture.

People that don't want radical progress in terms of experiments on animals,

in factory farming, on blood sports and other issues, grave issues,

the expulsion of Ryder is obviously a ploy to diffuse the radical campaign.

We threaten their cosy little world of coffee mornings.

They are concerned with cruelty

only in the way it affects uncontroversial issues like dogs and cats,

which are very important,

but their biggest fear is...

that they don't want to upset the apple cart, they don't want to offend people.

You cannot campaign against cruelty

without offending the people that perpetuate the cruelty.

(narrator) "The Second Stage of Cruelty" by Hogarth.

The beating of horses in the streets of London

provoked the founding of the RSPCA.

Their intention was to prevent cruelty to domesticated animals.

They could not anticipate the wholesale exploitation which was to come.

Charity - the institutionalisation of alms giving.

From its origins, charity has been an alternative to social change.

Does alms giving to a beggar change the society which creates poverty?

An organisation using direct action to end hunting has emerged in Britain -

the Hunt Saboteurs Association.

More than 1,000 activists are regularly out saving the fox, the hare, the deer

by sabotaging Britain's traditional hunts.

But the saboteurs have their work cut out for them.

- Out of the way. - Get off!

Will you get out the way?

(narrator) To this day, there are more than 500 organised hunts in Britain

every week.

- (man) There you go. - (man #2) There's a fox.

- That's not a rabbit. - That's some rabbit!

(man) Let him go. Let him go!

(interviewer) People feel it's cruel to chase the deer across countryside,

scaring it with a pack of hounds, when it could be shot and killed.

But doesn't every animal chase each other?

Not with 50 men on horseback and a pack of hounds.

Oh, I don't think they mind.

They're either killed or they're not.

(dogs bark)

(gunshot)

- (man) Come on. - (man #2) Get it. Get it.

(woman) People who don't understand might think that it is cruel.

What don't they understand?

I think people who don't understand hunting think it's cruel, don't you think?

What is it that they misunderstand? What should they understand?

Well, I suppose they don't like seeing a deer hunted and killed.

(narrator) This is the tradition which concludes the stag hunt -

a five-centuries old blood ritual

which still goes on every week in modern Britain.

The most gallant rider wins his trophy - the heart.

(man) Could you take that? That bit's for you.

- (narrator) Others receive the hooves. - (man) Lovely. Thank you very much.

(hunting horn)

(man on PA) white leads by a length, but red's closing.

White still leads on the outside. They've swung wide, these puppies.

White's fallen and red's getting in. White leads by four points.

Three and a half. Two and a half points. White leads, but red is rapidly closing.

Red's down to one and a half points. One point now. Half.

It's getting desperately close. we're waiting for the judge on this one.

(man) Quite a few of the hares are killed.

It's not a form of control. It's purely to test greyhounds one against the other.

It's probably the least defensible blood sport of all.

Our intention today Was to clear the area of hares

so that when they came along, there wouldn't be anything for them to course.

The Hunt Saboteurs does attract people who have a gut feeling about hunting.

They come in, they're influenced by the movement,

and, as a consequence, do become active in other spheres of animal rights.

Shooting and everything's cruel, isn't it, really?

I love hunting, of course. I've done it all my life.

It is an honour to introduce

the president of the first American International Fur Fair,

Mr Kenny Wagner.

(applause)

Ladies and gentlemen, the time is now.

(applause)

More than 2,000 people here are to witness

that this fair is no longer a dream.

The drama of accomplishment and the moment of fulfilment are upon us.

(shouted protests)

In the last 25 years,

our industry in the United States has grown from a $212-million industry

to approximately $725 million.

And I firmly believe that within the next five years

we will reach $1 billion.

The American fur retailer and department-store operator

who had the courage to continue on with furs during the dark period

are now being rewarded.

[Music] Sparkling diamonds catching the light

Shame! Shame! Shame!

[Music] Beautiful people

[music] Open your hearts

OK, enough.

(emcee) Ah, look at that girl. She is beautiful!

What do you think, folks? Huh?

Yeah!

And now we have a threesome, looking classy, I tell you.

Get the light on these furs. I wanna see these furs.

(applause)

Ah, the audience wants to see them, too.

It is deceptively simple. It's a hinged ring of steel with a powerful spring.

When anything touches the plate, the ring snaps shut with tremendous force.

(emcee) Yes! There they are, folks!

Where's my lady? There she is.

And here she is all by herself and looking gorgeous.

We're getting ready here now.

We are about to go here.

Count it with me.

Yes!

(all chant) Down with cash! Don't buy furs!

Down with cash! Don't buy furs!

Down with cash! Don't buy furs!

Down with cash! Don't buy furs!

(man) It's a Russian lynx and a Russian crown sable.

- (man #2) How many pelts? - 84, 85.

And then the Russian lynx, there's 20, 22 skins.

You've got about $400,000 in those two coats.

That's a natural Alaska lynx.

It's another $100,000.

I love them.

I would take a dim view of purchasing a fur coat if I gave it any thought.

I just eliminate it from my mind.

- I think that it's a shame, it's a pity. - (interviewer) Then why wear it?

Because it's available to me. I didn't do it personally.

Oh, that's a cat. And they are not a... endangered species.

(interviewer) And don't they suffer?

Sure. But they have to die sometime. They're from a farm.

- Don't we? - They're not wild animals.

(newsreel) Good news to fanciers of turtle steak and/or turtle soup

are these hard-shelled critters in from hunting grounds off the Florida Keys.

They comprise one of the biggest and the mouth-wateringest hauls

of the deep-sea denizens ever to hit the dock.

Upside down and completely helpless,

they're lugged unceremoniously off to the cannery.

At this point, it's just as well a turtle only sticks his neck out once.

Still unaware of their fate, they breathe easily

as a junior skipper almost turns turtle

trying to keep his balance on a reptilian perch.

Mm! Seems he recognises a friend.

Well, he'll soon be in the soup himself.

(electronic beeping)

(clip voice-over) Research in marine-mammal capabilities

is culminating in a unique approach to underwater search and recovery.

A sea lion located and attached recovery hardware to a fleet weapon.

The system has a demonstrated recovery capability to 500 feet.

For depths greater than 500 feet, there is the whale.

(narrator) Apart from human beings,

the whale has the most highly developed brain of all living creatures.

Why is the circus popular?

Does our laughter stem from a feeling of superiority

to the bear who has difficulty dancing on a ball?

Our thrill from a feeling of domination

over the wild creature taught to perform tricks for our amusement?

When the eyes staring back at us from inside the cage

are flat and dead,

extinct,

who will retrieve for us our lost companions?

Remaining wildlife habitats provide scant refuge.

In America, game animals are allowed some space to exist.

250 million are shot by American sportsmen in an average year.

(gunshot)

It's more than a hundred years since Darwin pointed out the biological kinship

between us and the nonhuman animals.

And I feel, therefore,

it's only logical to say that there should also be a moral kinship,

that we should all be in the same moral category.

If we can all suffer, then we should all be given similar respect.

We should be accorded similar rights

based upon our sentiency, our capacity to suffer.

It's particularly, I think, discreditable that scientists who, more than other people,

know and believe in the biological brotherhood of all the animals

should so totally exploit the other species

merely, it seems, because they are of another species.

And I've coined this word "speciesism",

because I feel that our prejudice against the other species

is irrational and small-minded and selfish

in the same way that racism is,

in the same way, if you like, that sexism is.

Speciesism is the greatest and cruellest form of exploitation in the world today.

(squealing)

(man) Come on, rat.

- Just try again. - OK.

Is he hurting somewhere? Let's see...

(narrator) Dr Kenneth Casey at the University of Michigan Medical School

is assisted by a student in handling this rat.

The rat is being used as part of research

into the memory process of human beings.

- (Casey) How does that feel? - (student) Not much.

(Casey) Not much. He's not interested in it.

He's more interested in getting out of this box.

No. There's no way of studying the nervous system

Without having a nervous system to study.

(interviewer) How about clinically studying human beings?

No. You can't study the mechanisms.

Here we can record directly from the brain.

We can implant electrodes, uh...

and make continued observations.

We can subsequently, uh,

sacrifice the animal by giving it an overdose of anaesthetic,

and then remove the brain and study the histology,

find out where our electrodes were,

and do that a number of times with different animals.

(interviewer) Is the rat's brain a good model for the human brain?

Not really. A rat brain is quite different. But it is a mammalian brain.

It's a small, well-organised mammalian brain,

which has many similarities to the human brain.

([music] silent-movie piano)

(narrator) Rodents are the sacrificial victims of modern biomedical science.

It is estimated over 300 million animals die in laboratories worldwide each year.

The vast majority are rats and mice, guinea pigs and rabbits.

There are a number of drugs which were tested on animals

which have then proved to be most dangerous when applied to humans.

And vice versa,

there have been drugs which, if they had been tested upon animals,

on certain species, would have been found to be dangerous,

might never have been released.

An example is penicillin, which is extremely toxic to guinea pigs,

but fortunately Fleming and Florey did not test it upon guinea pigs.

(narrator) At Upjohn Company,

they are persisting with attempts to develop a new drug

to prevent stomach ulcers occurring.

The test group gets the potential preventative agent.

In the process, one hundred or so rats are given ulcers every day

by oral injection of pure alcohol direct into the stomach.

(experimenter) The agent, absolute alcohol, or ethanol.

(narrator) The control group develops ulcers within a few hours.

They don't object very strenuously for this.

It's just very easy.

(narrator) Both groups are then killed with carbon dioxide.

Over ten years of research on ulcers has been carried out in this lab.

At 25,000 rats a year,

more than 250,000 rats have been used in this one project.

At the time of filming, there were no breakthroughs to report.

Similar research is going on

in pharmaceutical companies throughout the world.

Whichever company patents a new drug first

stands to reap huge profits.

An Upjohn scientist estimated that in the course of one year

Upjohn Company uses some 250,000 rats and 500,000 mice.

Rats are so easily come by. They're cheap, they're easy to use.

It's easy to reproduce experimental results.

I think a lot of researchers just think of them as another experimental tool,

like instruments or a piece of apparatus.

I work for a large international pharmaceutical company.

I have a job as a scientific officer.

I wanted this interview to be anonymous

because I feel almost instinctively the repercussions would be serious.

From working with rats in a lot of tests,

I've come to believe firmly that they're extremely intelligent, aware animals

who enjoy human affection when they're given it.

A large group of rats were subjected to experiment with a particular chemical

whose effects on the nervous system were very well known.

And I saw rats with spasms,

unable to walk, in semiparalysis,

obviously extremely distressed, shaking, scratching their noses,

scraping their paws to the extent to which they bled

in trying to relieve the irritation, dying in agony,

and also being cannibalised even when alive by their cage mates.

(interviewer) Do animals suffer just being in a laboratory

without any experiments being done on them?

Unquestionably.

When the animals are to be put on an experiment,

their situation is made even worse

in that they're removed from a kennel or a cage

where they live with other animals.

And particularly cats and dogs become very distressed on their own,

because if they're laboratory-bred they spend all their time with other animals,

and during the course of an experiment

they're usually kept on their own, in isolation.

I believe that many of the experiments carried out on animals are unnecessary.

They're often repetitive,

they're often due to the patenting of drugs and other chemicals.

Companies keep the results of their experiments secret,

whereas if the results were compiled between organisations,

then some of the experiments would be unnecessary.

I personally believe that a lot of the drugs produced are unnecessary.

(interviewer) What if someone said:

"She doesn't know. She hasn't seen enough. She just overemotional."?

I don't think I am overemotional about it.

I haven't told you about how very deeply I do feel about it.

I'm sure that any number of people

could, if they wanted to, tell you the same things.

The incidents which I've described aren't unusual or rare.

They're what happens every day to millions of animals in this country

and every other country where work like this is carried out.

The place I work for has a particularly good reputation.

I'm sure much worse things go on in other laboratories.

[Music] And I'll be screaming

[music] And I'll be crying...

- (narrator) LSD tests. - [music] And I'll be crawling

[music] And I'll be dying

[music] And I'll be running

[music] And I'll be hiding

[music] You know I'll be dreaming

[music] And I'll be sliding

[music] I said oh

[music] Ah, ah

[music] Oh-oh

[music] That's right

[music] It's all right

[music] I'll be running

[music] I'll be hiding

[music] I'll be dreaming

[music] I'll be flying

[music] That's right

[music] That's right

[music] And I'll be hiding

[music] And I'll be crawling

[music] Whoa-oh, yeah

[music] whoa-oh

(narrator) Here, monkeys are made into drug addicts.

Morphine addiction is the norm used

to evaluate the addictiveness of new drugs

by researcher Dr James woods.

This research necessarily subjects monkeys to withdrawal experiences.

Over $2 million of tax moneys have been given to this one research project.

We try to have other scientists here at the university

use the animals as much as they can.

We trade animals to the extent that we can.

We use animals in many ways, in many different experiments

to make the maximum use of the animals that we can.

Uh, uh...

Our research is reviewed

by a committee of people who are very concerned

about the ethical issues associated with animal research -

a group of medical scientists here at the university.

They're independent of us,

and they assess ethical considerations involved with our research and OK it.

(voice echoes) "OK it... OK it... "

(narrator) what are the priorities when very expensive research

is undertaken primarily to perfect a laboratory technique

without application to a specific medical problem?

In Holland, microsyringes implanted in the monkeys' heads

release mind-changing drugs direct into their brains

upon radio signals from outside their cages.

Is artificial heart research, which experts admit is an unpromising area,

of sufficient importance to benefit societies

which as yet cannot or do not provide basic healthcare?

80 to 90% of the experiments licensed under our 1876 act

are not carried out under anaesthetic.

Now, in this country the controls are far better than in most other countries.

But even so, severe pain is allowed and is inflicted.

(narrator) Filmed clandestinely in Canada,

these piglets' hind legs have been intentionally paralysed.

Such footage is very difficult to obtain.

In Britain, public and press access to animal laboratories

is effectively banned.

It's purely a function of my current and the amount of current I put on, you see?

I can turn it on and leave it at any level I want, either low or high...

and he will do the same thing each time.

We have 60 electrodes implanted,

and we'll keep them in anywhere up to four years.

If you had a stroke in which you were paralysed in a limb

so that you could not move it voluntarily,

we could theoretically stimulate those parts of your brain,

as with the monkey, in the brainstem, which are not damaged by a stroke,

producing movements you would ordinarily do.

We could programme these movements and give you a switch or buttons,

and as you push them, your arm would reach out and get a piece of food

or write for you or whatever.

It's one thing to experiment on animals. I don't want anyone experimenting on me.

But that's just the point, Fred.

Because they check this out first on animals

they're pretty sure then how it's going to work on people.

I'm sure this operation they've planned for you is way past the guinea pig stage,

otherwise your doctor wouldn't have ordered it.

And I'm also sure that a good many dogs or some other animals

have had this operation and are alive and kicking,

or you wouldn't get the new operation, you'd get the old one.

And the way I see it, anything new in medicine is usually a lot better,

otherwise it wouldn't have been developed.

(Ryder) There is the psychological vested interest of the person

who has a career in animal experimentation.

His academic career may depend upon him doing certain experiments,

getting his PhD and so on.

In laboratories, in zoos, in school science fairs, in factory farms,

in all these and more, animals are treated as things,

as if they had no value in themselves.

This treatment must be stopped,

not only because it is a good thing for us to be kind to animals,

but because we owe it to them.

When rights are violated, justice not kindness is at issue.

Their defenceless state, their inability to speak out for their rights,

makes our duty to help them all the greater.

Tomorrow they will suffer, tomorrow they will be killed,

unless we act for them today, and act we must.

Respect for justice requires nothing less.

(narrator) An antivivisection poster on a laboratory wall.

He's put that up there

to keep us in mind of the ethical restraints that we have,

and also as a point of fact that we poke fun at some of these organisations,

which do have a tendency to exploit extreme facts

and blow them out of proportion,

so, um, as to perhaps stop research and even limit it, you know.

A lot of it is malarkey, it's not true.

(interviewer) what is "Millennium Guild"?

That's an organisation we don't know too much about,

but they want to stop some research, pain research and stuff like that,

and things they think are extraneous and not necessary researches.

And, basically, they're misinformed.

And they really don't know.

(narrator) Sleep and insomnia research.

This type of experiment is in the category of painful procedures

allowed to be conducted with no anaesthesia.

The cat's life processes being monitored

would be distorted by the use of anaesthetics.

ALAS, the Association of Laboratory Animal Scientists' trade fair.

(woman) How many do you have in mind?

In Washington, DC, designed to support the rights of biomedical researchers

to use laboratory animals.

We are the vivisectionists as opposed to the antivivisectionists.

We monitor state and federal legislation and regulations

which might hinder animal research.

We provide testimony on Capitol Hill.

(narrator) Charles River Laboratories, a company breeding lab animals,

sells some 14 million laboratory animals a year.

Profits rise with the widening uses of animals in research.

We're funded by medical schools, veterinary medical schools,

allied trade, pharmaceuticals, medical associations.

What? That? I keep my money in there.

No. Those are mouse cages.

I haven't talked to the demonstrators. I didn't come to talk to them.

I came to do business with this organisation.

But, Doctor, look, isn't there a less painful method?

As a veterinarian I can tell you, animals get much better care in research

than they do as most people's pets.

That, my dear friend, is how science operates.

Repetition, duplication.

But what good is that to mankind?

You have to have your trust and faith in someone.

The same persons that are in those facilities,

in many cases may become your family physician.

Are you going to trust the man that's your family physician?

Well, there's certain secrecy about research in some areas, I presume,

for the same reason there's a certain secrecy

among people who produce automobiles...

or almost anything in a manufacturing line in a capitalistic system.

(narrator) At the Upjohn Company, this dog, its heart exposed,

was found and filmed with apparently no staff in attendance.

At the Upjohn Company, this dog, its heart exposed,

was found and filmed with no staff in attendance.

While research remains the domain of scientists alone,

unaccountable to outsiders,

it will be impossible to assess how representative this incident is.

(man) Imagine yourself making something and doing something

that you think is very, very good for society,

and you're very proud of this work.

Now, wouldn't you want to show society this work?

Wouldn't you want to tell society about what you're doing

and make it very open to the public?

We have tried time and time again

to get animal researchers to discuss with us in public

the merits of their research,

what kind of pain and suffering they are causing the animals,

and comparing that to the social

and general welfare benefits for human beings.

We have gotten nobody to do this,

and today's incident was just very typical of this,

and very, very unfortunate.

That is, we tried to talk With Dr Al Moreland,

Who is head of the animal research facility here,

and he refused to talk to me

because I was not part of the elite, because I was not a scientist.

So, somehow, I'm not part of the in-group.

An outsider can see and feel things...

that the inside group might,

through habituation or consensus or whatever, simply not be seeing.

The more they attempt to hide,

the more suspicious one gets about what they're doing,

and the angrier I get.

(narrator) Monkeys raised with surrogate mothers

develop rocking behaviour.

This is used as a model for neurotic family relationships.

To produce psychotic behaviour,

other surrogate mothers were rigged with spikes.

This experiment, filmed some ten years ago, is still being elaborated upon.

Harlow, the inventor of it, has remarked:

"Most experiments are not worth doing

and the data obtained not worth publishing."

(man) What's up?

What's up? What's up, huh?

What's up? You got flies all over you. You got flies all over you.

(narrator) Lake Village Commune, Kalamazoo, Michigan,

home of Roger Ulrich, behavioural psychologist.

Oh, you're a new one, huh? You a new guy?

(narrator) In the '60s and early '70s,

Ulrich's US-military funded research on aggression

involved freezing, burning, starving and electroshocking

monkeys, rats and cats.

I didn't even recognise you. You're one of the new ones, huh?

For goodness sakes. Were you born this morning?

Like, two... Like, hours, hours.

Just born, just born.

OK. Hi, Mona. So you finally had your baby, huh?

(narrator) While continuing on the faculty of Western Michigan University,

his research activities have since taken a new direction.

When I told my mother what I did for my dissertation, which was...

She said, "What did you do?"

I said, "Well, I studied rats. I showed that pain produced aggression."

She said, "Well, we know that."

She said, "Grandpa used to always say:

'Stay away from animals When they're wounded.'"

OK. And I said, "OK, that's a certain level of... "

And she was right. We knew that.

But we didn't know the milliamperage it took to make a rat, an albino rat, fight.

And that's where science goes. It continues to explore some train like that.

(Ulrich on TV) These rats are in an aversive environment because...

(narrator) Excerpts from a widely-used film made by Ulrich seven years earlier

showing his research.

(Ulrich on TV) And if he can't escape or avoid,

as you can see, the result is aggression.

Monkeys have the same reaction to pain. They fight, too.

Well, the question of the ethics of doing this type of research,

putting an animal through pain, was something that came up...

The day I walked into an animal lab and the day I started doing animal research,

it was something that came up and it walked with me every inch of my career

as a professional scientist.

I mean, that question came up from groups of antivivisectionists,

it came up from myself, it came up from friends of friends of mine.

It was always there.

And we had to deal with it, and we dealt with it in terms of,

we put it on a scale and we felt that what we were doing was legitimate

in terms of asking questions that...

we knew no other place to get the answers from other than using animals.

(interviewer) No other place to get the answers than animal subjects?

That's right.

Haven't there been great thinkers in history

that are concerned with violence, social conflict,

and who have not done painful research?

- Yeah. - Have they not contributed anything?

They've contributed a magnificent body of knowledge to that,

a magnificent body,

which I appreciate very much and read and am interested in, OK?

But they were not coming at it from the point of view of behavioural scientists,

which also has contributed a beautiful, magnificent body of knowledge.

How, then, do we attempt to control aggression?

Punishment.

But unless the punishment we employ is so severe as to be terminal,

what are the chances aggression can be stopped through punishment?

Back in the lab, several experiments have given us answers to this question.

As in many laboratory experiments, the environment is made aversive

by the scheduled delivery of painful tail shock to the monkey.

When allowed to vent his aggression on the bite hose,

the monkey appears relatively relaxed between the scheduled shocks.

When we punished this aggression

by shocking him twice as hard every time he bit the hose,

we got two reactions.

Some monkeys began to bite the hose more.

Though the punishment was introduced to stop such behaviour,

it made the environment even more aversive,

thus producing more aggression.

But monkeys aren't dumb, nor are they necessarily masochistic.

And in a short period of time, each monkey stopped biting the hose

and thus averted the punishing shock.

None of the animals could be considered less aggressive, however.

Instead of biting the hose, they bit their own hands,

scratched their face or assumed a slumped position

characteristic of humans labelled psychotic or neurotic.

And we were willing to take money from the Office of Naval Research

to do our basic animal research.

And we were also willing to take money from them

to make the film Understanding Aggression,

in which we questioned very, very sincerely,

more so than probably we've seen questioned in a lot of film,

the use of force in a heavy, heavy way

to bring about the change of human behaviour, OK?

I mean, you've seen the movie.

(Ulrich) A chamber was equipped with two hoses for monkeys to attack.

The environment was made aversive,

then the favoured enemy was found by which hose the monkey bit the most.

When we tried to punish the monkey for attacking his favoured enemy,

it was obvious that aggression was not suppressed.

In fact, the monkey continued to bite the favoured enemy

and increased his attack on the less favoured one.

By the time the first punishment session was completed,

the monkey had bitten ten times more than usual.

Although this heightened aggressive reaction to punishment was reduced,

any time the monkey was likely to get punished

for aggression against his favoured enemy,

more aggression was directed toward his less favoured enemy.

If you're interested only in controlling a specific form of aggressive behaviour,

then punishment, in a certain narrow sense, does work.

But if you're interested in making the organism generally less aggressive,

punishment is not the answer.

These two rats are fighting because one is attacking the other.

Why? He's a mercenary rat.

He's getting paid to do it.

The wires leading into his brain

are capable of carrying electrical current to the pleasure centre,

a very potent reward.

When the rat attacks the other rat, he receives his payment -

a short electrical impulse.

Here's the same rat attacking a cat.

This shows just how powerful reinforcement behaviour can be.

When the mercenary rat got too good at his trade

and made the cat's environment aversive by causing it mild pain,

she ceased her peaceful coexistence strategy

and terminated the annoying rat's mercenary life.

The cat illustrated the only sure way punishment is capable

of completely stopping one individual's aggression - capital punishment.

(interviewer) Listen to your vocabulary - "punishment", "aversive environment",

"mercenary rat", "reinforced behaviour", "capital punishment".

Look at your activities.

The military funded your research during the height of the Vietnam war.

The US government and the US military

has been involved in teaching repressive regimes,

for instance, Chile, how to torture political prisoners

or how to extract information from them.

Doesn't your work link up with that sort of repressive system?

You want me to say... You... Uh...

OK. Now, let's turn to philosophy.

Of course my work links up to that. We all are one.

We all, in the end result, are intrinsically linked up one with another.

Everything you do and everything I do is linked, OK?

Together, brother, we are linked up with Chile

and the repressive regimes all over the world.

You and I reach out and together in this technological world,

you holding things made by multinational corporations, are linked up.

Together we assume this responsibility.

(Ulrich) This information on aggression must reach those people in control,

maybe a parent, maybe a student, maybe an admiral.

One would think that we could have picked up on this

by observing the ineffectiveness of our riot-control techniques.

(screaming)

(narrator) Riot footage in Ulrich's military-funded film.

Ulrich says when the navy saw his pacifistic conclusions,

they took their name off the film.

(Ulrich) Has it been proven research with animals

has come up with anything that's helped us in the area of cancer research?

Smoking is dangerous to one's health,

and yet we're still exploring the effects of nicotine,

the effects of smoke, on animals.

And the scientist himself is smoking.

He's not attending to the data that's come out. That's the point I'm making.

We don't attend to the data.

The things that I discovered in the basic scientific laboratory

are still meaningful to me.

I went through that. It's my past. I cannot erase that.

I cannot be dishonest about that.

It's a part of me. It's a part of my roots.

And...

Do you have remorse about the suffering

that the animals in your laboratories experienced?

Do you personally have any feelings of regret

about the suffering that the animals were subjected to in your laboratory?

When I think of what it feels like to be lonely,

and when I think what it feels like to get shocked, which I've gotten many times,

when I'm feeling down and so forth,

and I think of what Ralph, one of my squirrel monkeys, went through,

and different things went through, I think:

"Jeez. God. You poor son of a bitch."

Come on! Hustle! Hustle!

Hustle over!

(Ulrich) More and more people are starting to say:

"So I do live a little bit longer. What's the quality of life?"

"How happy am I going to be under these circumstances?"

(baas like sheep)

What it seems that humans are willing to do is go to any end,

to sacrifice all the rhesus monkeys in India,

if we can go out of this life feeling no pain.

We're so addicted to continuing our way of life

and doing what it is that we feel good about.

(narrator) In fact, the majority of laboratory animals

are used for commercial not medical purposes.

Identical products with virtually identical ingredients carry different brand names

to compete for the greater share of the market.

Every new brand of toothpaste, every new improved brand of floor wax,

every new product, has to be tested on animals.

Not to find an antidote for accidental poisoning,

but to arrive at a statistical rating of each product's toxicity.

This is a commercial testing lab in Pennsylvania.

The LD50 - that is, lethal dosage 50% -

involves mixing poisonous substances into animal feed

or force-feeding these substances to lab animals until exactly 50% die.

(man) Oh, I've had experience with LD50s for almost ten years.

An LD50 is essentially a lethal dose to 50% of a population,

and it's a statistical calculation

calculated from the number of animals which die at a series of dose levels.

(narrator) Toxicity testing under US or British government guidelines

is conducted with no anaesthesia, sometimes over periods of weeks.

This is a coded material.

As a testing laboratory, we rarely know exactly what the materials are.

(man) She aborted approximately, uh, three weeks ago or so.

- (interviewer) Right. - And during the implantation period,

she just began to haemorrhage very severely.

Do you think the animals suffer?

Uh, no. I don't think they, uh, in most instances they do.

(narrator) The skin-irritancy test.

The eye-irritancy test.

Rabbits' eyes do not tear.

Perfect for testing caustic substances

that must remain in the eye to do their damage

and must not be washed away by crying.

The following giant corporations

have reported conducting numerous painful tests on animals

without any use of anaesthesia -

Allied Chemical, American Cyanamid, Avon, Bristol-Myers,

Ciba-Geigy, Colgate-Palmolive, Dow Chemical,

Hoechst Roussel, Hoffman-La Roche, Monsanto, Pfizer, Ralston Purina...

Yes, there are alternatives. Take, for example, the production of vaccines,

which used to be produced in the living animal.

In the case of the rabies vaccine, in the brains of living animals.

Polio vaccine is another example.

Now these are produced in the test tube, as it were, in the tissue culture.

And they're produced more cheaply and very much more safely

than they were in the living animal.

There are just some examples. The Ames test in another instance of this.

This simple test-tube technique

has revolutionised certain aspects of pharmacology.

What we would like to see is far more effort

to develop humane alternative techniques of this sort.

(narrator) Newspaper ads, combined with a leafleting campaign,

pressured several cosmetics companies to fund research

into alternatives to the eye test.

The $2 million donated represents a minute percentage

of the companies' annual profits,

but it is a significant concession to an emerging international movement.

Animal protesting? I don't believe how they can do it.

People have nothing better to do but protest about animals, you know?

- After all, aren't we all animals? - I happen to agree with them.

You agree with them, but there has to be a purpose to it, right?

(chanting) Stop the torture, NYU!

I read about that, but then again, if people would be liberating animals,

how would mankind be able to strive for the technology they've achieved?

- Isn't he adorable? - Personkind. Liberate your language.

But it's justifiable suffering, in a sense, don't you think?

Is it justifiable to behead a cat in a guillotine? Is it justifiable?

- Is that what they do? - They do.

They have Blalock crushers, they have Noble-Collip drums,

they put dogs in hyperbaric chambers.

But aren't you talking about? Anything to an extreme is no good.

Because NYU is extreme.

$10 billion of taxpayers' money squandered on vivisection, which is...

I'm not that familiar...

It's the torture, torment and slaughter of laboratory animals.

There's the Ames test, which tests chemicals for cancer.

We want these to be more extensively used,

and we also want more extensive mathematical and computer modelling.

We want mass chromatography, gas spectrometry...

(clip voice-over) German shepherds go through a refresher course

after arrival in Vietnam.

They've been used successfully as scouts and for sentry duty

following stateside training.

A GI imitates a Vietcong, giving hand and arm battle signals,

and the dog proves he's learned his lessons well.

Basic training for each animal runs to about $2,000,

but it's a good investment.

If this had been an enemy guerrilla, he'd be out of action after that mauling.

So extensive has been the use of these dogs,

that many have been wounded and a few killed in action.

Their swiftness in preventing sneak attacks on US bases

has also proved them invaluable.

In Vietnam, the old motto takes a new twist,

and a soldier's best friend is his dog.

(man) If you go down to the wounding pit you can pick up your animals there.

(clip voice-over) At the wounding pit, the demonstration animal is anaesthetised

utilising intravenous Nembutal in an anterior jugular vein.

(gunshot)

At the demonstration table, the animal is prepared for surgery.

Our purpose is to teach a familiarity with the principles and practices,

which, if well learned on the laboratory animal,

may later be responsible for decreasing morbidity and mortality in combat,

and to demonstrate on living animals the effects of weapons of warfare.

Students are grateful for the opportunity to learn the principles and techniques

of what is a neglected field in the average medical school.

Having participated in one d�bridement,

they are certainly better qualified to perform that first one in combat,

or in a similar situation.

(narrator) This monkey was used to test a new recording device

for reading levels of electroshocks

as they pass through the bodies of living animals.

If you're concerned about animals,

people think there must be something wrong with you

because you're probably being overemotional and oversentimental.

I used to apologise and think:

"Well, maybe there is something wrong here that I do feel very badly

when I see a monkey being, uh, shocked to death, literally,

and I feel bad and I empathise with that monkey and I feel horrible."

But I no longer apologise for that

because I think that we've regarded emotion somewhat as being unscientific

and something we don't want to deal with.

Here we are pouring tons of money... You know, science is big business.

It's not just the lonely researcher in the lab discovering truth.

It's highly funded by the federal government,

it's controlled by the government.

It's our money that is being funnelled into these things.

What do we get out of it?

Well, do we get a science for the people out of it?

No. Very little of the research has any direct benefit.

Very little of it trickles down to the people.

(narrator) In 1946, shortly after the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

animals were loaded onto this ship in preparation for atom bomb tests

at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.

Shaved, tagged and immobilised on the open decks,

they are left to face the full blast of the explosion.

This test to record the effects of nuclear weapons on animals

was known as the Atomic Ark.

A few years later,

military researchers subject donkeys to lethal doses of radiation

to test its effect on them.

This project was initiated in 1951 and is still being conducted

under funding from the US Department of Energy.

Ulceration of the gums.

Ulceration of the anus.

Bleeding from the mouth.

Lethargy.

Collapse.

And finally...

death.

All these symptoms were observed and recorded in human beings

after the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

long before this experiment was conducted.

This research has been in progress for over 29 years.

A tethered dog is hit by the full blast of a Chinese A-bomb explosion.

(clip voice-over) The effects of nuclear weapons on large biological specimens.

After the fury of the burst had spent itself,

a round-the-clock operation was set in motion,

biomedical teams hurrying in to recover the animals.

The primary cause of death was mechanical injury to the organisms

due to translation.

Those animals in the open which escaped total missile injury

survived temporarily until the massive radiation they received took its fatal toll.

The mortality rate, nearly 100%, can be applied to man.

(clip voice-over) 2am to 8am is a work period.

The next six hours are devoted to rest.

Followed by another work period from 2pm until 8pm.

Six more hours of rest complete the daily schedule.

The total dose of 500 rads received by the monkeys

would be considered lethal in man

if accumulated over a shorter period of time.

500 rads of gamma radiation delivered at the rate of 50 rads per day

failed to degrade the performance of the test animals

in either accuracy or reaction time.

The inference is that man could tolerate substantial amounts of radiation

and still perform efficiently

if the dosage is received over a sufficiently long period of time.

A definite advantage in civil defence, military and space-flight operations.

And somehow, one gets the impression

that the chimpanzee is proud of his contribution.

(narrator) These types of experiments are still being conducted today.

At the Armed Forces Radiobiological Institute in Maryland,

a heavily irradiated monkey is forced by electroshock to run until exhaustion,

as a model for combat soldiers' endurance in a nuclear war.

In biomedical science, the use of animals as models

yields, at best, unreliable predictions.

Everything must ultimately be tested on people.

As Roger Ulrich put it, "There is no experiment other than the real thing."

Yet animal experiments are duplicated

in universities, government and commercial labs around the world.

Trivial or absurd experiments are initiated,

alternative research techniques remain underdeveloped,

and expensive new treatments are favoured over preventative healthcare.

The whole direction of modern medicine and research

is dominated by the internationally powerful

chemical, pharmaceutical industries.

Are we justified in feeling confident

that animal experimentation greatly alleviates human suffering?

Or does it perhaps pave the way for it?

(clip voice-over) Here in a hospital affiliated to the Harbin Medical College,

researchers prepare an amazing experiment -

the transplanting of one dog's head onto the body of another live dog.

This is the fifth such experiment.

Their knowledge reinforced by the experience from four previous failures,

the researchers try again,

confident that it can be successfully done.

And here is the proof that they were right.

The small dog's head is now sustained by the large dog's body,

yet their respective nervous systems remain unimpaired

and the characteristic actions of each are visibly unaltered.

Knowledge from such experiments is of great value to medical science

in its constant study of how to save and prolong human life.

(narrator) Do we condone the widening exploitation of animals?

Or do we act to end it?

The people here who have masks on

are people who either aren't known to the police

or whose activities aren't known to the police.

Whereas with myself, I've already been to prison twice

for Animal Liberation Front activities.

Each of us spent a year in prison.

And then in the spring of 1976,

the Animal Liberation Front was formed,

and that rapidly grew to be a much larger organisation.

And it now has several hundred members.

(narrator) Since 1977,

there have been more than 400 Animal Liberation raids in Britain

and many in the USA, Canada, Holland and France.

We'd feel it perfectly OK for someone to have broken into a concentration camp

to free people and to damage the torture equipment used by the Nazis,

and, you know, we see the torture and imprisonment of animals

in the same light.

And I think if you look at it like that,

it would seem that our activities are much too lenient

rather than being extreme in any way.

(hens cluck)

(man) This is a news release from the Animal Liberation Front.

This morning, one of our groups was in action in the southwest of England.

The target was a factory farm, Sunnyside Poultry Limited.

Here, many thousands of chickens are forced to live in very small wire cages.

More than a hundred birds were rescued.

The ALF has now transported these chickens

to a place where they can live out their natural lives in freedom.

The birds are receiving proper veterinary care and fresh food.

If we call again about this raid, we will use the identification code "White Fox".

(man) When they first came out, they were in a distressed condition.

They were very shy, terrified.

They had none of the normal reactions of a dog.

I went into the actual laboratory and removed two of the smoking beagles,

and I was subsequently apprehended by the police

and questioned as to the whereabouts of these dogs.

By then I'd passed them on. They'd gone to safe homes.

The police made a great deal of the fact that the dogs were almost certain to die

once they'd been released from the sterile conditions.

But we refused to hand the dogs back,

and it actually has now transpired that they've spent some three years at least

leading a perfectly happy and normal existence.

You tend to go out and doing a little bit.

You're leafleting or you're preaching to the few.

And then after a while you think, "What the hell? What's the point? "

You're reaching so few people, you're doing so little good, it takes so long.

You feel helpless and hopeless, and you think:

"Why should these animals suffer all the tortures that we can impose on them

just because I haven't got the guts to do anything else?"

So you think, "I could do more by smashing up that place

or putting it out of business."

Four kids, as they see it, walking in there and taking their research equipment -

I think they've been really humiliated.

Scientists at New York University say that we're stealing these animals

as if they own them as property.

How can they own these animals to torture them?

It started out with a raid by four people at NYU Hospital in Manhattan.

That netted them five laboratory animals.

It was a protest action claiming cruel treatment of the animals by the centre.

Officials are uncertain as to whether there'll be charges pressed

against the Animal Liberation Front people who raided their lab.

The stolen animals will wind up as gifts in homes selected by their abductors.

We have a cat, we have two dogs and two guinea pigs.

We took the guinea pigs because we wanted to show

that we're not just dog and cat lovers, that we care about all the animals,

and that they all have a right not to be tortured.

A society exploits other species without any regard

to the fact that they are feeling creatures with nervous systems,

this extends into our treatment of the human race.

And, beyond a doubt, one looks around and sees it everywhere on every street.

The oppression of animals

is a sort of far extension of the oppression of people,

and they can't be disconnected. This is what's so vital.

I think that a culture which is conscious of its oppression to other species

would also be conscious within its own.

People who fought against slavery were called "nigger lovers".

We're "animal lovers". They were seen as cranks

for thinking that black people should have rights, slaves should have rights.

We're looked upon as cranks because we say animals should have rights.

We're very much up against the same arguments as well.

"These humans, these black people, these slaves,

have no rights, they're not human, they're subhuman."

If you mention animal rights, you're faced with the same argument.

"They're not human, they have no rights."

I think we've struck the right sort of balance

where we are concerned not to harm life in our activities.

When we set light to a place, which we did six months ago,

we staked out the place for about four or five nights

cos we wasn't sure whether a night watchman was sleeping there or not.

In fact, there wasn't anyone there, and in the end we did burn it down.

I don't think it ever would be in the form of indiscriminate bombing,

where ordinary people who aren't involved in cruelty are going to get hurt.

It's going to be more like the sort of thing

where a cruel professor is shot on his doorstep.

I think that would be a bad thing.

I'm just saying how I can foresee what may happen if things don't change soon.

Because we don't have control over what other people do.

We've only got control over what we do as individuals.

And people are very, very angry.

(narrator) An agricultural research centre near Cambridge, England.

(shouting)

Hold that, will you?

- It's coming. Up the top. - Get the top.

It's this one, it's this one.

Be careful.

- Watch his legs on the glass. - Watch his legs.

(narrator) And this is what they came for.

Photographic evidence.

- (man) What do we want? - (crowd) Animal liberation!

- (man) When do we want it? - Now!

(chanting continues)

- (woman) What do we want? - Animal liberation!

- (woman) When do we want it? - Now!

- What do we want? - Animal liberation!

- When do we want it? - Now!

- Vivisection! - Out!

- Vivisection! - Out!

- Vivisection! - Out, out, out!

(chanting continues)

Keep in line.

(man) We are an organisation which has existed for just over a year now.

We have over 200 members in the north of England.

Our organisation is concerned with

involving as many people as possible in these raids.

That is why the invasion of the agricultural research centre

Was done in the middle of a Sunday,

at 12 o'clock on a Sunday, in the open light of day.

We're not afraid of the authorities. We'll accept what the courts dish out.

Leaders of antivivisectionist societies try to present a respectable image

so that they can somehow get compromises out of sympathetic MPs,

compromises which will lead to maybe a decline

in number of animals used in vivisection research.

But we feel that this campaigning that's continued over the last hundred years

has yielded no significant results.

We'll do four of these, like this...

One, two, three, four. OK?

Pull it back.

Four! Five!

Six! Seven!

- (man) Shout as you do it. - (all) Eight! Nine! Ten!

We're not animal lovers. We respect animals like we respect our neighbours.

We respect our neighbours, We respect their right to live.

(man #2) People are scared off animal groups cos they might face violence.

Our organisation, we ensure that no member goes into any position

Without adequate protection.

It has benefited our members a great deal. They're not as intimidated now.

One. Two.

Three. Four.

Five. Six.

Seven. Eight.

Nine. Ten.

We understand socialist groups who say to us that you can't achieve anything

under the present capitalist system.

We understand this argument.

And we feel we have got no illusions about the present system.

(man) Ten of these. One. Two.

Swing your body. Three. Four. Five.