I love this story from New Zealand’s University of Otago. Students in the masters program for science communication have available a course in Science and Natural History Filmmaking. What a great course, and what an enormous opportunity for these students. The six resulting films from this year’s class are now being screened for the public. All of the films sound interesting, but two demonstrate a real flair for taking animal consciousness to a new level:
Janelle Ericksen and Eliza Muirhead explore the sacrifice and risk involved in being an animal rights activist in ‘Human|Animal – Are we a species apart?’, along with revealing the conditions in which many ‘factory’ animals are kept….
Food production and consumption gets another look in Three Little Pigs: A Curly Tale, by Emily Gordon and George Dawes. In showing the three very different lives of one factory, one free-range and one backyard pig, the film examines pork, the animals it comes from, and those of us who consume it.
This is one more example of how students can make a real difference for animals by choosing subjects for their research that will educate others — their professor, their fellow students, or even, if they play their cards right, the public — about what’s happening to animals. Now let’s hope these students get these films up on the web, where the rest of us can see them, and pass them on.
