Top 5 books and films to watch this Veganuary and change your way of thinking forever
To mark the release of our Veganuary 2022 video, here is our list of the five best books, films and documentaries to help humans shift their perspective to some of those who we exploit by not going plant-based. Do you know someone taking the Veganuary challenge? Send them our essential viewing and reading to help them make the ethical connection.
Every year, exponentially more people have signed up for Veganuary, with a record 582,000 joining in last year. The results of a survey by Veganuary show that a massive 46 per cent of those people were in it for the animals. With more and more people waking up to the realities of animal farming, Veganuary gives them an opportunity to think about how their choices contribute to a system of exploitation, as discussed in Surge's new video Does Veganuary actually change anything?
But animals are not just the abused victims of a cruel food system. They are individuals with personalities and agency. Humans may struggle to imagine what that means, but luckily there have been a number of books and films released in the last few years that can help to bridge that imaginative gap.
Here are our top five works that show the world from the perspective of animals or give us a glimpse into their inner lives.
The Animals in that Country
By Laura Jean McKay (2020)
This incredible work of speculative fiction sees a strange virus sweep across Australia, causing the infected to hear the voices of animals. It sounds more fun than the real-life pandemic we’re dealing with right now, but being bombarded night and day by the disjointed, cryptic way in which other creatures speak - using their whole bodies rather than human language - drives many people mad.
The story follows gruff, hard-drinking Jean, who works as a guide in an outback wildlife park, and a half-breed dingo named Sue as they try to track down Jean’s son Lee who, lured to the coast by the desire to hear whales speak, has absconded with her beloved granddaughter Kimberley. The deep ambivalence of Jean and Sue’s relationship reflects the shift in power dynamics between humans and non-humans triggered by the ‘zooflu’, while the book as a whole shows us a vision of how unbearable it would be to hear the thoughts of the animals that we exploit and disenfranchise for our own anthropocentric ends.
Gunda
Directed by Victor Kossakovsky (2021)
A portrait of the lives of farmed animals, the main characters of this black and white documentary are a sow and her many piglets in the time between their birth and when they are taken away for slaughter. Unlike films that show the harrowing reality of animal agriculture and the slaughterhouse, Gunda wordlessly shows us the lives of these individual pigs, as well as some chickens and cows, as they go about their days, revealing their personalities and the contours of their relationships with each other and their environments.
These animals live in the way that everyone says they wish for farmed animals to live before they become food, and perhaps that is part of what gives Gunda some of its poignancy; our knowledge that most aren’t so lucky, and that even those that are will not escape the fate that humans have determined for them. As one film critic put it, “Gunda operates with … an underlying, non-militant plea to rethink our relationship with animals we have dismissed as subservient and only valuable in the measure that they serve as our food.”
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Stray
Directed by Elizabeth Lo (2020)
Another ground-breaking documentary in its focus on animal lives, Stray follows several street dogs of Istanbul, filming from the dogs’ level to give a unique perspective of their experiences. Filmmaker Elizabeth Lo has said she let the dogs decide the narrative, letting them guide her around the city as they looked for food and shelter, played and fought together, and interacted with humans.
Right now, the film has even more potency as Turkey’s President Erdoğan has ordered local authorities to round up stray animals and move them to shelters, which campaigners say will be a death sentence for them. Hundreds of people have protested the crackdown on the streets of Turkey, where a law has been in place since 2004 making it illegal to kill strays or hold them captive.
The Octopus and I
By Erin Hortle (2020)
In this novel, from another debut Australian author, breast cancer survivor Lucy is trying to come to terms with her changed body after major surgery. She finds new ways of understanding her body through her burgeoning fascination with the octopuses off the coast of Tasmania where she lives.
This might have been yet another story about a human healing themselves through a connection with nature, the kind which essentially treats other species as metaphors or tools for human emotional growth. But Hortle gives other animals the opportunity to exist in their own right, devoting whole chapters to the perspectives of octopuses (see this extract for example), a seal, and a bird. The voices of the animals are less enigmatic than those of The Animals in That Country, but they do explore how the thoughts and feelings of different animals are deeply embedded in their different physical experiences.
Cow
Directed by Andrea Arnold (2021)
This upcoming documentary immerses the viewer in the life of a cow called Luma on a working dairy farm. Similar to Gunda, the film is mostly without dialogue, but it differs from Gunda in showing more of the human control over the cows’ lives - their movements and interactions with each other and how they feed.
This being a dairy farm, there is inevitably separation of mother and calf, and death too. Vegans will be keenly aware of these realities of dairy farming already, but others might not be so prepared. As one review notes, by centring the cow, and so often focusing on her gaze, the film calls into question the seemingly benign treatment she receives from the farmers. Another review suggested that in the focus on a single cow, whose life ends the same way as all farmed animals, there is a “kind of evasion or dishonesty in showing just one cow’s sad end.” But with the numbers of animals exploited in the food system being so incomprehensibly vast, showing that those numbers are made up of individuals is exactly what more people need to see.
~ BONUS ~
This Is Vegan Propaganda
By Ed Winters (2022)
It may not quite fit the theme of shifting perspective those of non-human animals as with the other works featured in this list, but whether you are a vegan already or curious to learn more, This is Vegan Propaganda by Surge co-founder/co-director Ed Winters will show you the other side of the story of animal exploitation that has been hidden for far too long.
Based on years of research and conversations with slaughterhouse workers and farmers, to animal rights philosophers, environmentalists and everyday consumers, it helps readers understand the true scale and enormity of the issues at stake
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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