A Non-Vegan Fella With Empathy Issues Watches “Earthlings”

While back I somewhat impulsively decided to watch Dominion. I say it was impulsively because I did it during a pretty boring online class during which I literally had nothing else to do, so I figured I'd seize the moment. But I also say it was somewhat impulsively because I had a vegan youtuber tell me to watch it, and that if I were to do so and write something about it he would be glad to read it. He ain't read it, or at least he ain't responded to it, but it don't matter because I still feel it was worth it to have written what I wrote. Either way, recently I decided to impulsively watch Earthlings, and while I didn't write any notes during, and while I'm not too sure what to write now, I figured I'd write something. At the very least it makes for some symmetry, with the two essays being posted side by side, though written quite a ways apart. So here I go, improvising, because of one particular image that won't so easily leave my mind.

Last time around I went with a picture of Tony Soprano slightly nauseated as he gazed at a plate of food. In the context of the episode he was looking at a fancy quail dish that he ended up eating anyway. Incidentally, Tony is the classic type of non-vegan person, one who has a genuine concern for animals, often more so than for people, and yet his eating habits not only do not reflect it, but don't even seem to be at all reconsidered. At the end of the day I think everyone is a little bit like that, not just regarding animals but regarding anything at all. We all have our moral concerns and our moral blind spots, and that's what makes morality so tricky, it's what makes every single person fall way, way short of moral goodness. The main question then is, at least for me, just how expedient is it to even care about our moral blind spots? If the endgame is all the same, then isn't it better to just not care? To simply kill your own empathy and carry on with your life? Seems to me that vegans are up against it, and if morality isn't all that, or at the very least if you can get away with things with complete impunity, then why even bother?

Still, we carry on a bit further, and this time here I figured I'd remember the monkeys. Indeed that was the main part, or perhaps the only part, of the documentary that moved me a little. Maybe because they look a bit like cats, or then again they look a bit human, like human kids, staring at the scientists with a confused expression, something that says, this hurts like hell, I don't like this, but I dunno, maybe it's for a purpose, maybe it's for my own good... It's all in the eyes, I suppose, when they look up from one face to another, when they blink, it's all very sad, very human. I say that, but truth be told, a grown human in an unkind situation would be easier to stomach, we can just assume he must have done something, or if he didn't then he was no innocent anyway. But the monkey's eyes, the fear, it does make me feel sorry, it does stick with me, it does haunt me a little bit. I think that's the main thing for me, that empathy doesn't always strike me strong and swift, it instead does so with a much more delayed effect, hitting hard after days, weeks, months, at times even years. This one is just of a few days, now as I remember the documentary and write about it, even skim through some of the frames. In that sense I'm even less organized and methodical than I was with the previous essay, more on an improvisation swing, remembering the monkeys...

The moral upside to all this is that the bits that most upset me about these documentaries are the ones that I and most people are already fairly against, such as animal testing, military testing, and entertainment. Definitely not nice to watch people abuse elephants, the main one in this documentary being called Becky, as I now recall. That might serve to draw a bit more pity, but regardless I always have a bit of a preference for elephants over some other animals. Dogs too of course, as I now remember the dog thrown into the back of a garbage truck. Still, as cruel as it is, I don't sign up for anything of the sort. If I were to witness it I'd try to stop it, assuming I'm a hero, which I ain't. And if I were given a piece of paper on which to jot down my name as support to stop animal testing I might just do so. Why should monkeys have their heads snapped in a metal helmet to study the impacts of car crashes and football injuries? Wouldn't it be better to study the brains of people who already underwent such an injury? And wouldn't football players and other athletes already know the risks of their profession? Not much empathy for them, as far as I'm concerned, no, not from me. They can all go suck a lemon.

Then again it might not be wise to have a whole lot of empathy for anything you see within the four limits of your computer screen. The documentary also shows bullfighting, which can be quite cruel indeed, as well as unfair for the bull, assuming there's still any serious pretense of it being a legitimate sport. Incidentally, as far as that goes, I'll share two strange episodes that may delight some vegans, or indeed non-vegans, or maybe just weird ol' me.

First one was an instance that made me realize why apparently the bull's horns are sometimes sanded down before a show. Saw this clip once of the running of the bull, lots of people watching from the stands, and a few others dancing around trying to evade the beast. This one fella was charged and thrown up into the air quite a ways, then spun like a windmill until he crashed with the back of his head full on the pavement. He may have died right then and there, but just to be sure the bull proceeded to gore him and happened to dig his horn into the man's jaw, somewhere between the neck and the ear. As the bull then jerked him around, the man damn nearly lost his head. People on the stands screamed and shrieked, they threw whatever they had at the beast, I think peanuts, and tipped their beers over his body, showering him in glory like they would a gladiator.

The other episode was quite recently. A cheating bull-rider flashes onto the scene, the bull thrashing and bucking like crazy while the man was obviously fixed in place. In this case it was a horrible idea because after a little while you can just imagine the discomfort it was for the man to be jerked around repeatedly, his legs glued tight while his brain sloshed around in his skull. After a while the bull got tired and fell down, seemingly on top of the man though the camera angle somewhat obscured it. When the other riders rushed to help, the bull immediately stood up, once again running and thrashing, with the rider still attached to him, but this time all of his body collapsed, like a puppet, as the fall presumably broke his spine. Poor bastard looked like Woody whenever Andy comes around.

It is what it is, as it is often said, and as I already decided I'll say at the end of this essay. No empathy either way. Nothing I can do for the man, nothing I can do for the bull, nothing I can do for the monkey, not nothing I or anyone can do for anyone. That's my pessimism, though I'm sure vegans disagree, something can be done going forward. But what's already done is done, that much they must agree with, can't take away the suffering that's already been suffered. And on that note I guess one might as well continue, we might as well assume every creature plays a role, and animals play theirs in these violent ways. Matter of fact, just the other day I was reading Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy when I happened to find this,

Whatever pains and inconveniences we suffer, Chrysippus maintained, the world exists for the sake of human beings. The gods made us for our own and each other’s sakes, and animals for our sakes. Horses help us in war, and dogs in hunting, while bears and lions give us opportunities for courage. Other animals are there to feed us: the purpose of the pig is to produce pork. Some creatures exist simply so that we can admire their beauty: the peacock, for instance, was created for the sake of his tail.

It don't sound all that great, and indeed some other ancient philosophers like Pythagoras and Empedocles went against consumption of animals, at least land ones, I think. But Chrysippus was a stoic, and for that reason you may see him embody the aforementioned it-is-what-it-is mentality. I don't know, maybe the only reason I thought of this was because I compared the ravaging bull to a gladiator, and so I went droning on and on until I got here. My saving grace remains the same, that the most shocking aspects of these documentaries seem related to bits of animal cruelty that aren't all that supported to begin with. No one rightly supports those things, and if they do, they do it unknowingly. I for one have no bleeding clue how many of my purchases have directly benefited from animal testing. Probably a few but I legitimately don't know, I can claim a bit of ignorance in that regard. And in the spots where I can't claim ignorance, I confess I still don't quite see the great moral offense in the action itself. To kill an animal quick and easy for food shouldn't be the problem, I for one don't see it. The problem is the sheer brutality of the treatment, which is seemingly bordering on insanity. I mean, when Joaquin Phoenix complains about the lack of anesthesia or the dulling of the blades, then you know there's a bigger problem all over.

Having said that, my skeptical mind wanders a bit. To be honest I'm not no fan of documentaries, I think it's very easy to weave the narrative you want and gradually make it stronger and stronger until the closing credits swoop in. At least I advise people to once in a while watch a documentary on something they know a little bit about, I'm sure you'll find a ton of aspects you might call misleading or outright lies. As for this one I'm not too sure. It seems a little off to say it's industry practice on every single level because even on a strictly business point of view it doesn't pay to have sickly animals with open sores and abscesses all over their bodies. Then again, I don't think the images are manipulated, and certainly not for the year it was made. But it could be that the images are a bit of a rarity, or just the absolute worst of the worst of the worst. And what if, just thinking out loud here, the images of the monkeys are actually of vets trying to help them? Might could be, at least I like to think so.

Well, those images can't be, and though I wasn't intending on it at first, during the writing of this thing I decided to screenshot a few extra moments, with the intention of spreading them throughout this page, for the sake of posterity and remembrance. I'm not so sure I need it, because while strong emotions aren't my strong suit, I'm inclined to think I have a pretty strong memory. Things are liable to stick with me, even though I aim to forget them, and even though at times they don't bother me as much, at least not as much as they initially seem to bother other people. Watching Earthlings this week was precisely that, starting it up impulsively, knowing exactly what to expect, occasionally even noticing some footage that is also featured in Dominion, such as the fox being skinned alive, or at least I think it was a fox, and even at that I was doing fairly well. But then it was the damn monkeys, so unexpected, I never figured I would feel sorry for them, but their eyes stuck to me and now always will.

For now I'll go through those key scenes one last time, just so I could get three screenshots that at the time of writing I don't yet have. Rest assured I'll get them, I'll close the video player, I'll delete the documentary from my desktop, and I'll never worry about it again, at least not enough to do anything about it. Still, I don't mean with this to denigrate veganism as such, though I'm not a huge fan of vegans themselves. With this I just mean to reluctantly defend the pessimism inherent in most of my thinking, namely that the only correct way to live in this world is to train yourself to simply not care, to not give a damn, to smile and always smile.

A fallen world belongs to the sociopaths. It is what it is.