Help Animals by Watching Movies With Friends!
Activism comes in many different forms. Sometimes it can be as simple as watching movies with friends and family members and having conversations about them afterward. The following are short lists of films to get the people in your life on their way to helping animals!
Family Movies
Babe: This cute movie investigates the rights, emotions, and sensitivities of animals while questioning why humans love some animals but slaughter others.
Charlotte’s Web: Here’s another movie that highlights what a pig has to do in order to avoid being slaughtered. Like Babe, this adaptation of E.B. White’s classic children’s novel asks viewers to examine how we treat intelligent animals such as pigs.
Chicken Run: Claymation chickens fight to escape from the prison-like farm where they are destined to be killed.
Free Willy: Perhaps the best-known movie on this list, it’s about a boy fighting to free an orca from captivity.
Legally Blonde 2: When the main character learns that the mother of her beloved Chihuahua is trapped in a cruel lab, she goes to D.C. to fight the vivisection industry.
Horror/Sci-Fi Movies
King Kong: It’s one of the most famous and saddest stories about a wild animal who is taken from nature, placed in shackles, and forced to perform for human entertainment.
Island of Lost Souls: This 1932 classic tale about animal experimentation investigates the way that nonhuman animals experience pain and suffer like us while questioning the ethics of vivisection. This movie defined a new genre in horror cinema!
Predator and Predators: The tables are turned, and the humans become the hunted in this sci-fi franchise.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: This sci-fi gem looks at the horrors of vivisection, the exotic pet trade, and the suffering of wild animals in captivity.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: One of the earliest and nastiest looks at eating meat in modern society, this film put humans in the slaughterhouse—and horror movies were never the same again.
Documentaries
Blackfish: This film made international headlines for its gripping investigation of the death of orca trainer Dawn Brancheau and SeaWorld’s systemic abuse of orcas and other marine mammals.
Born to Be Wild: This inspiring film documents the lives of orphaned baby elephants and orangutans and the people who rescue, raise, and reintroduce them to the wild.
The Cove: This Oscar-winning film investigates the annual dolphin slaughter at Taiji, Japan.
Earthlings: Narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, this extremely moving documentary explores major industries and the ways in which they use and abuse animals. Watch it online.
Food, Inc.: This movie takes an in-depth look at America’s food production and the corporations that prioritize profits over welfare and health.
Forks Over Knives: This documentary examines the connection between diet and most diseases of affluence and how they can be controlled or reversed if you eat a plant-based diet.
I Am an Animal: Learn about Ingrid E. Newkirk and PETA US’ history and struggle for animal rights!
Lolita: Slave to Entertainment: This provocative documentary investigates the sad capture and solitary life of the orca Lolita at a marine park in Miami.
Inspired to help animals? Please join PETA’s Activist Network.
Posted by Edwina Baier
