Hog Haven Streaming Videos

Skip to Videos

Discussion Questions

Questions for general viewers:

  • Erin says at one point, “No, I really don’t want to eat my friends.” How does this make you feel in regard to your own pets, who you might consider to be your friends?

  • At one point in the film Andrew says, ‘How many of your friends have ever met a pig?’ Have you ever met a pig? If you met a pig, would you be OK eating it later that day? Why or why not?

  • People who see the film Hog Haven sometimes say, ‘I had no idea this world even existed.’ Some have said, ‘This film convinced me to stop eating pork.’ Has watching farm animals in this context – as having families, emotions and intelligence – changed how you feel about them and how you feel about eating meat?

  • What is an acceptable level of suffering for a farm animal? Animals die when they become meat for people to eat. Is the way the live their life and the way they are killed important?

  • How do you feel about slaughtering animals, but treating them humanely during their lives?

  • We are all raised in a society that condones the mistreatment of some animals. How do you feel about this statement?

  • By eliminating the amount of meat and dairy you consume, you help reduce the amount of suffering experienced by farmed animals. How does this film help to clarify why that is important?

  • Why do we root for animals that have escaped from slaughterhouses?

Questions for animal activists:

  • “Hog Haven was consciously edited without confrontational language or tropes around animal advocacy and veganism to avoid triggering programmed emotional responses. Erin, the protagonist of the film, also does not believe that directly confronting the beliefs of people who consume meat and dairy is an effective method of advocacy.” (Beeson) The philosophy is that activists cannot convince others to change their behaviors by confronting their belief system (i.e., illustrating the suffering of animals raised for human consumption). Rather, the advocate/activist must expose others to alternative ways of perceiving farmed animals as a way of planting seeds toward the conversion of behaviors and beliefs, even if those conversions are incremental. Is this an effective means of activism?  

  • “An attempt to change someone’s beliefs is also an attempt to change his or her behaviors. Beliefs are felt – and often felt to be pleasurable. To attempt to convince someone to go vegan means a change in that person’s bodily repetitions. …That can be a painful process, especially when those bodily acts are social responses (saying no to family food rituals, for example).”  (Alex Lockwood, The Pig in Thin Air (48)) Are there ways in which animal advocates can help people to alter their rituals and habits without uncomfortably disrupting their social structures? Is helping people to navigate these disruptions essential to effective activism?

  • “…Direct encounters with nonhumans are essential for developing our ‘moral attention’ to others, but they cannot take place until we have a ‘balanced and clear concept’ of who we are. (Lockwood, 200). Is this true, and does one necessarily precede the other? 

  • There are many expectations and prejudices about what animal activism may be. How have you experienced your own and others’ expectations and prejudices around your own form of activism?

  • Erin says at one point, “No, I really don’t want to eat my friends.” If it’s wrong to kill our companion animals for food (cats and dogs), then it’s also wrong to kill pigs, as there are no morally significant differences between them. Harming individuals because they belong to a different species is ‘speciesism’ Is speciesism related to racism in this way?