Farmed Animals on Film

"In this incisive and timely survey, Stephen Marcus Finn surveys a broad range of films about farmed animals with a keen ethical focus on how they serve to help or harm the lives of those who are caught up in the industries of carnivory.  Finn breaks new ground in his demonstration of how ubiquitously our habits and values are shaped by a provocative canon of feature, documentary, and animated films ranging from Okja to Babe, Chicken Run to Fowl Play, The Cove to Death on a Factory Farm.  Reading Farmed Animals on Film: A Manifesto for a New Ethic is like attending a keenly curated film festival, and readers will want to follow up by actually watching all these films and thinking about them through Finn’s lens."
­­—Randy Malamud, Regents’ Professor of English, Georgia State University, author of Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity

"Stephen Marcus Finn’s book is a comprehensive, insightful, and thorough analysis of over 30 films, and the power of cinema to tell stories.  Besides thorough analyses of the films-as-text, Finn offers what much research and publishing does not: action steps.  Once our consciousness is raised, what can we do?  We are told in a well-written, accessible and interesting book that should be required reading for anyone who cares about animals."
—Debra Merskin, Professor Emerita, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon

This book aims to show how film can increase awareness of the plight of farmed animals without exploiting them.  Much has been written on the rights of animals, be they in the wild or circuses, hunted, experimented on, used for entertainment, or slaughtered and consumed. However, there has been little that has examined in any detail the filming of farmed animals, and nothing on a declaration of rights for such animals, thus leaving them in a limbo of neglect. Stephen Marcus Finn offers a manifesto on how to foster the rights of farmed animals in filming sets out to rectify this lacuna.


Stephen Marcus Finn is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pretoria.  He is an animal rights activist, a novelist, and playwright whose writing concentrates on social outsiders and the oppressed.