I don’t know if they claimed it or not. But the scenes in the kill room especially seemed very real.
Does anyone know about this movie? Watching the kill floor almost made me hurl. The cow comes in, the metal rod shoots in the head, then they take a knife and start slicing the thing apart. Blood, guts, skin gets taken off… It’s amazing how fast they process a cow.
Which brings me to a tangent question. In plants like this, where does the waste material go? Blood, feces, urine, etc. goes on the floor and down a drain. Can that be considered normal waste or is the plant responsible for processing it?
I looked on IMDB, and it looks like it was an independent film. There is no reference to whether or not the kill floor scenes were shot at a real meat processing plant or if it was just some great “special” effects.
The IMDB Link. Not the usual glut of information, like trivia.
If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a pretty good movie about how the almighty dollar wins again. (no surprise there). I still found it to be a fascinating movie.
I don’t believe the movie has a certification from the American Humane Association (the people who put the “No Animals Were Harmed, blah blah blah” markers after movies), does it? Why do you think no animals were harmed? I’m pretty sure the kill floor scenes are real.
Pretty sure it was footage from a real slaughterhouse. It wouldn’t make much sense for them to spend millions on CGI to recreate a mundane event that happens thousands of times per day.
And yeah, that is how they do it. I don’t find it particularly disturbing - in fact I’m downright thrilled about the state of modern slaughterhouses. In another place and time you’d have to risk your life to run down a cow with dogs and a spear, or cut it’s throat with a machete and let it bleed to death with much heaving and bellowing, or shoot it in the head with a rifle and hope you blow enough of it’s brains out the first time. Then you have to dress and butcher a 1500-lb animal in the dirt or otherwise in a less than sanitary situation… This way is better for the cows and everyone who eats them, IMO.
Other aspects of factory farming are what I have problems with. I hate that there’s so much focus on the slaughterhouses because people aren’t used to seeing meat being made from animals. The slaughterhouse system here in the USA is probably the best in the world.
The kill floor scenes were very real. They were allowed in just long enough to shoot the footage and then they were promptly given the boot. It really is a hidden world that the meat packers make a herculean effort to conceal from the consuming public.
I didn’t see the notice about “no animals were hurt in the filming of this movie”, and the kill floor scenes looked real to me.
Funny, I thought that you weren’t permitted to harm animals in movies, regardless of the movie topic. If this is true (that you can harm an animal) then I don’t see why so many films go out of their way to not harm animals.
I think the kill floor scenes were real. And I didn’t have any problems with it per se, I was just surprised I guess since I thought movie sets had animal rights people on set to make sure the animals were safe. Showing an actual cow getting killed and dressed was perfectly fine with me.
The cows weren’t being killed for the sake of making a movie, they were being processed in a real slaughterhouse for the sale of their meat. In this case, while the whole movie wasn’t a complete “real” documentary, this was documentary footage.
I had no problem with seeing it, in fact I think showing it was very eye opening. I also think that showing how illegals are treated was amazingly corrupt, I loved the HR guy being a dick to that poor mexican woman who’s husband was hurt badly on the job and fired for using meth.
The HR scene showed the compassion that most HR departments give, the only difference was they had an interpreter tell the lady that her husband was out of a job AND his back was hosed.
Talk about treating people like worthless, replaceable parts.
Like I said, I didn’t think you were permitted to intentionally hurt an animal in a movie. I remember reading somewhere of someone getting into hot water because they killed some rats - REAL rats as part of the story.
In any event, I think this has been answered, and I’m happy it was real footage. It looked real when I saw it; I’m glad the animal rights folks didn’t get involved. But being independent, they probably didn’t have to worry about sponsors bitching, pulling advertising, etc.
The blood is trucked away in tankers and dried into either ring-dried or spray dried blood and then resold on the commodities market. I did purchasing for a small fish feed manufacturer and we used spray dried blood by the truckload. There is a lot of dried blood sold in this country and most of it goes right back into animal feed, it’s about 88% protein.
Other inedible parts are sent to a rendering plant where tallow is separated from bones, gelatin is separated from hides and everything else is turned into meat and bone meal.
Nothing is wasted and very little is actually disposed of at a cost to the meat processor. The products made from the waste are part of a whole other industry.
If I’m not mistaken, Cecil did something on the subject—might have been an entire column. IIRC, it’s not illegal to harm an animal when you’re making a movie, and no filmmaker is legally obligated to have someone on the set to supervise. It’s just that if you don’t harm an animal, then you get to put the Cute ‘n’ Fluffy Society’s seal of approval at the end of the credits.
Yup. That’s documentary footage, so you can show animals being slaughtered for food no problem. It wasn’t a set. The workers on the floor weren’t actors. The animals weren’t being killed to make for a good scene. They were being killed to make hamburger and steaks and Jello. It was like any other working day there, except people with cameras showed up.
I don’t think that’s true. You just won’t get a certification from the Humane Society if you don’t allow their rep on set to supervise all animal scenes and you follow their guidelines. No one is forced to get that certification although I think some union rules require it. There may be animal cruelty laws that apply, but often filming is done overseas in locations where those laws don’t exists.
No offense, but you do understand what a documentary is, right? I’m being serious.
Unless it was a reenactment, why would any real-life footage be subject to the rules in place for fictional movies? I watched a documentary on HBO about the Taliban, and they showed an Afghan getting his head sawed off. The Cove is an Oscar-winning documentary about an annual Japanese slaughter of dolphins. Why would that real-life footage have any rules apply to it? It’s a factual document.
yeah, a real headscratcher really. it’d be really messed up if documentaries were being shot down because it contained footage of animals being hurt. that’d be something gloria allred would be all over in a heartbeat. easiest 1st amendment case EVER, with millions of dollars to win.
Do you honestly not see the difference between intentionally killing something for the sole purpose of making a movie, and filming something that is already being killed for documentary purposes? Really? You know there are tons of war documentaries that show humans being killed, yes?
Film makers aren’t required to follow the AHS standards and get their approval. Most do so because it avoids public relations problems and it may be required by union rules and the fact that it usually isn’t very expensive to do so. As long as killing an animal doesn’t violate local cruelty laws the film makers aren’t under any legal obligation to avoid killing or harming animals for the purpose of capturing what they want on film.
Are you questioning the morality or legality here?