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Animal Husbandry (7)

  • 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.
  • Baaaad Dream
    Baaaad Dream
    Jesse Gouchey 2012 1 min
    Emerging filmmaker Jesse Gouchey's animated short pokes fun at selectively-bred mammoth sheep, whose out-of-proportion form makes them vulnerable to tipping over, and a very fat Farmer who tries to save them, with dire consequences.

    Produced as part of the 8th edition of the NFB’s Hothouse apprenticeship.
  • Beef Inc.
    Beef Inc.
    We're sorry, this content is not available in your location.
    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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.