Sentient the Movie

[Alberta Louise]

Big day in Newtown. Lunch at Green's Enmore Road was a Mexican Burria vegan pie - the best! Tony Jones, the director, will be in attendance tonight for the premiere of 'Sentient'; Q and A's will be part of the program no doubt. Tony Jones is an Aussie. Known at 'Sundance' Film Festival. He asks "Can we justify harming animals in the name of science?". It's pegged as a moving journey into laboratory animals.  Runtime is 105minutes.

[Alberta Louise]

Sentient was playing last night in Newtown. Tony Jones introduced the movie beforehand as ‘I won’t say enjoy the movie; feel it”. At last an Australian has produced something comparable to SHAC USA and Huntingdon UK over lab antics of technicians and the failing of the health system to produce accurate data based upon monkey experiments alone. Thus far in the movie it achieved its purpose. It does show the sentience of the lab animal better than anything else around at the moment. It does appear the Seattle’s primate center in Washington that opened their doors to be filmed has had an epiphany equal to that of some of the members of the animal rights movement previously in media and witnessed. Following on its heels the Biomedical people interviewed for this awe inspiring two hour and a half insight to their facility took the atrium and told us, the audience, how wrong it is to mutilate animals. Odd considering its equally their bread and butter work and would have the opposite effect to an animal rights activist aka stop researching on sentient creatures. Predicated on the title “Sentience” one could carefully consider it an animal rights tale of woe and what the animal rights movement has been saying since its inception yet this is not the case. It might be cathartic to the biomedical community particularly at this late stage of their involvement, the same mannerisms, the same talk, seemingly the same concerns of welfarism but as the old adage goes “Appearances are deceiving”. Admittedly this is shocking footage. The animal rights movement was doing it years ago. I am not convinced the biomedical conversion to their charge is wholly for the animal and might have more to do with Chinas involvement in the clean-up and ultimately making globally larger this Industry as happened with the farmed industry who China recruited and lead the way for the same purpose once. This could be their happy smiley face in the deal.  This could be its recruitment drive arse backwards. Worth a look, listen and learn. There has just been too much WE MUST coming out of the Biomedical community to think otherwise yet the tears flowed and the voices were warm in the movie. We’ll just have to wait it out and see what happens next. For the animals.