The Animal Condition kicks off in full-blown leftist activist mode: a group of four then 20-something friends – Michael Dahlstrom, Ande Cunningham, Sarah-Jane McAllan and Augusta Miller – stumble across videos online of abattoirs and are incensed by what they see.
The four Nida graduates thus resolve to make an undercover documentary exposing the wicked ways of the Australian meat trade. They secure a small amount of funding from an animal welfare organisation and hook up with hardcore activists who, in a cloak-and-dagger-like way, sneak them on to paddocks and into battery hen factories under the cover of darkness.
The biggest surprise wasn’t what they found on farms in the dead of night but the response they got when they approached authorities in broad daylight. According to Dahlstrom, the now 36-year-old director, the industry had a reputation for not talking to film-makers; that applied especially, one assumes, to inexperienced hotheads who were literally jumping the fence.
So they tried a different tack: “After realising we were only getting one side of the story we went in with honesty and said we’d been hanging out with activists,” he says. “The first ones we spoke to were Australian Pork Ltd. They took us by surprise and allowed us to go into their farms. A lot of times just with the farmer, not any PR people or media spokespeople. They often gave us unfettered access.”
Impressed by this transparency – surely a reminder of Lyndon B Johnson’s old saying about tents and pissing – the group resolved to keep an open mind.
Like each of the four, Miller, 30, served as a writer, producer and on-screen investigator: “Some of us were meat eaters, some of us were vegetarians,” she says. “We had a wide perspective of ideas about food and the right way – or the wrong way – to consume food. But we were open to those ideas changing.”
The result is a deeply engrossing documentary with a refreshingly honest and self-reflexive approach, engendering a real sense that the audience’s journey is one shared by the film-makers. Shot over the course of just under four years, Dahlstrom and his team watched as treatment of cattle became a hot topic, thanks in part to stories broadcast on Four Corners and 60 Minutes.
“By the end of the film we were hearing things from all sides. From activists, scientists, ethicists, farmers, industry and government,” he says. “As we started to find ourselves at the heart of a key issue for Australia – live export and animal welfare – we found that people suddenly wanted to talk to us.”
Key on-screen talent is varied, including the leader of Katter’s Australian party, Bob Katter, the Greens senator Lee Rhiannon, the then agriculture minister, Joe Ludwig, a number of industry representatives and animal welfare advocates Peter Singer and Lyn White.
What the team also found, according to Miller, was that a great deal more was being asked of farmers in an area few had expertise in: media management.
“For a lot of these men and women, who have long histories in agriculture, they haven’t necessarily had to discuss their farming practices with the public,” she says. “They’ve had to learn very quickly how to talk about what they do in a quote/unquote ‘palatable’ manner.
“It’s something that, for many people in the industry, goes back generations, so you’re dealing with something that is very personal to them. I could see the struggle they were having with suddenly having to metaphorically and literally open the doors.”
Perhaps it is ironic that a film sensitive to issues facing farmers begins with the creators sneaking on to their land. The issue of secretly recorded footage is a topical one, with the government introducing bans in recent years on filming in detention centres (as the recent documentary Chasing Asylum reminded us) and Barnaby Joyce coming down hard against animal rights activists recording covert footage.
“Were it not for Animals Australia and their undercover footage in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Malaysia, Jordan and Pakistan, we wouldn’t know what is going on with Australian animals being sent overseas,” Miller says.
“It produces a lot of anger, both from industry and from the public. But until there’s transparency within animal husbandry and agribusiness, I think undercover footage is a necessary part of this conversation.”
Perhaps it also a reminder that undercover footage is not necessarily a synonym for “lopsided” or “unfair”. One of the subjects that drew the most sympathy from Dahlstrom is the same kind of person you might assume, if you only watched the film’s jumping-the-fence opening act, that the team would want taken out of business.
When the director met Malcolm Gett, one of the pioneers of animal intensification in Australia in the 1970s, the farmer had spent hundreds of thousand of dollars installing new sow stalls. These are small cages where breeding sows can only take one step forward and one step back, and can’t turn around.
While The Animal Condition was being shot, Dahlstrom says, “the governing body, Australian Pork Limited, came to an agreement where they were going to phase out sow stalls. This farmer ended up going bankrupt as a result. He was struggling at the beginning of the shoot but thought he’d pull through. By the time we were in post, he’d lost his farm.
“You’ve really got to look big picture with these things. If you go out and want to see change, it’s not just about wanting to see the change happen overnight.
“If you were someone who wanted to see an end to, say, battery hen farming, you need to see through that transition. In order for it to be effective, you have to have a plan so the hit on people’s livelihood doesn’t crush them.”
• The Animal Condition has screenings around Australia from 22 August
