I was looking forward to some good laughs at the movies when
my husband bought us tickets to see “The Other Woman,” starring Cameron Diaz
and Leslie Mann. We expected going in that it was going to be a light-hearted,
romantic romp with not too much substance, but generous with the pratfalls,
idiotic situations, and cleverly funny dialogue.
What we didn’t expect was the irreverence and disregard the
filmmakers had for farm animals who are turned into the meat on our plates,
especially pigs who unfortunately are eaten by the billions every day by
billions of people who insist on eating bacon for breakfast and barbecued ribs
for dinner.
Already in the first key scene of the movie, the wife
character chides the husband character on his preference for “real” bacon. She
tries to get him to switch to turkey bacon since she claims (falsely…I might
add) that it is healthier. When he replies in disdain at her suggestion, she caves
in and agrees that pig bacon is the only kind of bacon “real” men eat.
I was fuming by the time this scene ended and frankly, while
the rest of the movie had some funny moments, I found it hard to really enjoy the
humor knowing that the writers, producers and directors found pig bacon to be
funny.
Maybe they ought to go check out a pig slaughterhouse from
which all pig bacon comes from and see if they still think it is so funny.
It’s bad enough that consumers eat meat. Few meat eaters who go to the supermarket,
KFC, Burger King, McDonalds or any other fast food outlet or restaurant ever
contemplate the toll the meat industry places on the environment to grow and
process those animals, not to mention the runoff and sewage of the billions of
gallons of blood, guts, poop, vomit and other secretions that come out of the
animals prior to slaughter and after slaughter. Nor do they imagine the
suffering and pain of the animals’ dismal lives who live less than a year in squalid
conditions with nothing to do but eat and poop. To hold such disdain and disregard for what
the environment must endure to produce meat and then to make light of the
suffering and slaughter of a living, sentient creature is unconscionable.
I understand there are meat eaters who are very aware of the
meat production process and who have witnessed
the slaughter of these creatures. There are hunters who kill their own meat.
There are people who work within the meat industry that confront the conditions
daily. While they see the ugliness of the business, they see it as a necessary
process for feeding the world. But, few of these people take the process
lightly. I haven’t come across anyone in the business who finds slaughtering
pleasant. Even those workers who inflict torture and inhumane acts on the
animals are acting out their own dissatisfaction and cognitive dissonance from
the sordid act of slaughter. That doesn’t excuse them from the acts, of course,
but it does reflect how absolutely dehumanizing the whole process is.
I will never condone meat eating myself. But I at least can
hold a modicum of respect for those meat eaters who understand, witness and
take part in the process of placing that meat on their plate. What I can never
understand are those people who eat meat readily but refuse to face the
atrocities of the animal farm industry, and hide behind their skirts aghast at
anyone talking about slaughter or showing them slaughter in action. If you can’t,
won’t or even contemplate killing an animal, you have no business eating it.
And I can almost guarantee you that the “beautiful” people
in the movie “The Other Woman,” don’t know the first thing about meat…and
therefore should not be eating it, much less making fun of it.
People who eat meat have a responsibility to know where that
meat comes from and what goes into getting that meat onto the dinner table.
Being an “animal” lover and being environmentally conscious absolutely requires
building a base of knowledge of the meat industry. Anything less than knowing
what goes on in the meat industry is just empty words. Meat eaters who
disregard where meat comes from may be pet lovers but they absolutely cannot be
called animal lovers. They may recycle their trash and drive a prius but they
will never be environmentally conscious until they sign up to reduce the demand
on meat.
Filmmakers and other mass media marketers owe it to the
public to ensure that a true message of what goes into processing meat is
reported. They can do it with comedy, they can do it entertainingly, they can
do it dramatically, but they shouldn’t enforce the already imbedded attitudes
that our meat-heavy society overwhelmingly feels—that of carelessness and irresponsibility.
