Episode two focuses on the exploitation of animals as Pets, highlighting the realities and consequences for animals who are born into, and in many cases, discarded by this form of exploitation. Typically, this form of animal exploitation is not towards the top of the public consciousness and it is as a result of our binary thinking that it has been allowed and enabled to perpetuate to the frightening scale it has today.
We start by looking at the activities of breeders. Operating in an industry which is in many ways, essentially, unregulated. We see behind the curtain in terms of the operation of Puppy Mills and the conditions in which the dogs are kept, as well as the terrible mental and physical outcomes dogs face if they are brought up in such an environment.
We then get a glimpse of what life looks like if you, like many other dogs and cats, become a stray. In other words, homeless. The number of animals becoming homeless every year will astound, as will the scale of death that is an inexorable and continuing outcome. Human beings euthanise such vast numbers of animals on a daily basis that we have had to revert to the use of gas chambers as there simply isn’t enough of the drug used to kill animals, “humanely”, to go around. As Joaquin says, many of us are Speciesists and really the only hope to reverse and stop this form and all forms of animal exploitation is through (re)discovering true empathy with other beings, not of our own species.