Pet project

>> Curt Johnson on his disturbing animal-rights
doc Your Mommy Kills Animals!

by MATTHEW HAYS

Nothing gets an audience squirming like images of animals in peril. Animal activists have long used these clips, knowing people will reach for their pocketbooks if they see cats and dogs being harmed.

But sadly, the animal rights movement, far from being benign, is not a well-meaning monolith, but rather a splintered group with severe infighting over issues of how best to protect and save animals.

This is the thrust of filmmaker Curt Johnson’s latest documentary, Your Mommy Kills Animals!, a savvy film that draws us into the movement and attempts to illuminate its various factions.

It’s harrowing stuff. And don’t expect Johnson to shy away from the horror: the film opens with a montage of footage of animals being mistreated. It works, undeniably, getting us emotionally ramped up and engaged for the rest of the film, which is largely a series of talking heads.

The movie’s title itself—perhaps the greatest in movie history—is culled from the excesses of the animal rights movement. During his research period, Johnson found a comic book that PETA was distributing to young children. Titled Your Mommy Kills Animals!, the cunning bit of propaganda was an effort to warn children that if Mommy wore fur, she was a murderess. “It was pretty astonishing,” he recalls. “It’s one thing to be extreme or provocative, but they were handing this out to little kids.”

As he proceeded to investigate, what Johnson found was similar to what he’d seen in other activist movements, including the strain of gay activism prompted by the AIDS crisis in the ’80s and ’90s. “There was a great deal of division, and it reminded me of some of the divisions I’d seen among gay groups. After a while, you’d look at someone and think, ‘Why are you involved in this cause?’ People lose track of the cause itself.”

But Johnson’s own status as an animal-rights activist came into greater scrutiny during the filmmaking process. His status? He has none. “I’m not a vegetarian. I didn’t know that much about them, except that they seemed to be doing good work to protect animals. Then I saw the Drudge Report one morning, and he reported that the FBI had placed animal rights groups at the top of the most-dangerous domestic terrorist threat list. I couldn’t believe it.”

Killing them softly

But that non-insider status led to problems with one of the best-known animal activist groups, PETA. One of the most shocking moments in Your Mommy comes when Johnson reveals that PETA kills huge numbers of animals every year. Their policy is that rather than face imperfect lives, the animals are better off euthanized.

But when PETA learned that Johnson was asking questions about their rate of animal euthanasia, they suspended their involvement with the project, apparently worried about how they would come across. Johnson feels this might have something to do with his involvement with Michael Moore Hates America, the 2004 documentary that examined Moore’s track record on honesty and accuracy. Johnson served as a producer on the film.

PETA’s influence within the movement is so extensive that Johnson then worried he wouldn’t be able to continue working on the film. “In about two days, 13 people cancelled their interviews with me. I had been blacklisted.” Johnson managed to soldier on, making the PETA withdrawal part of the film itself.

Certainly, many of Johnson’s subjects—even if their goals are laudable—appear to be rather strange. It’s hard to take lots of advice from animal-loving Californians who speak in down-to-earth, natural terms while appearing to have had so much plastic surgery done that they look like aliens. And, not surprisingly, Johnson shows us glimpses of tactics executed by certain extremists that do the cause far more harm than good.

Was there anything in particular that shocked Johnson? “I’m just surprised that people don’t do a bit more research. I mean, the celebrities who get on board and support these causes have got to examine what’s going on first, before lending their names to specific groups.

“I am also quite surprised that there isn’t more dialogue between the animal activists and the medical researchers. In fact, they are both arguing for the same things: both want more stem-cell research. The medical researchers argue that they could do far more with stem cells than with animal testing. They’re both advocating exactly the same position on this. They have far more in common than they realize.”

Your Mommy Kills Animals! screens as part
of Fantasia’s Documentaries From the Edge program
on July 7, 7:05 p.m., and July 9, 5 p.m., at the
D.B. Clarke Theatre. For more info,
see www.fantasiafest.com

>> Movie Listings