Facing Animals, An Animal’s Eye-View Perspective of Their Life

by Jennie Richards · Published October 5, 2018 · Updated October 19, 2018

Facing Animals is a powerful photographic short film (30 minutes) that takes the viewer on a visual and emotional roller-coaster ride from the eye-view perspective of the animal. The film explores how humans treat animals differently, from dogs to pigs, cows to chickens, and the routine cruelty and abuse meted out to certain animals we eat or conduct research on, in contrast to the compassion and affection we shower on other animals we consider our pets.

From the animal’s eye-view we watch their own personal experiences – as a newborn chick is hatching, as baby chicks are tossed onto conveyor belts and are sexed then thrown into maceration machines killing them, we watch pigs in medical research being operated on without anesthesia, we see newborn baby calves taking their first fragile steps as they are removed from their mothers and forced into veal crates, we watch hens being painfully de-beaked, female pigs biting at the grates in front of them as they express their psychosis from their severe confinement, piglets screaming as their tails are routinely cut off without anesthesia, and dogs being pampered and blessed in a church. These are just some of the myriad images that express how we treat animals today. The contrast is stark, how some we lavish with love, and others we ignore, don’t see, don’t think about, and abuse – because we eat them or conduct research on them. This film gives those billions a voice, if even for a moment.

The film asks why we treat some animals so well, and billions of others so inhumanely and cruelly? It questions our own behavior toward animals, and makes us conscious about why we have labeled one animal a cheap piece of meat, another an object of medical research, yet another as a pest or “vermin,” and still others as our beloved partners, best friends, even children.

How do you treat animals? How do you value them? Do you assign different values to different animals depending on how you use them?

All non-human animals, including mammals, birds, octopuses and fish, are considered sentient and conscious. How we treat them matters to them.

The film is without commentary, you hear only the sounds of the animals in their environment.