A COW AT MY TABLE

On May 17, 1996, Jennifer Abbott was arrested at Intercontinental Packers Ltd. for crawling under a fence and videotaping a dead cow. While the crown later dropped the charges, security alerts quickly went out from producer associations in the meat industry warning of Abbott's project. Her experience was a perfect example of her thesis - that social forces in our society conceal, distort and legitimize factory farming with perilous repercussions to animals, humans and the environment. Every year in North America, billions of farm animals are slaughtered for meat, yet we tend to accept this as the price of dinner. Our acceptance is what Vandana Shiva calls the "ethics of anaesthesia". Weaving together interviews with animal rights activists, agribusiness representatives and animal welfare experts with archival and documentary footage, Abbott has produced an extraordinarily compelling, powerful and visually stunning documentary, which looks at a situation many would rather not know about and many would prefer was never told.