"...humans who have power exploit those who lack it....Might the same be true of how humans treat other animals, or other earthlings" (720).

This block of narration is accompanied by a video of a worker dropping a cinder block on top of a downed pig's head. That image was the first of many that truly shocked me throughout Earthlings. Killing another animal in such a way seems unbelievably savage, but it serves as a reminder of the harm humans are capable of committing.

How would you feel if the last thing you ever saw was a block crushing your face?

"So beneath the many differences, there is sameness. Like us, these animals embody the mystery and wonder of consciousness. Like us, they are not only in the world, they are aware of it. Like us they are the psychological centers of a life that is uniquely their own" (720).

Hearing these words, I got an eerie sense of the uniqueness of animals' varying behaviors for the first time ever. It's kind of hard to explain what I felt in words, but seeing images of penguins huddling together and beluga whales swimming made me think about how wonderful it is that there are other forms of consciousness out there besides our own.

"This is followed by a slaughterhouse scene, wherein a worker applies the captive bolt gun to three pigs, who all squeal and crumble to the floor" (721).

If the captive bolt gun is supposed to immediately render the animals unconscious, then why do they scream and squirm about for several seconds after being shot?

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals...[Instead] We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear" (722).

I thought about our spirit animals and the traits they embody when I heard this. Indeed, (in my case) viewing an armadillo as a sort of sacred, mysterious totem instead of a desert rodent makes its life and consciousness that much more valuable in the eyes of a human. It is through this lens that we should strive to view all animals--not as lesser beings, but as equals.

This little guy is more than just an animal--he is a sentient being with feelings similar to our own.

"Euthanasia, generally defined as the act of killing painlessly for reasons of mercy, is usually administered by an injection in the leg for dogs, and sometimes in the stomach for cats" (723).

Seeing the speed at which animals go limp after being injected left me feeling heartbroken. My family had to put down one of our cats several years ago, an event that I fortunately didn't witness. If I had seen how quickly Tim's life left his body, I would've been much more upset over his passing.

This isn't Tim, but it might as well be. My family had to put him down after he developed leukemia. 

"In a gas chamber, animals are packed very tightly and can take as long as 20 minutes to die. It is, by far, less merciful, more traumatic and painful. But the procedure is less expensive" (724).

There's a film, Conspiracy, that dramatizes the conference at which the Nazi leadership brainstormed the most effective way to implement the "Final Solution" (the killing of every Jew). In it, several scientists and SS officers casually talk about the effectiveness of gas chambers. Their graphic descriptions of the process by which gas kills people is haunting and revolting--the victims' bodies turn bright pink and swell up. Every time I hear about gas chambers, I think about how horrible it must be to suffer through such a death.

Human claw marks from inside an Auschwitz gas chamber. Imagine what the inside of a gas chamber used to kill dogs, cats, or other clawed animals must look like.

"Continued footage of domestic pets being gassed, poisoned, shot, and in one case, thrown into the trash compacter of a garbage truck" (724).

The images of a dog frothing at the mouth and twitching because it consumed cyanide and another being "thrown into the trash compacter of a garbage truck" made my blood curdle.

"The hope for the animals of tomorrow is to be found in a Human Culture which learns to feel beyond itself. We must learn empathy, we must learn to see into the eyes of an animal and feel that their life has value because they are alive" (724).

Amen.

"Dehorning usually follows. Never with anesthetic. But rather a large pair of pliers" (726).

I can't even begin to imagine the pain of the dehorning process. The amount of blood that spurts from recently clipped horns is absurd.

Horrible.

"The inversion process causes cattle to aspirate blood, or breath it in, after incision. Ripping the trachea and esophagi from their throats is another egregious violation, since kosher animals are not to be touched...until bleeding stops. And by dumping struggling and dying steers through metal chutes onto blood soaked floors, with their breathing tubes and gullets dangling out, this "sacred task" is neither clean or compassionate" (728).

The cold, metallic nature by which kosher slaughter is accomplished was shocking to me. Everything about it is horribly inhumane, and seeing the steer choke on the gushing blood from its slit neck and its esophagus flapping around disgusted me.

This is far from a clean, ritualistic death.

There were many other parts of Earthlings that shocked me, especially the portion on pigs. Seeing the bloated ulcers that were sprouting up all over their bodies really made me rethink my consumption of bacon. And the statistic that sows will "manufacture between 50,000 and 600,000 pigs a year...each" made my jaw drop. The fact that they sit in dark pits bathing in waste and cannibalize each other horrified me. I honestly don't think I'm going to eat any type of pig-based meat for a while.

"One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the boy, he asked, 'What are you doing?' The youth replied, 'Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them back, they'll die.' 'Son,' the man said, 'don't you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can't make a difference!' After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said...'I made a difference for that one'" (751).

I loved this story because it reminded me of our day at the shelter. Though there are thousands, maybe even millions of dogs suffering without a home, I know that I made a difference by walking and playing with Jaws and Shilo yesterday. They're but two of many, but at least that's two fewer animals suffering in our world.