PETA peeves

>> Your Mommy Kills Animals! is a shocking
look at the controversies surrounding
the animal rights movement

by MATTHEW HAYS

Watching a film like Curt Johnson’s Your Mommy Kills Animals! evokes a powerful streak of sadness. Its story of activism, that in many cases has gone terribly wrong, is like watching a bunch of potent dreams and good intentions come unravelled.

The film’s title—arguably one of the greatest in the history of cinema—is neatly supplied by one of the more excessive strains of the movement. It seems that at one point, some animal-rights activists had the stupendous idea of writing a comic book to inform young children about the fur coat their mother was wearing.

And indeed, much of this feature-length doc is as shocking as its title. The movie begins with a montage of unnerving cruelty to dogs. I couldn’t watch most of it. There are lots of intriguing talking heads—among them Greenpeace founder Paul Watson, Moby, Bo Derek and Christopher Hitchens—offering their opinions on this activist movement. What comes out of all of this is a deluge of information, ideas and disturbing images—in fact, if there is one fault of this film, it’s that it probably surpasses its critical mass, taking on even more than it can chew.

Your Mommy has two key revelations: one is that PETA actually kills large numbers of animals. They do so, as does the SPCA, under the auspices of a mercenary euthanasia, given that there just aren’t enough homes for these animals to live in. It’s not an entirely unfair argument, but many other animal-rights activists respond to PETA’s M.O. with horror. The other is that the Bush administration has decided that animal activists (as well as environmental activists) are among the most extreme threats to American security at home. Yes, they rank above anti-abortion Christian fundamentalists, who’ve been shooting doctors who provide entirely legal medical procedures for years.

Your Mommy Kills Animals is direly grim, but it’s also an important film. I would have like to have seen a bit more discussion of our treatment of other animals beyond the household-pet variety. If my vegetarian friends are to be believed, most of our environmental woes would be behind us if we all just deleted meat from our diets. Perhaps that’s the sequel.

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