Violated Nature
ERROR 404
April 14, 2009
It didn't take long for this astonishing documentary to disappear from the net. Twenty four hours after the link was posted on my site, it now leads to an inaccessible message.
**ARTE+7 Services was quickly reminded of its duties, the pretext being rights issues. **
Perhaps...
What I can tell you is that the images featured in this report were nauseating, barely bearable. I would say... urgent. I remember the images broadcast decades ago on "battery-farmed calves" where people protested against the fact that these animals were raised and fed in frighteningly prison-like conditions.
Found in low definition on Google :
It's true that we are omnivores, and in particular we eat meat. I am not the one who kills the chicken or bleeds the pig whose meat ends up on my plate. Moreover, the industrialization of food production has its productivity constraints. In this film, we saw machines killing cattle, industrially and mechanically. In the past, calves were brought into a room by assistants. Then one of them put a mask with a large diameter nail over the animal's head. Finally, another, wielding a mallet, drove the nail into the animal's brain, which collapsed. Then others skinned it further away. All of this has been mechanized, that's all. The rest of the manual intervention is when an employee mechanically approaches the cow or the young bull, trapped in a container, whose head is the only part visible, and shoots something into its head, a projectile or a strong electric shock. It can thus kill a thousand cattle a day, with its mind elsewhere. And what would you do in its place?
Soon, this task will be automated. An electronic eye, coupled with a program doing shape recognition, will identify the animal's head and perform the action much faster, day and night, and above all in a less costly way. In fact, all the jobs you would have seen on these images, which you would have found uncomfortable, will eventually disappear. Those and many others.
I remember, twenty years ago, a computer programmer neighbor who was developing an apple-picking machine. The scheme was the same. Shape recognition, then picking. An arm equipped with a suction cup quickly adjusted to the fruit and detached it from the tree after sucking it in. One day, a system evaluating the fruit's density in a fraction of a second using ultrasound will replace the picker's action.
This is the whole issue of our relationship with nature, with the world around us. In the end, man becomes a "battery calf" himself. Instead of killing it, we fix its head in front of a screen and perform a ridiculous decapitation on it. We give it false answers to false questions. Whatever we do, this documentary would have made people think too much, perhaps consume less, and I am not sure that only rights issues presided over its disappearance, its inaccessibility.
We shouldn't act like hypocrites, like these damned European Buddhists, who make their dietary rules those of the high plateaus there. Do you know that Tibetan Buddhists eat meat? It's normal: wheat doesn't grow well at these altitudes. They don't kill the animals. This task is assigned to Muslim butchers. Men, women, and children who die with empty stomachs would smile at seeing these images that revolt us, and rightly conclude: "Well, I would like to live in a region where you can consume what comes out of these factories!".
Moods of rich people of the planet. Exactly. If I had had the time, I would have taken some screenshots of this film, which might have survived. Unless... rights issues....
I see something strange. The page above, which only published a comment on the content of the film itself, has itself disappeared. Was it reprehensible to mention only the content of the documentary? Only the journalist from ARTE, Marion Duval, could tell us.
It's five o'clock. I have a lot of work to revise the manuscript of the book I am going to self-publish and that you will soon see announced on my site, and elsewhere. I will complete this page with a final image, stronger than that of the film, which summarizes the whole drama of our planet. I had used it to illustrate an article by Jean Ziegler, dated from a year ago. In short, this Austrian film shows only half of the things. Its counterpart would be a report on a woman in Haiti who would go buy a clay cake for ten cents of euros to feed her children and deceive their hunger.
I don't know if you've ever seen hunger up close. It happened to me once. When I was driving safaris in Kenya, the chance of charter flights made me pass through Dibouti, where I arrived during a time of famine. The streets were full of people screaming their hunger. What to do? I bought a stock of corned beef tins in a store, then distributed them in the streets. Finally, I went back to hide in my hotel, waiting for the flight that would take me to Nairobi, to retrieve my clients and take them on a 2500 km trip through the beautiful African reserves.
Lawyers have very strange jobs, which lead them to defend both the oppressed and the scoundrel, thanks to their acting skills for all roles. Journalists can also see many different things, diametrically opposed, in this vast world. The gaping differences quickly coexist for those who let themselves be guided by chance. When I was twenty, chance made it so that I could also be received at the tables of the richest and the poorest. It's the fate of the street performer, who is welcomed both in castles and in hovels. I have never forgotten what I saw.
Luxury to the point of boredom, poverty to the point of the being's agony. ---