Hacker Cinema
Dominion
2018 · Film · documentary · 120 min
Directed by Chris Delforce
Exposing the dark underbelly of modern animal agriculture through drones, hidden & handheld cameras, the feature-length film explores the morality and validity of our dominion over the animal kingdom.
14 positive1 negativefrom 15 commenters
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27 comments on Hacker News
I don't think people are kept abreast of the realities of animal farming in general.
Cows simply produce milk like chickens lay eggs.
Consider how imagery of a farmer inseminating a cow with his arm disappearing up some tract or fitting a spike to the baby so it can't drink its mom's milk -- or farm conditions in general -- are basically shock footage that people are insulated from until they maybe chance upon a movie like Dominion.
I'd wager most people actually do inconveniently hold some vegan ethics, but there's a blind spot due to tradition, culture, and habit.
For example, most people have some sheepishly held position against factory farming despite partaking in it. And they think it's wrong to kick a dog and a pig and a cow. And watching a documentary like Dominion or Earthlings makes them feel horrible so they'd prefer not to watch it.
>They should be nicer to them when they kill them ... /s
An example (from Dominion) is how they typically asphyxiate cattle immediately before slaughter: using carbon monoxide (when nitrogen would be far less painful/cruel, but costs a few ¢¢¢¢ more).
I fell asleep watching this movie during that scene, and it led to horrific limbic states.
--
Of course I still consume animal products, but watching that film entirely ended swine for me (and greatly reduced my overall meat consumption).
Finally sitting through a quarter of the movie Dominion at age 30 is what helped me confront the blind eye I was turning towards animals and take action.
And that's just after a talk about the environmental impact.
Next they should watch a documentary like Earthlings or Dominion that challenge them on an ethical level.
> We take puppies and kittens from their mothers. Is that cruel?
We have laws that prevent us from taking too young puppies and kittens from their mothers, in Europe at least.
> We spade and neuter them as well, is that cruel?
We use anesthetics for that ... animal agriculture doesn't. E.g. chick beak trimming, chick culling, piglet tail trimming, piglet tooth clipping, skinning alive ... I could go on for a long time (see the Dominion movie if you don't believe me).
You cannot really compare lives of our pets with lives of our farm animals.
> Is it kind to forgo neutering pets in the name of allowing them to breed unfettered?
No, because we tend to have carnivores for pets ... and that's incredibly stupid. They already consume 25% of our meat production (IIRC). Having more of them is cruel ... to the wildlife which habitats that destroys.
> cruel to cull part of a herd of dear when the alternative is a slow wasting death or winter starvation
That's a problem with our forestry practices ... we eliminate predators, destroy natural habitats and then pretend our actions are necessary (and enjoy a wild game in process).
> Is it kind to release hundreds of mink into the wild to die a lingering death from starvation?
No ... better to not breed them at all. Why breed new ones to perpetuity in small cages, and kill new generations again and again?
> Where do you imagine beef bulls living out their lives in a happy and good existence?
Eat plantbased, grow cauliflower, beans and rice. Problem solved.
Even taking calves from their mothers is cruel - on dairy farms I mean, on beef farms they're being kept with their mothers. Some cows will loudly grieve for weeks, some will try to hide their calves from the farmer.
And then there's the question of killing. If you haven't seen how it goes, may I suggest movie Dominion? It's not usually as painless/stress-free as we'd like to believe.
https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34541077
"You could say that if you kill a cow you're depriving it of the rest of its existence, which could also have been a happy, good existence, so why deprive it of that just because you want to eat some meat when you've got other healthy, nutritious, delicious things that you could also eat?
Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University
"You don't have to think about humans in exactly the same way that you think about cows. But you've got to explain why you think it's permissible to do to an animal what you think it would be impermissible to do to a human being. In the case of people their suffering matters, but their happiness also matters. The same should be true in the case of animals.
Jeff MacMahan, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford
> One that presupposes that eating meat requires cruelty
We don't have to presuppose anything ... it's not possible otherwise.
Have you watched at least 15min of the linked documentary? I am asking because I actually chose my language deliberately. I might be ignorant about extremely atrocious evils that happened on a large scale over the last 22 years, but at least to my knowledge and my subjective feeling, the systemic animal torture that is inflicted unto many millions of intelligent beings every day as shown in the documentary Dominion is the worst.
But I don't need people to share my opinion, you are right in that this is an important topic for me. What I just would like to happen is that people realize that eating animal products is evil enough to change their diet.
Watch the movie Dominion if you’re interested in having your eyes opened as to just how cruel and gruesome factory farming is. Whatever you think is going on, it’s almost certainly orders of magnitude worse than you can imagine. The sheer scale of it boggles the mind.
Understand your points of view. I too ate meat for a long time. I too defended that position with same ferocity you do. But I was wrong to do it.
And you're wrong on too many points to discuss it at full - sorry, no space here, also have family to feed and work to do. My bookmarks folder about dangers of animal products/agriculture has hundreds of items. I'll cherrypick just few of them to get you started.
You'll find several of your viewpoints discussed here:
https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en
Want to learn more? (pun intended)
Movies:
- I'd recommend Dominion movie again, but you won't probably see it, and even if you do, i don't think the suffering of animals/horrors of the meat production will be enough to change your opinions, so I'll talk about it from different angle.
- Cowspiracy
- Seaspiracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7JE8j5Ncmw - This man makes you think
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI - Dairy is scary
Health:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNY7xKyGCQ - Dr. Michael Greger | How Not To Die
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnHYHjchn6w - Foods for Protecting the Body & Mind: Dr. Neal Barnard
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/whatthehealth - What the Health! (2017)
Impacts on biodiversity / climate change:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/30/us-food-production-climate-crisis-meat-monopoly-farming
https://www.salon.com/2022/11/11/the-meat-industry-is-borrowing-tactics-from-big-oil-to-obfuscate-the-truth-about-climate-change/
OK, I'll react to few of your points.
> "never personally eat meat strikes me as a bit of a neurotic, narcissistic response"
So avoiding killing is a neurotic, narcissistic response? Like, really?
> "to avoid ice cream to spare dairy cows who are clearly, if you meet them, quite happy with their jobs"
Are you sure? I've met a lot of them, when i was a child. You know that cows giving milk are mothers, forcefully impregnated/raped every year, with their calf taken from them on the day it's born? They loudly grieve for days/weeks, sometimes hiding the calf from the farmer only to be taken away from them days later? Do you know that producing milk on industrial scale shortens lifespan of cows to cca 1/3 (5-6 years instead of 20+), only to leave the cow exhausted/crippled and killed (changed into burgers) in the end?
Why we drink cow milk? Why not rat milk, giraffe milk, dog milk, human milk ... why it has to be cow milk? Why are cca 50-70% of people milk intolerant? Do you know about pus in the milk? About linked diseases like parkinsons and other autoimmune diseases linked to milk? That cow eating grass near industrial factory will eat more pollutants in a day than somebody living near breathing air for 14 years? About bioaccumulation of toxins in the milk/meat? About all proteins/b12 coming from plants/bacteria, not from the animals?
> And your next point - war.
You're clearly an american. Your country is the only country in the world being involved in wars constantly for 250+ years, achieving so little for so high a price. Your viewpoints mirror the indocrination you've received. It does not reflect reality either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involving_the_United_States
I could go on and on, have to go, leaving you to it, sorry.
TLDR. If you're like me, replace cow with slave and then read it again. It makes sense.
To Dove: if it's unnecessary to eat the animals, then their slaughter is cruel. See the movie Dominion to see why even "full & happy life" may may nothing compared to their final days.
... get's calmed down ... skillfully shoots ... it literally falls to the ground ...
This is a theory. You need to see movie Dominion [0] to see the reality.
[0] https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch
Admittedly I only skimmed through through it, but it looks like yet another vegan documentary (e.g. Dominion, which I watched all the way through and wasn't convinced at all by) where the worst examples of the worst excesses of industrialized slaughter are taken in the worst possible light and suggested to be broadly representative of the whole. Honestly, anybody with basically any exposure to real-life animal husbandry can find issues in these sorts of documentaries with minimal effort. For myself, I'm a hunter and so I regularly kill and butcher wild animals literally as a hobby -- despite this (or maybe because of it), I'm actually quite open to criticizing the ethics of intensive livestock farms as long as it's not through the lens of "meat is murder".
I wish there was a halfway decent documentary that took a more balanced approach, because if your goal is "better animal welfare" rather than "the abolition of meat eating on moral grounds" then there's actually a lot to criticize and improve on. e.g. I thought "Food Inc" was a lot more even-handed, even though it still fell into some of the usual traps.
As a young boy I too was taught how to kill rabbits and poultry by my grandparents.
As a city boy I was chasing my screaming village nephews with a rabbit eye all over the grounds.
I've spent few summers around cowhouse and young calfs, "helping" my aunt take care of them.
I've killed and cleaned few fish for christmas.
The animals I watched killed were living good life and there was no suffering at the end.
So I always had an image in my mind of animals living in green fields, and then miraculously and humanly killed in an instant.
But I've never been around slaughterhouse or in a highly industrialized meat production facility. Even now many people in cities don't know where milk comes from (yes, they know it's from cows, but they don't know that you have to artificially inseminate the cow and take away the calves, and they never heard them crying for days).
The amount of suffering, brutality and aggression of slaughterhouse staff, the supposedly human ways of killing our food, the long, painful and stressful process of killing, the amount of screaming of distressed animals, skinning of alive animals - documented in the Dominion (2018) movie - I was not prepared for that.
But that's not what made me vegan. I've seen it long after I've become vegan.
I'm not advocating for soylent (soylent green is people, anyhow).
But it is an argument for changing our practices, because it shows that propaganda of meat industry (happy cows & meals in burger joints, pictures of cows grazing in the fields on supermarket shelves, etc.) is just a big lie. And that we simply don't know how to kill painlessly.
Few quotes:
If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life. [Howard Lyman]
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. [Paul McCartney]
Those who purchase meat, fur, and leather have no right to be shielded from the sights and sounds of the slaughterhouses from which these products were produced. [Peter Singer]
> until we have tens of billions of humans
We don't even have enough room to supplement the current population on western version of meat-eating diet. We already use more land for beef production, than we have forests.
> until we have tens of billions of humans
Agree, we have to abandon our current notions of growth, if we want to preserve life for future generations. On our current path we're going to hell (too many things to enumerate here).
> a high quality of life for a reasonable number of people
Plant-based diet means a higher quality of life for everyone - people, animals, wildlife.
I for one would rather have more forests, than beef burger packaged in plastic.
If you think that we handle animals humanly, please see Dominion (2018) movie [https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch]. If you can watch it till the end and still have the same opinion about putting meat above your taste buds, please, let me know. You'd be the first.
If you want to help the planet (for your children/grandchildren), start reading about stuff. Meat/dairy industry, agriculture, forests, dying sea, poisons everywhere and in everything, plastics, flora/fauna extinction, ...
Become vegan and limit your consumption & air travel to the minimum.
See movie Cowspiracy, Seaspiracy, Racing Extinction (2015), Dominion (2018) ...
See how good guardians / governors / stewards we really are.
Then weep because (almost) nobody cares. People don't even care to learn more about the problems we're facing. Everybody is just parroting the (billionaries' owned) TV lies.
This is probably me not being able to “read the room” but this study both makes me very happy and very sad.
I recently watched Dominion documentary [1] and the more we learn about animals cognition the more I feel the weight of their massive abuse especially in the last 150 years. (The recent story of an HNer interacting with a spider on his desk was really cool though, I don’t have a link anymore.)
Without judging anyone or their behavior in particular I just feel repelled by our treatment of other clearly cognitive beings. The people working these places don’t seem like ones you would want around anyone in society either and I don’t buy the story that it’s only bad in some places. I’d wager that it’s really bad in most cases.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
This documentary is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko (Dominion, released in 2018, unfortunately requires signing into youtube due to age retrictions)
Human evolution is poorly understood, and the assumption that any choice $X supposedly made by early humans led to our forefathers’ anamolously rapid brain development is flatly speculative.
> Unlike most great apes today, whose diet is primarily plant based, we can thank the incredible nutrient density in meat and our incredible hunting and tool creating ability for prefrontal cortex development.
Complete and utter speculation.
> We were pack hunters, forging tools and strategies capable of taking down mammoths. Call it 'diabolicaly evil' if you want, but this is simply nature and survival.
Subsistence hunting amongst early human tribes is not comparable to modern day factory farming in any conceivable way.
B12 doesn’t come from eating plants OR animals: it comes from bacteria, and ironically that bacteria is in such short supply on factory farms that the animals need to be injected with synthetic B12.
> I don't personally believe highly processed plant alternatives such as Beyond meat are a long term option if you're even vaguely interested in your own health.
I eat raw soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. I’d recommend watching the documentary Forks Over Knives [1] if you care about your personal health, and the documentary Dominion [2], if you’d like to see what really happens on factory farms.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtnlwqEii2I
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
If we need less crop produce (because we dont need to feed the live stock) then the crop produce related pollution will decrease by the same factor, right?
No also consider all the pollution from the live stock (which is huge! see the documentary Cowspiracy or Dominion for details).
A lot of pollution come directly or indirectly from animal produce. I count CO2, NOx, phosphor, methane, water use/pollution/acidification, land use/pollution/acidification. It's said that it is one of the most polluting industries, up there with transport and residential heating/cooling.
> A few of the brighter bulbs in sustainable agriculture treat their animals more like you might an intern.
> Except for the whole bad day at the end.
It's about animal exploitation as a whole. Any commoditization of sentient beings is a bad thing. We don't need to, when it comes to a choice (especially in this forum), we can choose to not be a part of that system.
> Most of these fad diet folks have this stuff all wrong. We didn't eat all fruits and nuts. We didn't eat all meat. We ate a steady diet of opportunistic foods, and meat was a supplement to our nutrition.
Stopping exploitation isn't a diet fad. Some people might confuse it though. We don't need to be opportunistic now.
> To be a vegan requires you to use a global supply system for your food, which has its own carbon footprint problems.
Sure, and we can do better on many fronts. But animal exploitation is one of the main contributors to climate change. We're already using a global supply chain for animals, which includes all the growth of food in other countries to ship to them.
> It has been asserted, sometimes as a throwaway line, in a number of historical documentaries I've seen, that part of structural classism in the middle ages was denying meat to the working class, leading to developmental delays. Malnutrition made them dumber. Easier to control. 'Course, they gave themselves gout in the process...
Historically what we have done should not impact our current ability of choices. We can live on a healthy vegan diet. Structural classism also includes the current worker in the meat industry. https://www.livekindly.co/slaughterhouse-workers-victims-meat-industry/
In terms of malnutrition people can live on a healthy diet while vegan.
https://www.bda.uk.com/resource/british-dietetic-association-confirms-well-planned-vegan-diets-can-support-healthy-living-in-people-of-all-ages.html
There's a lot of information here https://www.cowspiracy.com/facts
There are plenty of videos explaining stuff about exploitation. Dominion is free on youtube. In terms of youtubers Earthling Ed is a good watch.
Most importantly, it's easy and one of the single most impactful decisions we can individually make on a daily basis
The documentaries "Our daily bread" and "Dominion" (you can watch them for free on YouTube) can persuade most people to change their mind, at least for a month.
I used to hold the same opinion as you but I realized it was out of a strong desire to be an affable peacemaker for something that is essentially concentration camps for animals. I have resisted any attempt to be vegan for years and years despite mounting evidence of the mind-boggling level of cruelty that goes on at factory farms. I just don't think we can afford to blissfully ignore it at this point. If a meat-eater can sit through the film Dominion and not change their mind... Man, I just don't know what to say. I feel like I can only afford to be affable to those meat-eaters truly ignorant at this point.
How happy are these animals in the documentary, Dominion?
https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=984
Your post presents a nice rainbows and sunshine guess at how the animal ag industry works, and I really wish it worked like that, too.
There is a documentary called Dominion which might be interesting to you:
https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch
Warning: it's quite shocking / bloody.
> Animals are killed quickly and painlessly for meat.
I've watched enough undercover video of factory farms to know that is at least not true 100% of the time. Killing is also not the only possible moment for suffering, for example with gestation crates, battery cages, merely moving livestock around with electric prods and pokers, etc... Treating animals humanely costs money, and in a capitalist system there is always pressure to reduce costs.
A recent documentary came out called Dominion which is about the most comprehensive criticism of factory farm conditions I have seen. It's almost entirely composed of undercover video. You can actually watch the whole thing online:
https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch
I sort of hate linking that, because it feels like diet-shilling, but the reason I do so is really pretty basic: I think there is a misconception and that there is video evidence that I think would correct that misconception. I could write everything out, but I think actually seeing the video is more effective. You don't have to commit to watching all of it, just watch a random 10-15 minutes.
There are a lot of documentaries (Earthlings, Dominion) or books (Eating Animals, Fast Food Nation) on animal agriculture that would give you a better counterpoint to #1 than I will in this comment. Or just Google image search "factory farm", "battery cage", "gestation crate".
If #2 justified animal agriculture it could also be used to justify human slavery, provided you intentionally bred humans for that purpose.