REVIEW: Your Mommy Kills Animals



A woman dressed in a fur coat is walking through a shopping mall. Suddenly, a man carrying a baseball bat approaches and beats her to the ground. Stripping the coat from her lifeless body he wanders casually away. A title card fades up on screen; “What if you were killed for you coat?” It’s a provocative statement carrying with it the seemingly incontestable logic of one Animal rights organization for whom the sequence is a staged protest against the fur trade. So begins the documentary, Your Mommy Kills Animals.

It’s a cleverly pointed introduction from first-time director Curt Johnson, but in some ways it’s also slightly misleading. Instead of setting out to question the morality of the fur industry, meat consumption, or even laboratory testing on animals, Johnson’s film is more interested in the political divisions that exist between the various Animal Rights and Animal Welfare activist groups.

While factional splits and disagreements over the means of protest are not uncommon within most political movements, such conflicts within the Animal Rights arena have recently taken on a specific urgency. In 2005, the FBI declared the Animal Liberation Front the No.1 terrorist threat to the United States. To think that a group of ‘left-wing vegan activists’ had suddenly become more dangerous to Americans than Osama Bin Laden is as unfathomable, as it is perfect as a frame for Johnson’s investigation.

Using the trial against six members of the SHAC organisation (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty), as a springboard for the documentary, Johnson proceeds from a brief history of Animal Rights to a more focussed analysis of more contemporary activist groups. Demystifying the modus operandi of each faction, from the radical SHAC through the more liberal Animal Welfare, and PETA, the Hollywood backed arm of Animal rights, the film scrutinises the beliefs and methods proffered by each organisation. The cross section of interviewees is fairly impressive, (from the SHAC members through celebrities, journalists, veterinarians, prosecutors and even the owners of a mink factory) and the film benefits from the scope of voices and opinions that emerge from within the supposedly unified movement.

Johnson’s not afraid to let the visuals get dirty either – we see dogs being brutalised, screaming cats in confinement, and a fox that’s been skinned alive – but they’re all fairly brief flashes of the kinds of cruelty that motivate these political players. In lesser hands, Your Mommy Kills Animals could’ve ended up taking cheap shots at the audience’s emotions, but this is no simple shock-doc; it’s an intelligent expose that actively resists stamping its own position within the breadth of groups and activism on show.

The film’s footage of the protesters in action also raises some valid comparisons with the radical Pro-Life movement in America. While Animal Rights groups lay claim to having never killed a human in all their protests, certain Pro-Life factions have taken responsibility for the murder of doctors and the bombing of abortion clinics. When you consider that it is the former who has been deemed the greater threat, questions regarding the motivations behind the “terrorist” tag allow the film to expand its examinations into broader political territory. However, the effect of such labelling hasn’t been entirely negative. As one activist suggests, the FBI’s declaration may have inadvertently given some groups a previously unrecognised “credibility”.

However, where Your Mommy Kills Animals makes its most convincing demonstrations is in the way it links the political response to Animal Rights activism to more immediate concerns over ‘free speech’. Once again, the spectre of 9/11 looms large within this documentary, particularly through its association of the ‘war on terror’ to issues of domestic control. For Johnson, Bush’s America seems to occupy a dark stain on the historical map, a place in which human and animal rights alike are being increasingly subsumed by the whirlpool of corporate greed and dominant political interests.

It’s a powerful, resonant and provocative film that will hopefully find the broader audience it so deserves.

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