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Genetic Engineering and Farm Animals

1 Jan 1997
19m

An educational video from Compassion in World Farming promoting better understanding of the uses of genetic manipulation in animal agriculture.

This video aimed at secondary schoolchildren was distributed by the pressure group Compassion in World Farming (CIWF). It was supplied as part of a teaching pack that also included posters and classroom activity sheets facilitating its inclusion in a lesson plan. One activity, ‘Where Do You Draw the Line?’, involved pupils arranging cards listing uses of genetic engineering in a spectrum from the totally acceptable to the totally unacceptable. They would then watch the video and rearrange the cards based on their new knowledge.

The video’s theme is the genetic manipulation of farm animals, but it situates this within CIWF’s broader campaign work against the industrialisation of agriculture. The footage of animal experimentation, battery chickens, milking machines and indoor piggeries tends to overwhelm the main theme with the raw reality of ‘how the sausage gets made’.

For many viewers, this may have been the first time that the rosy vision of the traditional farm familiar from storybooks, food packaging and mass media was challenged by the reality of modern farming practices. While some children were likely disturbed, others would no doubt have laughed at the appearance of a chicken head poorly superimposed on the body of a cow as a means to explain transgenic animals.

Compassion in World Farming has used audiovisual campaigning material since the 1970s. This video was made for them by Small World Productions, an independent company that has produced education films and campaign videos for a number of charities and pressure groups.

This title remains available on CIWF’s Farm Animals & Us Compilation DVD-ROM, which is supplied free to schools, colleges and universities.

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