S5. E9: Kelly Guerin: Love Begets Love
“… we are trying to make something watchable that is just unwatchable. I don't want to be here and I don't want to see this. And every part of me wants to turn away, but you have to engage with it, and you have to come out the other end with something that hopefully can encourage other people to stick with long enough to have it land.”
- Kelly Guerin
How we treat animals is how we treat humans.
Kelly Guerin is a documentary filmmaker who has been making that connection for as long as she’s been making films. She is a part of the extraordinary We Animals Media Team and has worked independently as well as alongside NGOs to direct, film, and edit dozens of short films spanning topics of animal protection, environmental justice, and human rights throughout the world.
Her debut feature-length documentary, Nations of Their Own is set to be released in 2021. The film takes place in occupied Palestine and follows an unexpected group of activists who are on a mission to rescue their country from the effects of decades of military occupation, starting with its animals.
This conversation is about what we are doing to animals and to one another, and until we make the connection that the two are completely intertwined, there’s no real stopping of any of it. Kelly’s honesty, openness, and vulnerability completely floored me, and her deep love for humanity made me want to be better in every way possible. I hope that you are as moved as I was.
Watch the Nations of Our Own Trailer
Learn More About We Animals Media
Learn More About The Unbound Project
Transcript:
Kelly: [00:00:00] It's just the first glimpse of, we are trying to make something watchable that is just unwatchable. I don't want to be here and I don't want to see this and every part of me just wants to turn away. But you have to engage with it and you have to come out the other end with something that hopefully you can encourage other people to stick with long enough to have it land.
Elizabeth: [00:00:27] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Kelly Guerin. Kelly is a documentary filmmaker and a part of Jo-anne MacArthur's extraordinary We Animals media team. Kelly has documented the fate of farmed animals after Hurricane Florence wet markets in China, years before they were making the headlines and cockfighting in Puerto Rico. She's also a part of The Unbound Project, a multimedia documentary project that celebrates women at the forefront of animal advocacy. Kelly's debut full length documentary, Nations of Their Own, is about animal activists in Palestine. It's set to debut next year. Kelly, it is so wonderful to have you here, thank you so much,
Kelly: [00:01:47] Thank you so much for having me.
Elizabeth: [00:01:49] How did you grow up around animals or did you grow up around animals?
Kelly: [00:01:53] I always had an affinity for animals. I just can't remember a time when I wasn't. I mean, all of my childhood photos are of me clutching ratty stuffed animals and friends and relatives would buy me Barbies, but they would choose the ones that had pets, and I would always like to open the box and throw away the Barbie and keep the little dog that came with it.
Elizabeth: [00:02:11] And did you have pets?
Kelly: [00:02:13] I did. I was always begging my family for, you know, a dog, a cat or rabbit. It's funny looking back, you know, my whole family is vegan now. My whole family is super into animals and animal rescue, but we were not the best pet owners growing up. We're so ashamed to say that now. So as much as I loved animals, I didn't have a ton of profound relationships with animals growing up. You know, we didn't really know how to raise dogs where they were happy and healthy, and they cycled through animals kind of quickly and we would drop dogs off at the shelter. It's kind of horrifying for us to realize now because we all have these pain in the butt dogs that we would do anything for and we would never leave them.
Elizabeth: [00:02:52] And I think a lot of people have stories like that, and I think it's important to tell them and to talk about them.
Kelly: [00:02:58] I grew up in Southern California and, you know, the opportunities around their dogs and cats and bunnies. But we actually moved to Colorado when I was 12. We were flying back from visiting family in Michigan and we flew over farm country. My little brother and I looked out the window at the big red barns and we said, Oh, we're going to live there someday. That looks amazing. My parents were like, Really, your California kids are growing up by the beach. You want to live there? Sure, it's like, Let's, let's change it up. So we moved out to a small five acre farm in Colorado, kind of in the middle of nowhere. That's where we got to just kind of experiment with being around farm animals. You know, we got some horses. Every time my dad would go out of town for a work trip, my mom and I would mischievously like to get in our truck and drive to this local animal auction and we would take an animal back with us. So every time he came back, there'd be a cow in the backyard or a little goat.
Elizabeth: [00:03:52] Are you kidding? Like, you'd go get a cow?
Kelly: [00:03:57] Yes. I don't even remember how we possibly stumbled upon this place. It was this tiny, dinky little animal auction in the middle of nowhere. As much as my mom and I both loved animals and it was a really sad place. So I'm not sure what initially drew us there or why we kept going back.
Elizabeth: [00:04:17] Why was it so sad?
Kelly: [00:04:18] It was just dirty. It was chaotic. The animals were terrified and covered in poop, and there was no food or water for a lot of them. It was the beginning of us asking ourselves, like starting to question the world of animals around us. My mum and I got to go through that together. So you would be walking around these sale pens and every time we went every weekend, it seemed there would be just these pens of day old baby cows. And we started asking like, why? Why are there so many baby cows? The farmers would always give us some answer, like, Oh, the mom rejected them. The mom rejected them. The mom rejected. How many times can that happen? So like, you know, I've there's just a lot of really bad dairy cow moms out there or there's something else. So we actually one time just there was a really sick baby, and he was the only one there, still had his umbilical cord all dried and hanging off of him. He was really lethargic, and all of the farmers said, Yeah, you know, no one's going to buy this one. He's not coming back, and most of them don't make it. So we bought him for next to nothing. We have a picture of me in the back of a pickup truck like smiling holding this baby cow with diarrhea all over it. We're just over the moon that we have this cow and we ended up bottle feeding him. His name was Butters.
Elizabeth: [00:05:33] Did you have him for a long time?
Kelly: [00:05:34] We had him for several months. That's actually the other sort of tragic part of the story and part of our awakening into becoming this little family of activists now. We lived in this association, this neighborhood association, HOA. It's still so angering to me now. I have a hard time talking about it, but essentially the neighbors, several of them did not like that when they rode by our property on their horses, they had to look at disgusting farm animals. We didn't live in a rundown place. There were animals everywhere we had like, you know, a cow that was loping through the field that we all played with, and we had this little pig that would sit by the mailbox and wait for us to come home. It was really, it was this idyllic little else. But then the neighbors would yeah, they threatened lawsuits on my parents and they threatened to evict. I don't even know what power they would have had us in association. So we got these farm animals. We fell in love with them. We developed just this awe and amazement for the depth of their personalities and how similar they were to our dogs and our cats, and even more profoundly in some ways. Then to have to be told that they can't be here. You can't have them. They need to go, and so I like one of my most haunting memories is, you know, we had this pig and oh, I still have such a love for pigs.
Elizabeth: [00:06:51] What was a pig's name
Kelly: [00:06:53] Piggy because I'm not very creative. All of my cats have been named Kitty, and all of my pigs have been named Piggy. I didn't know about Sanctuary's at the time. I still get so choked up thinking about it. But before I knew that there were other places that they could go, I just had to find a friend, a farmer friend that I knew who promised to do it as gently as possible. It's like the first animal that ever had to be. So my family has this shared memory of just feeding piggy her chocolate chip cookies as we were saying goodbye to her.
Elizabeth: [00:07:30] Oh, I'm so sorry.
Kelly: [00:07:31] That's so funny, I haven't thought about her in years, and it's funny that it still comes back and it's so funny because I know I had stopped eating meat, but I don't think I was vegan then. We didn't go vegan for many other years. I didn't become an activist for many years after that. I just knew that there was something profoundly wrong and unjust about that experience.
Elizabeth: [00:07:54] And as horrible and devastating as that was I'm sure, not many people have such a direct line of like they can say, I mean, it very much sounds like I don't know if this was the moment, but it very much sounds like like Piggy came into your life and look at what you've given back to the world, which is incredible.
Kelly: [00:08:15] Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, so many people, their first experiences with a video or a photo, and certainly that I'm sure that was for me long before I met Piggy. But just to have that, not many people get that opportunity. I'm so grateful for my parents. We talk about it all the time, like what would have happened if we stayed in California? What would have happened if we didn't do the stupid thing and go to the auction? We'd be such different people.
Elizabeth: [00:08:39] So, do you have siblings?
Kelly: [00:08:42] I do. So my mom and dad, my brother Shane, who's a couple of years younger and I have two sisters who were adopted from China.
Elizabeth: [00:08:51] And all six of you went vegetarian and vegan?
Kelly: [00:08:54] All six of us. So I remember being kind of, I think my mom and I went back and forth when I was growing up on and off vegetarian, we would try. My mom actually went vegan first when I was in college. You know, once the mom of the house becomes vegan and she's the one who's cooking, everybody can get on board or you know what makes it.
Elizabeth: [00:09:10] It also makes it very easy.
Kelly: [00:09:13] It does. It was hard enough to. I mean, as I'm sure you've heard from many people who go through this, it can be a very isolating experience at first when you first have to take this leap and learn new recipes and navigate all of those uncomfortable social situations. I'm really lucky that I never had to battle that within my own immediate family. Certainly, it came from friends and extra, you know, right? Peripheral family.
Elizabeth: [00:09:41] And everyone's an activist in one way or another?
Kelly: [00:09:43] My dad probably wouldn't call himself an activist. He's very like Wasafi, straight laced. He wears a lot of button up shirts.
Elizabeth: [00:09:50] But he is a vegan.
Kelly: [00:09:51] He's a vegan. Yeah, and poor guy. He's a government contractor, so he's in all of these like straight laced military meetings, and he's getting the vegan meals.
Elizabeth: [00:09:58] Was there a part of you that knew that at some point you needed to do something in terms of animal welfare protection?
Kelly: [00:10:09] Absolutely. I think it was right about the time. I think I became vegan in my junior year of college and I always had a love for animals. I identified in my community as, Oh, Kelly's the animal activist, but I wasn't. I went to some protests and I wrote some letters and I did some phone calls and I rescued dogs, but I didn't ever. I really hated going to protest. I hated holding signs, I hated walking the streets, I never identified with that, and I think I had a very narrow view of what it meant to be an activist. But I always knew that I wanted to work with animals in some capacity as I got older. It's funny around my junior year of college, I think my track at that time was I wanted to be an animal rights lawyer, environmental lawyer. So I bought all of these books on how to, you know, how to get into law school. I had to study for the entrance exams and it's funny looking back. I would have been a terrible lawyer, would have been the worst. So the desire was there. I was just looking for my place in the world and the way that I could contribute to my best capabilities because it certainly wasn't holding a sign.
Elizabeth: [00:11:13] What came first, filmmaking, documentary making or animal work in terms of your career?
Kelly: [00:11:21] So I'm on track to go to law school and I've got my plans, I've got my book and I've gone there. It's my last semester of college. I had blown through all of my credits, so I didn't. I wasn't taking enough classes to be considered a full time student, and I really wanted to use the gym. So I asked my friends if they were in any interesting classes, and my friend Ellen had said, Oh yeah, I just signed up for one. It's called Documentary and Social Change in the Mediterranean. You should take it with me. It was the only course in college I ever took a pass fail, which was funny. I got into this class and I think I think day one, we watched this film called The Square, and I don't know if you've seen it. It's an older movie now at this point, but it's about the Egyptian uprising and the Arab Spring.
Elizabeth: [00:12:11] I haven't seen it.
Kelly: [00:12:12] It’s incredible. It's a story that I remember having studied several years back when I was a freshman, and I remember being really into it and reading a lot of articles and talking very academically about it and then revisiting it three years later as a personal story. just never seen, I hadn't been aware of how far documentary films had become. I still, like most of us, had that idea in my head of, you know, it's Ken Burns. It's old historical photographs. It's some guy talking over a banjo and said, You know, I had a very narrow idea of what a documentary was and to be introduced to a subject that I thought I knew. But in an emotional way, like in somebody's personal story, my jaw was dropped. It gave me a way of engaging with the story I thought I already knew, and that was it was the closest thing to magic that I had seen, and I think that was the that was the barrier I felt myself up against, even just as a little new vegan out in the world, trying to communicate to people how I how I felt about this thing and what it meant to me. I could show them brutal videos. I could give them stats I could give, but I was missing that connection. I left that class, you know, a couple of weeks in going, that's my magic. I've got to try it.
Elizabeth: [00:13:30] You're really lucky. Like, not many people have these really distinct moments that just alter their whole lives path, so soon, so early and so profoundly.
Kelly: [00:13:43] Convenient timing like about to graduate from college. Maybe a little too convenient. So would you do maybe some desperation there? I'd been lucky enough to shadow a local filmmaker in the months after I graduated. I'm just these little commercial shoots, so it gave me enough of a taste and enough of a by the end of these months of working with this filmmaker, I had amassed this little set of my camera, my microphone and I could edit basic video. My first film that I ever made for me, not as an assignment then, was when I went back to the animal auction where my whole fascination and journey with farm animals had started.
Elizabeth: [00:14:26] That makes me want to cry. It's amazing. It was like justice for Piggy and all of Piggy;s friends.
Kelly: [00:14:36] Justice for piggy, yeah. It's the way to get rid of my ghosts. Oh my gosh. I should mention by this point that I had seen Ghost in Our Machine by Liz Marshall, featuring Jo-anne McCarthy.
Elizabeth: [00:14:47] For people who don't know Jo-anne or her work, or people who haven't seen this film, well, you just tell us a little about it?
Kelly: [00:14:53] Like a snare machine. It's a film directed by Liz Marshall featuring Jo-anne MacArthur, who I'm so honored to now call a colleague and a friend and a mentor. It's a documentary about a woman who goes into animal industries and factory farms and zoos and aquaria and documents from the animals perspective. It's just her journey of trying to get these images seen, trying to get them published, even though they conflict with ad revenue of other pages who might be selling furs and meat and animal products. I saw this documentary about this little lone woman who was out there taking these images. I cannot recommend it enough. So I am just sitting in this audience and I think Jo is there actually, at the time, I think it was too nervous to go up and talk to her then. But I was sitting in the audience going like, I'm doing that, I'm doing that. So with my inner Jo-anne MacArthur, like, I'm all inspired. I've got my tiny camera and I'm going back to this animal auction now where everything started. It's such a different experience going back.
Elizabeth: [00:15:53] What happened, tell us?
Kelly: [00:15:54] Going back not only as an adult, I hadn't been there since I was, you know, middle or high school.
Elizabeth: [00:16:04] Did it look the same?
Kelly: [00:16:05] It did, tragically. Unfortunately, it was kind of a slow day, the day that I had tried to go and film. I remember in times past there had been just. Oh, my God. Just pens and pens of baby animals, and today there were just some, just some cows and some goats and some horses and some chickens, often the small animal area. But I had tried to negotiate my way into film there, and they had never had anybody wanted to film in there. So kind of ashamed to say I might have flirted with the Cowboys a little bit who were working there, and I tried to flatter them and pretend like I was interviewing them like, Oh, your work looks really hard, and can I get in there? Can I see what it's like to run an animal auction? I tried to phrase it as like, I'm really interested in your experience, but of course, I'm getting in there and I'm punching down, and I very much have Jo-anne's images in my mind when I'm trying to get down on the animal's level and I'm trying to walk through the chutes as as they would. So the film, actually, it was my first little project. It became this two minute, it's black and white, because I didn't know how to white balance my camera. I forgot how to white balance my camera. And there's no blood. There's no gore, you know, it's kind of a film school. It's very dramatic music, but it's just two minutes of the animal's perspective going through this animal action. It captured all of the fear that I remember and all of the anxiety and all of the dread as it's building to then being deposited into the sales ring where there's an auctioneer shouting and people are prodding them and hitting them with sticks. All around the line of this ring are advertisements for the butchers where they're going to go to and the slaughterhouses they're going to go to. That was my very first film.
Elizabeth: [00:17:46] How do you feel after, like, hooked?
Kelly: [00:17:50] Hooked, no, I have. I'm chronically somebody who is dissatisfied with their work. So as I was editing this, like I didn't get it, I didn't get it. I messed up this, I messed up this. As I'm editing it, I knew I had to finish it, but I wasn't going to do anything with it. It was going to sit there in this shame box on my, you know, on my hard drive. My mom, actually, I think, was the one who posted it on social media. It ended up kind of, I wouldn't say viral. Like, No, no sad animal videos ever really go viral, do they? But it traveled and it has millions and millions of views now.
Elizabeth: [00:18:25] Oh my gosh, I want to see it.
Kelly: [00:17:50] Jo-anne actually found it and sent me a message, and I got to call my mum afterwards and say, like, Oh, Jo-anne MacArthur just messaged me.
Elizabeth: [00:18:35] I didn't realize that this was the film that this is her.
Kelly: [00:18:38] This is the origin story.
Elizabeth: [00:18:45] Oh my god, that's amazing.
Kelly: [00:18:48] And I know that we're geeks about this stuff. But like this is this is like my hero who's just messaged me.
Elizabeth: [00:18:53] Is like a dream story, right?
Kelly: [00:18:56] This is just so undeservedly lucky. It's kind of ridiculous now that I have to say it out, but it's just beyond lucky.
Elizabeth: [00:19:03] That is awesome. She sends you a message.
Kelly: [00:19:05] She messages me saying, one, just I saw your work and I loved it and thank you. But also that just throughout her many decades of documenting animal stories, not many decades she's not that old, throughout her many years of documenting animal stories, she's also amassed this sort of backlog of video clips that she had taken over the years and didn't know what to do with. So she and I began to collaborate on a few little projects sort of bringing together her video and her photos into these multimedia pieces. So we did, the very first one was about an open air slaughterhouse in Tanzania. That was a little glimpse into what I was getting myself into, but just didn't know it yet.
Elizabeth: [00:19:49] How so?
Kelly: [00:19:50] It was, I had seen all of the edited videos before of the Meet Your Meats and the bloody, gory stuff that you see online and I'd watched Earthlings. You know, for people who don't know, it's just an endless barrage of all of the worst undercover animal footage that you could see. But I had always seen it edited and I had always seen it with kind of dramatic music over the top, and it had always been packaged before it came to me. This was the first time that I had just been delivered this library of just raw video clips where I had to watch just these animals one after another, get their throats slit and bleed out, and the dread of watching an animal bleed out for 30 seconds or a minute. You think that they're gone and then they kick their leg and you realize that they're still there. It's just the first glimpse of us trying to make something watchable that is just unwatchable. I don't want to be here and I don't want to see this. Every part of me wants to turn away but you have to engage with it and you have to come out the other end with something that hopefully you can encourage other people to stick with long enough to have it land. It was my first experience with what would become.
Elizabeth: [00:21:13] Your life.
Kelly: [00:21:26] Yeah, yeah, that's the question I'm still asking. I don't have answers yet, and that's what every new project presents to me. How do I get people to see this?
Elizabeth: [00:21:18] And do you still like when you take on a new project? Is there still that moment of like, I'm going back into this.
Kelly: [00:21:26] The adrenaline, yeah, and it changes from shoot to shoot, but when you know you're about to go into a space like that, in some ways, it weirdly has gotten easier. I will never go into my first chicken slaughterhouse again, I will never witness my first slaughter again like those first are there.
Elizabeth: [00:21:45] But what was the first that you went into filming after the auction?
Kelly: [00:21:52] I had done some shoots here and there, and I had gone to Puerto Rico and I did a short film about a government sanctioned cockfighting ring in Puerto Rico. The vet clinic specifically underneath the ring, where the injured birds would be brought down and the people the owners of the birds would decide if they wanted to pay the five or ten dollars to have them fixed so that they could fight again or if they would throw them away. There was, I remember this just shaking trash bin in the corner of the vet clinic, where the discarded like lost cause roosters were thrown away. So I had done that short film, but I had jumped pretty quickly into what I'm now working on as my first heftier, full length film project and that's about animal activists in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Elizabeth: [00:22:37] I saw the trailer and it's absolutely incredible. It's stunning. It's so moving. Tell us about the film. How did this even start?
Kelly: [00:22:49] I was still just doing sort of freelance camera projects and film projects wherever I could find them, so I had been hired to come along as a chaperone slash photographer on a group of high schoolers from Denver who were going over to the occupied territories, Israel, Palestine in the Middle East and learning about peace and conflict studies on the ground. Me on a bus with a bunch of these high school kids, it was again one of those I think we all know in broad strokes the idea behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's famous enough and it's talked about enough that I could explain what it was about, but I had never been on the ground in a place like that, and I had never been in a refugee camp. I had never seen, you know, armored tanks driving down the streets and where the people are literally walled in and where they have to store rainwater on their on the tanks, on top of their houses and where they live miles from the beach and have never gone to the beach because of the barbed wire fences and the guns. It's humbling to be in a place like that and to recognize how privileged you are to be able to think about other issues besides day to day survival. So I'm wrestling with these ideas, I'm thinking about this stuff and you know. There's a moment I remember so clearly when the high school group is going through this Palestinian town. The tour guide is showing them a home where a family lived inside that was bombed out by Israeli missiles in one of the times of heavy fighting. He's telling this horrible story about how the family is trapped inside this family of four. We're looking at this rubble and we're standing there and the whole group is facing this direction and behind us are the sounds of this little stall side chicken slaughterhouse. Just one by one four chickens, five chickens, six chickens. They all have their throats slit and they're dying right behind us. I have this weird moment where I'm looking. I'm looking at the rubble and looking at the chickens and looking at the rubble. It’s feeling bad in that moment for for looking at the chickens when I know that the heaviness of the moment is on, we need to sit here with the human tragedy and with this bombed out building and but also feeling like I can feel both. Both can be sad but feeling guilty, whichever direction I turned because I felt like I was ignoring the other. Our tour guide was looking at me going back and forth and even taking some pictures of the chickens, pictures of the rubble. Fe came over and talked to me afterwards, and he said, I noticed you were looking at the chickens. And I said, Yes, it's overwhelming, there's suffering everywhere and it's hard to wrap your head around all of it. He said, I can tell you of a big heart, but it's a luxury that we don't have as Palestinians to care about animals. Maybe that's sad. But, you know, enjoy that because it's a privilege and it's absolutely true. It is absolutely true. I do not go through life pretending because I care about animals, that means that I'm a deeper, more spiritual, more good person. I don't feel that way. I feel that I'm just the product of the opportunities that I've had to engage with animals and the luxuries that I've had to be able to think about things other than surviving. So I have these questions in my head as I'm leaving the country, and just months later, I'm at an animal rights conference in Luxembourg and I see a little table sitting there that says Palestinian Animal League. I've run up to the table and I'm like, You exist. How do you exist? Oh my God. They're like, Yes, hello, we exist. So my film then, in some very long winded way has been. How do you exist? How? What makes you? I was told that it was not possible, like you live in a state of survival, that that is a luxury that is granted to Western nations. What makes you able to come alive and do this work when there's so many pressing human rights and just pure survival issues that you have to deal with on a day to day basis.
Elizabeth: [00:27:00] So did you go over pretty quickly after?
Kelly: [00:27:03] I did, I have a film mentor who calls it. Oh, so you were in the adventure stage where you just spend all of your money on a plane ticket and go sleep on the floors. So in my adventure stage, yeah, I spent all my money on a plane ticket and I stayed in Palestine as long as my tourist visa would allow me.
Elizabeth: [00:27:19] You went and met the people that you had met at the conference.
Kelly: [00:27:22] I did.
Elizabeth: [00:27:23] What was that like and what were they doing like what was happening?
Kelly: [00:27:26] They were at the time just a tiny, tiny organization called the Palestinian Animal League, founded by two friends who were at this conference. Their whole idea behind their organization was not just that we're going to rescue puppies and kitties and find them homes. It was, they believed, that the cycle of violence was a very real thing in their communities, and they were witnessing, not only the suffering of animals, they were witnessing children who were growing up normalizing all of this violence around them, and we're taking it out on street animals. So their more immediate pain, you know, they were two fathers. They came from the immediate pain of, we're still going to fight for our own human rights and our own human liberation. But if somebody were to come to us tomorrow and say, here's your country back, we are right now a country of traumatized people who have normalized suffering. Who are raised with this idea that to survive, you have to be tough and you have to have somebody beneath you and you have to have power over somebody. So much of their work is very centered on engaging the community and especially the community's children, in the idea of being kind to animals. So while they were doing very straightforward things like trap, spay and neuter release of stray dogs, they were also doing summer camps for children. They were having group discussions with school kids asking who throws stones at dogs like, Do you think that that's OK? Do you think that the dog likes that, and the students are able to say, like, Well, the soldiers throw rocks at me, so.
Elizabeth: [00:29:02] So how we treat animals is how we treat humans. It's all connected. Until more of the world kind of, I think, wakes up to that in the sense of it's just violence begets violence.
Kelly: [00:29:14] Violence begets violence, yeah. You know, animal rights do not exist in its own bubble. The stories of animals and the treatment of animals, it's so interconnected with our human world that to just focus on the rights of animals, if you get to be so singularly focused on the experiences of animals.
Elizabeth: [00:29:33] You know, in a lot of ways you're missing the point if you just focus on the animals.
Kelly: [00:29:14] That's exactly right. That's exactly it.
Elizabeth: [00:29:33] It’s all one big, I mean, it's a huge cycle of abuse. Human, animal.
Kelly: [00:29:45] I'm hoping that the film is relatable to, you know, you don't have to be in a refugee camp to be able to relate to the experiences of these characters. Like as of right now, we're all living in this world where humans are suffering, other people are suffering. They're going to be so many almost competing origins of suffering and to be able to recognize that it is all connected. It's just a tremendous lesson that I've been so lucky to be able to learn from this incredible group of people who, if they can do it from refugee camps of Palestine, I can certainly wade through all of the political noise and heartache and nonsense to keep focusing on the on the core stories of animals and to know that that that is not its own thing. It's all connected.
Elizabeth: [00:30:34] I can't wait to see it. I really can't.
Kelly: [00:30:36] Yeah, I can't either.
Elizabeth: [00:30:39] All right. So let's say 2021.
Kelly: [00:30:42] And it's on the record now, so I have to finish it.
Elizabeth: [00:30:45] One thing I want to talk about is the work you've been doing in North Carolina because of COVID. I read a post when you returned to the field to document the impacts of COVID 19 on factory farming in the U.S., but you say this in the post, this is the part I wanted to read. We conducted flyovers of the eastern part of North Carolina, an area with one of the highest densities of factory farms in the world. As a result of recent coronavirus related shutdowns, tens of millions of animals have reached slaughter weight and have nowhere to go. During this investigation, I visited a chicken growing facility for Perdue Farms, one of the largest suppliers of the chicken in the country. A shipment of chicks had just arrived in the farm, but already their tiny bodies were beginning to collapse under the genetically modified weight. Several were dead, several more were dying. The brutal reality is that as a filmmaker, I'm not there to save these animals. I'm there to document and share their stories with the world in the hopes that they may help end the suffering for millions more. So I want to talk about the chicken investigation when they were doing all these mass killings.
Kelly: [00:31:56] North Carolina is such an odd place for me to end up because it is just one of the most heavily farmed states in the United States.
Elizabeth: [00:32:09] Are you living there right now?
Kelly: [00:31:56] I am. I am. I had come the first time I'd never been to North Carolina, but I had come out just post Hurricane Florence. So this hurricane has battered the eastern coast of the state, and all of these giant factory farms have been submerged under water. All of the most densely populated farmlands have been submerged, and we waited for a couple of days because we were just seeing all of the reports as units of property. This many dollars in damages was lost to farmers. When you investigate these kinds of stories or when you know the realities of what goes on behind the curtains, like those units of property, you know that what's being said, that's not being said is that many million chickens drowned in their barns, unable to escape. This many million pigs or this many thousand pigs. So seeing that there's this big gap in the reporting, Jo-anne and I had partnered and flown out there to try to capture the farm animal perspective on the ground. And once those images were available of pigs who were looking at you in the camera or washed up bodies of chickens and neighborhoods, it allowed reporters then to be able to tell the story in a way that was not dollars in property damage. So anyway, that was my first introduction in North Carolina. Then I ended up moving out here last year.
Elizabeth: [00:33:22] COVID’s now hit the slaughterhouses. It's hitting the workers. But now there's this huge back up with the animals, right? Is that when you guys get involved?
Kelly: [00:33:35] If you're a nerd like me who's following all of the sad news about animals in the world and you're paying attention to the articles that are coming out about farmers who and I call them farmers, but really in our modern food systems, they refer to themselves as growers now. So we used to have hog farmers, we used to have chicken farmers, but really, contractually they're known as growers. So the corporation will drop off baby animals to them. They will raise the animals in barns they pay for and waste that they are left with. Then the animals, once they reach a certain weight, get sent out to slaughter and they're dispersed throughout the country. So all of a sudden when there's a disruption to that wildly massive machine, you know, when suddenly there's not a slaughterhouse that is open to process millions of chickens a day or ten thousand pigs a day. Suddenly, these farmers whose only job was to grow these animals are just left with them there and they're getting bigger and there's no room for them. They're already squeezed to the max by the time that they're reaching slaughter weight because these things are formulated down to just a friggin 'science. The stories we were reading were farmers who have to guess their own animals and shoot their own animals and retrofit their buildings to be able to suffocate them, or to spray a slow moving foam over the floor of their chicken slaughterhouse so that the chickens suffocate to death. We were reading these stories and just following the sheer number of outbreaks that were happening at slaughterhouses and the meat shortages that were happening and that all the consumers were freaking out about. We knew that there was a major disruption to the meat system and we got up in a plane with Waterkeeper Alliance and flew around the eastern part of North Carolina to just see if we could document from the air, mass graves, because where are these animals going to go? In fact, you know, the more people do this work, the harder it becomes for us to do our jobs because this has been documented before. It's not just a pandemic thing, there are outbreaks all the time in these heavily confined factory farms. So porcine epidemic diarrhea, I believe it's called like that happens all the time. When there's an outbreak, you have to mass bury all the hogs. So we had access to all of these incredible libraries of these mass graves and flying over all the farmland. We spotted a couple of, you know, dirt mounds several times that looked really, really similar, but we didn't actively see any burying.
Elizabeth: [00:36:07] How many animals are in a typical farm?
Kelly: [00:36:10] Tens and tens of thousands, tens of thousands. Yet, curiously, this time we didn't see a lot of disposal. The new rumors now are that farmers are developing methods to destroy them all within their own barns so that there's far less opportunities to document the bodies. Because, as you pointed out, that tends to alarm people.
Elizabeth: [00:36:30] What do you think they're doing to them?
Kelly: [00:36:32] The activists who we've been partnering with out here who at this point have been documenting these recurring mass burials and outbreaks for decades now, they're not sure why we're not seeing as many of them, either. It’s an ongoing mystery. This is happening more and more. We don't have to wear undercover hidden cameras. You know, we don't do that with WeAnimal media where we're pretty transparent. Our aim is to get high quality footage and high quality photos. So we don't do button cameras, we don't deceive, we don't trespass.
Elizabeth: [00:37:06] So we can’t go to a lot of places in this country.
Kelly: [00:37:08] Exactly. But the ones that we can go to are kind of incredible because it's farmers opening their doors to us. So more and more, we're sort of leaving this activist bubble of this is our, you know, hippie issue that we care about. You know, farmers are getting fed up with how they're being treated and they're growing worried about the systems that they're part of and that they've seen their industry become over the years. They're concerned about whether it's waste management or just the poverty of these chicken growers, the fear tactics that the companies use to keep them quiet, to keep them from whistleblowing, to keep them in debt and desperate. So we are finding more and more of these unexpected allies with farmers who are willing to partner with us in telling these stories.
Elizabeth: [00:37:52] Yeah, I saw that you interviewed a bunch of them. What was that like? They seem very open in the film.
Kelly: [00:37:58] It's always such a weird experience. Really, whether it's I'm talking to farmers and laughing with farmers who I know own thousands of pigs and whose going to send them to slaughter, or another farmer who just went around this morning decapitating chickens with his hands like, you can meet these people and you can empathize with these people and you can talk with these people. Whether it's them or like slaughterhouse workers who have shared cigarettes with, I always had these complicated feelings around, like, you're just people, you're people, you're trying to make a living. You have had different life experiences. It's hard for me when I see photos or videos online and the response is those monsters, those monsters, how dare they, burn and hell, whatever people say. Farmers who are choosing to go against their own industry. I mean, they're having a greater impact on factory farming than I as an outsider with my camera ever could. Regardless of whether or not they're vegan or regardless of whether or not they shut everything down and start a sanctuary like it takes tremendous bravery. We can disagree on many, many issues. But I'm always just so profoundly impressed when they are brave enough to allow us in and to have honest conversations with us. For all of the farmers I've spoken to, there's a pandemic or not. There's always such an era of uncertainty. They are so at the mercy of the powers that be these very concentrated powers that be, that own the structure.
Elizabeth: [00:39:17] They're like indentured servants, I mean.
Kelly: [00:39:19] Absolutely, absolutely. They'll refer to it as crop shares or so. You know, even when it's not a pandemic time. The tone sounds very similar, they're vulnerable, they're uncertain, they're not sure how long they'll get to continue to do this work or have a living. They suspect they will not have something to pass on to their children because they know that it's unsustainable. I remember one one hog farmer that I spoke to, he said. You know, given the pandemic, there could be a situation where I have. A thousand adult hogs with no market to send them to in a few weeks time. I could just have hogs sitting on my farm, where do they go? They don't really get help from the companies. They're told to get rid of them.
Elizabeth: [00:40:06] It's the system. It's evil, and you've done work in wet markets in China. Will you talk about that a little bit? Maybe we can connect the two. Like, what's going on in our factory farms that is just as scary and as probably the next pandemic with what you know, the work you've done in China.
Kelly: [00:40:29] Without sounding like I told you so in all of this. These are things that, you know, these are things that if you're a nerd of animal rights and animal issues, wet markets and factory farming and the threat of pandemics have been around in the hearts and minds of vegans and animal rights activists for a very long time. So the fact that it finally came to fruition in exactly the way that all of these experts have been saying is inevitable given our systems, it's sort of been incredible to watch people have to face these stories because there are immediate consequences to them. It's not, you know, so many of our stories are for warning or pleading with people to to leave their everyday lives and to step into other experiences and to imagine the future that we're creating if we continue on this path. But to have that reality just come smack us in the face and have everybody have to suddenly overnight become interested in what the hell is a wet market? That was a really unique experience, and it's not one that we're familiar with. So Jo-anne and I had filmed wet markets in Taiwan just earlier in 2019. I had filmed several wet markets throughout my time of living and visiting and traveling in China, and so many of my Chinese wet market photos, I'd never done anything with them. They were sitting in my hard drives and they had nowhere to put them. But suddenly this pandemic happens and they become urgent, and all of a sudden they become very timely. So always hold on to your work. You never know what will happen. So to to then suddenly see that these old photos that I took of old middle of nowhere, nobody cared about wet markets become the headliners for articles on animal farming and pandemics.
Elizabeth: [00:42:10] It's pretty amazing.
Kelly: [00:42:11] It's pretty amazing. We're also very aware, WeAnimals media. We always want to emphasize that we often have to leave our own countries to have the access and the freedoms that we need to tell the stories of animals. Even though the systems are the same wherever you go. You know, every country has factory farming now. All of the animals, when they go into slaughter, they die in some horrible way. Every country eats meat on some massive scale. So just the fact that I can't go into my own country and my own factory farms because we have the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which would, you know, could put me in prison and thousands of dollars fines.
Elizabeth: [00:42:50] Which makes zero sense.
Kelly: [00:42:52] I have two two sisters adopted from China. I speak some really poor Mandarin. I have lived and worked in China. Some of the bravest and most incredible activists that I know are still living and working in China and Taiwan, and I have such a tremendous respect for the work that is being done there. When the wet market footage became very relevant and when it was time to put it out there. Yes, it's a unique situation that causes cross-species contamination and a new virus and a pandemic. But also we're very aware that we do not want the takeaway from this to be bad China. China is bad. That is barbaric. We are not barbaric. Things like that never happen here. We would never be blamed for something like this.
Elizabeth: [00:43:35] We're doing the same thing. You just don't see it.
Kelly: [00:43:37] Same frickin thing. Same freaking thing. You know, just that we don't have squirrels in a live market. Always we want to be mindful that when we do put out these stories, especially in countries that are not our own and we're not from or it's not our own or our own culture, we do try to always tie it back to its the same systems wherever you go in the world. It's all so interconnected that if you participate in this system as a consumer, even in America, you have to know that you are complicit in the big systems repeating themselves across. So yeah, on one hand, I'm very, very happy that attention has been brought to wet markets and what happens there, but I don't want that to be the singular focus of the story. That's why I hope that people are paying attention to what's happening in our own slaughterhouses in the U.S., you know, these outbreaks of these horribly abused workers and the massive scale of them makes it impossible to protect workers and protect consumers. I want people to be aware that it's not just bad China, that wet market.
Elizabeth: [00:44:43] The potential for the next pandemic coming from here is scary.
Kelly: [00:44:48] Absolutely. It could have easily happened here this time.
Elizabeth: [00:44:50] Are there things you do like, especially right now that you can't really escape, to cope and process? Because it's definitely trauma stuff having witnessed so much?
Kelly: [00:45:03] Yeah and I'm sure you've interviewed other photographers.
Elizabeth: [00:45:06] I always ask on video or photographers because it's just such heavy trauma.
Kelly: [00:45:12] The undercover people, if you're listening. Thank you. I don't know how you do it. I get to go in for a couple of hours and leave for a few minutes and leave. I don’t know how you do it.
Elizabeth: [00:45:20] For weeks and months.
Kelly: [00:45:23] I'm sure you'll hear over and over that at the time you have enough other stuff to focus on. You have to worry about framing and composition and batteries or the sound levels, or there are so many practical things that you get to focus on, and the adrenaline just sharpens your focus so much that you just have this singular, fixated goal of, I have got to convey this to everybody who's not here. It's this weird combination of adrenaline and rage and inspiration where you just want people to be here because there's no way you can be in a place like that and leave the same person. You just, you can't. But also being aware that what you're documenting, people will go to incredible lengths never to see, never to see, never to engage with, never to feel. At the time, there's enough to engage with and enough to focus on that. I don't have to think about it, but when I get back and when I look at my footage, I always cry. When I look at my footage like that, that's when it comes out. If it's not in the car on the way home or if it's not on the flight leaving the country. That's when it hits and you've left them all behind, everybody who you see in this footage is dead now. The ones who are behind them are depending on the time zone, it could be happening right now. To have that constantly swirling in your background. To recognize that what you have left with on your hard drive and on your memory card, that's what's left of them and what you choose to do with that is going to be all that is left of them like they're gone. It's a tremendous responsibility. I think no matter how good of a photo you take or good of a video clip you take. It always falls short of the immediacy of being there. It propels me to try to do a better job next time, and it propels me to do the best job that I can on the edit or to get the work out there or to help as many other people use this work as possible to make their work better. Because that's something that I'm so fortunate to also be able to do is work with an organization who gives all of this work away for free. Like anybody who is inspired by this, these photos and these videos and wants to make something of that and wants to take a stab at communicating this for themselves. It's available on our WeAnimals archive.
Elizabeth: [00:47:49] It’s awesome. Kelly, thank you so much for the incredible work that you do and the way that you're changing the world for humans and animals and me and everyone who comes across your work. And I, for one, we'll see your movie the minute it comes out. I cannot wait to see this film. So thank you.
Kelly: [00:48:08] Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure being here.
Elizabeth: [00:48:21] To learn more about Kelly, about WeAnimals media, the Unbound project and to see the trailer for Nations of Their Own. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you like today's episode and have a spare minute, please do us a favor and rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you would like to support the podcast, we greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon, its Patron.com/SpeciesUnite. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana, Po;ky, Gabriela Sibilska and Anna Conner, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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