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Livestock (14)

  • Animals
    Animals
    Jason Young 2003 1 h 14 min
    Viewer Advisory: This film contains scenes of animal slaughter..

    This feature documentary tells the story of a young couple’s year-long experiment in raising their own meat. On the abandoned farm property they just bought, they decide that if they’re going to eat meat, they should raise it themselves. Over 4 seasons, they get to know the animals, discover their personalities, treat them with respect and eventually slaughter them. Animals takes us deep into the heart of the animal-human relationship, with all its contradictions.
  • Beef Inc.
    Beef Inc.
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    Carmen Garcia 1999 50 min
    A struggle for control of the world food market is waging, and the battle promises to escalate in the 21st century. Beef Inc. examines how a handful of companies have come to dominate beef production and distribution in North America.

    As traditional farming falls victim to agri-business, small producers and consumers are paying the price. What has been a way of life for generations is now solely a money-making venture for big business. In the beef industry, a strategy of "intense livestock production" has been implemented to boost profit margins. Cattle are housed and fattened in overcrowded feed lots, a situation which exposes them to disease. To combat this, the animals are systematically vaccinated, given antibiotics and pumped with growth hormones. No regard is given to the potential health risks to consumers or the quality of the end product.

    This film gives a voice to the independent cattle producer who, unable to compete with the corporations, find themselves being squeezed out of the industry. In French with English subtitles.
  • Bacon, The Film
    Bacon, The Film
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    Hugo Latulippe 2002 51 min
    Several years ago, large-scale hog producers and their political allies in Quebec decided to branch out into international markets. But bacon, like everything else, has its price. Bacon, the Film asks whether we have properly measured the social and environmental impacts of this proliferation of huge hog operations. The soil is already showing signs of sterility. Rivers are contaminated. Water, the very symbol of life, has itself become a hazard in some communities. The situation could be spinning out of control. Abandoned by the state, citizens groups are making their voices heard and taking back democracy. An unexpected grain of sand in a machine well oiled by neo-liberal dogma, they are fighting to keep society on a human scale.
  • Canaries to Clydesdales
    Canaries to Clydesdales
    Eugene Boyko 1977 27 min
    This documentary follows two country veterinarians through their daily rounds, from sterile clinic to farm paddock. Thirty thousand miles of house calls a year is routine for doctors Vic Demetrick and Reg Maidment, whose patients include just about any creature that hops, trots, swims or flies.
  • Cattle Ranch
    Cattle Ranch
    Guy L. Coté 1961 19 min
    This short documentary offers a portrait of life on a cattle ranch, for both its human and animal inhabitants. Featuring sprightly music by folk singer Pete Seeger and narration by theatre actress Frances Hyland, the film is shot through the seasons on a large Canadian cattle ranch near Kamloops, British Columbia. With hundreds of cows and calves on the ranch, there’s no shortage of work to be done: soil cultivation and crop maintenance are taken care of by seasonal ranch hands while the resident cowboys—“anxious guardians”—brand and breed their bovine charges.
  • Corral
    Corral
    Colin Low 1954 11 min
    Western ballads played on guitar are the only sounds used in this romantic portrait of a cowboy. He rounds up wild horses, lassoing one of the high-spirited animals in the corral, and then goes for a glorious plunging ride across the spectacular Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta.
  • Cattle Country
    Cattle Country
    Beth Zinkan 1944 9 min
    This short 1944 documentary offers a portrait of ranching in the foothills of southern Alberta. Exciting scenes of great herds being rounded up and moved to summer feeding grounds suggest the large scale on which this business is run, while segments on spraying, feeding and shipping illustrate some of the less dramatic jobs involved in bringing Canadian beef to the world's tables.
  • Canada's Reindeer
    Canada's Reindeer
    1981 24 min
    In 1935 a herd of 2,700 reindeer completed a five-year journey from Alaska to north of the Arctic circle. They were imported and re-settled by the Canadian Government in an effort to improve the economic conditions of the Inuit. This film is the story of the trek, the raising of reindeer for saleable meat, its effects upon the people, and the transformation of herding from a primitive art to one using modern technology. The film shows how an ecologically sound, make-work project that started as a gamble ended up a success, generating jobs and money for the local people.
  • Epidemic Foot and Mouth Disease: Saskatchewan, 1952
    Epidemic Foot and Mouth Disease: Saskatchewan, 1952
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    Larry Gosnell 1952 16 min
    A documentary report on the 1952 outbreak of foot-and-mouth in Saskatchewan. It details the effects of the disease on livestock and explains how the epidemic was brought under control. Made for the federal Department of Agriculture.
  • Eye Witness No. 27
    Eye Witness No. 27
    1950 11 min
    Halifax's Junior Bengal Lancers: The youngest riding team in Canada gives a spectacular exhibition of horsemanship. Where the Big Ones Grow Bigger and Bigger: Great Slave Lake gives sport to the businessman who comes in by air to battle with the fighting lake trout. From Jobs and Schools to Swimming Pools: Twenty girls of the Peterborough Ornamental Swimming Club give an exhibition of synchronized swimming. Alberta Blitzes Prairie Killers: Alberta farmers hunt and shoot coyotes, predators of livestock and poultry, from swift-flying light aircraft.
  • Eye Witness No. 13
    Eye Witness No. 13
    1949 10 min
    Lumber Tugs Buck Flood-Swollen Fraser: Every spring small, maneuverable tugboats haul heavy log booms down the swift Fraser River to the lumber mills of Vancouver and New Westminster. Spring Round-up in B.C.: On the rolling hills of central British Columbia gawky new lambs take their first look at the world; skilled sheep dogs drive flocks down to the shearing pens; cowhands ride the range in the annual cattle round-up for branding and inoculating.
  • Pirouette
    Pirouette
    Tali 2002 9 min
    If we are what we eat, then we are having an identity crisis. Because food's journey from farm to plate is a strange one. An old woman has a simple relationship with her animals: she loves them, kills them, eats them. In town, people are first fascinated, then repulsed, by the intimacy between the old woman and their food. A film without words.
  • Pelts: Politics of the Fur Trade
    Pelts: Politics of the Fur Trade
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    Nigel Markham 1989 56 min
    The fur trade is Canada's oldest industry, but today some people challenge the morality of killing animals for their fur. This film examines the public relations war raging between the industry and its opponents and takes an objective look at the ethical, environmental and economic issues raised by the debate. The struggle to win over public opinion has been joined by Indigenous peoples in Canada who fear that their way of life will be jeopardized if the fur industry is destroyed. The cycle of the industry is followed from the trapper's bush camp and the fur ranch to the final sale of a coat in the furrier's salon. Throughout the film, the conflicting opinions of fur industry representatives, animal rights activists and Indigenous people challenge the viewer to consider all aspects of this complex debate.
  • Roundup
    Roundup
    Nettie Wild 2020 3 min
    Watch 4000 cattle return from summer grazing to 20 families who share a communal pasture and corral. Mesmerizing visual patterns from sky and ground frame an evocative contemplation of the relationship between human and animals, landscape and architecture.