Factory Farming / Films / Movies / Films About Diet and Food

A Cow At My Table, Feature Documentary

by Jennie Richards · Published August 10, 2016 · Updated June 15, 2017

A Cow at My Table explores the diverse perspectives on killing animals for food, featuring spokespeople from the meat industry to farmers, animal rights advocates, university professors, ethicists and moral philosophers, all who battle to influence the consumer’s mind. Director and producer Jennifer Abbott criss-crosses the globe, interviewing leaders from the animal rights movement, animal welfare advocates and representatives from livestock industries, to explore Western attitudes towards farm animals and meat, and look at what producing food more cheaply, efficiently and profitably really means. The film juxtaposes the old days of free-range animal farming with today’s modern intensive industrial factory farming and its impacts on the animals. The film shows the various techniques used by intensive animal operations to increase and improve business productivity, efficiency and profitability, but at the cost of animal wellbeing and welfare.

Critics say the film is “brilliant,” “visually smart,” “extremely accomplished” and “extraordinarily compelling and powerful.”

Quotes from the Film

“This is plainly systematized cruelty and it’s very profitable. And corporations will argue to the end—that they must do it.”

“We should think of the relationship behind the scenes between humans and animals, anytime anyone is a party to the death of an animal, it’s an exercise in human power over property, over a ‘thing.’”

“The basis of modern farming is science and technology now. It’s a reductionist science. Reductionism transforms a living system into matter, a thing, or inanimate object, they are ‘material’ – so we don’t think of animals as living, feeling beings anymore. These animals have a right to their own life, but we have taken this away from them.”

“The flesh we have on our bones, is the flesh that animals have too, and understanding that without that animal life form and without the integrity of that connection, and by not acknowledging that connection, what are we? What is the human being if they cannot see the reverence in our connection to animals, the sanctity of this, then what have we come to?”

“We are paying in many other ways, getting out of touch with the earth, hurting our environment, hurting our health, but it’s profitable to raise meat. If people knew all of the consequences of this system and these industries, they would not choose to support it.”

“We’re challenging what they’re doing. We are animal rights people, when we go to slaughterhouses, to stockyards, to factory farms, what we stand for is diametrically opposed to what these businesses stand for. When we take photos of the conditions, then people don’t want to eat the animal food when they see all the cruelty.”

“Most people assume Humane Societies will take care of the problems, people assume that laws will protect animals from cruelty if cruelty exists, but the fact is—the laws have been so weakened in order to allow the cruelty to exist.”

“Downer animals are sick and unable to stand up and cannot walk. So they cannot walk from the transit truck to the slaughterhouse. So the are forcibly removed from transport by chaining their legs and dragging them off the truck to the slaughter floor, or they drive a forklift to pick them up. There was this bull, the biggest bull I have ever seen, and with such spirit, but he couldn’t walk – so he was prodded by electric prods by four men for 45 minutes to get this big bull from the back of the truck to the front of the truck, then they prodded him to death right there in the truck because he couldn’t move.”

“Downer cows, should be humanely euthanized on the spot. But the financial aspects have driven this to move animals completely inhumanely. It is completely unacceptable. It’s all driven by money.”

“The idea of humane slaughter is an oxymoron, the two don’t go together. Even if there is humane slaughter, it still would not justify killing them. Every animal wants to live.”

“What does humane mean? We know that animals have real emotions; they have needs, feelings, and have psychological needs that must be met. The psychological well being no one has put a definition to. No one focuses on whether the animal is happy or not.”

“There are a lot of nerves going into the beak (baby chick), when we cut off chicken’s beaks we cause acute pain and chronic pain. But the livestock industry spokesperson – calls it ‘beak trimming’ to make it more palatable.”

“A key word in agribusiness is “Performance,” how the animal performs, how the animal converts feed into food. But the animal can’t choose to “perform” – they are animated into a machine.”

“We have bred and bred chickens to have specific production traits at the expense of the well being of the chicken.”

“Cattle have been bred to grow fast and large, and to be killed very young. The livestock industry is manipulating animals genetically and causing enormous problems for these animals making them suffer. ”

“The democracy of life is a very different kind of knowledge. Our relationship with animals should be a relationship of compassion, reverence and respect for the other.”

“You can remain detached only when you don’t know individual animals. When animals are not known as individuals, the cruelty becomes normalized, and their mortality rates become acceptable. Instead of looking at those individual animals who have died, they’re looking at them as production units.”

“Our culture blinds us to seeing the truth – we have social constructs that society reinforces and tries to get us to accept. If I knew a pig the way I know my dog, how could I eat it? What made it possible for me to blindly be a consumer of dead animals, was because I never thought about what it would be like to know that individual animal. If I knew them, I wouldn’t eat them. It’s really that simple.”

“Every shred of evidence that we have supports the view that they are fundamentally like us, in the sense that they are complicated psychological creatures, with an emotional life, expectations, desires, families, it’s just so rich. Darwin saw this too.”

“We know about pain, we know about fear, we know about suffering. Everything suggests that they feel all this as much as we do. It’s only the species that’s different.”

“Speciesim is like sexism, racism – it’s another “ism” that puts something above or below, someone is deemed to have more value or less value, one is superior and one is inferior. It’s personal prejudice and bias and ego, and not correct.”

“The arguments are in place, they are there, they are persuasive, the rights extend to all other animals. We’re not the same, but we’re equal. It’s not a principle of “factual” quality, but rather “moral” quality. Non-human animals have interests too, just like humans, and that needs to be considered.”

“This whole animal rights concern is trivialized and ridiculed, to keep animal rights out of the animal eating discussion. It’s never regarded as a serious subject and of course they (industry) never have to deal with it, do they? The larger society uses this to keep from addressing this subject of using animals for our pleasure, and not recognizing the animal’s rights, the animal’s interests, their needs, their value as individual living beings. We’re marginalized, we’re ridiculed, we’re reduced, vegans are made fun of because they are forcing the questions, the re-thinking, the discomfort with our killing and eating animals when looked at more closely.”

“The difficulty has been the social issue. How do we interact with this immense issue of eating animals? We have a big commitment in our culture to maximizing pleasure, and suddenly vegans come along and confront that principle of pleasure through killing animals. My response is that pleasure is the result of privilege, what you see as pleasure is the result of someone else’s harm.”

“The factory farms of affluent countries are taking the grain away that could feed poorer countries. It’s come to animals in rich countries vs. feeding the poor around the world. That notion of cheap meat is actually a very costly way to produce food.”

“That notion of cheap meat and food is about externalizing the costs.”

“In general, no animal producer makes changes to improve the welfare of the animal, unless they make more money doing it. They are not motivated and will not do it for the animal. It is purely economically driven.”

“Part of what’s at stake here with the dairy and meat industry – is power, wealth and property. And anything that threatens that, the power will try to prevent it and threaten them.”

“The animals raised for food, they had their biography ended. They had a life story, but we terminated their life story. We ended it. They never had a full life.”

“The slaughter plants don’t have an understanding of animal rights or animal welfare. Activists are a threat to revealing the truth and their existence.”

“The criminal thing is what’s happening to the cows that are sick and dying at slaughterhouses, and left to die outside.“