film review Peaceable Kingdom Documentary Directed by Jenny Stein Produced by James LaVeck with music by Moby Tribe of Heart, 2004, www.tribeofheart.org 77 minutes, $20 US (DVD or VHS)

Reviewed by JOHN YOUNGMAN

"What if the things you were taught didn’t make sense anymore? What if speaking the truth meant losing your community? What if following your heart meant doing the impossible?"

These are the big questions posed by Peaceable Kingdom, a new film from Tribe of Heart which explores the life journeys of farm animals, former animal farmers and animal rescuers struggling against an industrial farming system where the lives of animals count for very little. 
 

What began with one rescued sheep eventually grew into a rambling refuge for hundreds of rescued farm animals — and a spiritual haven for thousands of adults and children who visit there annually. Through director Jenny Stein’s camera, we see these two solitudes come together in a peaceable kingdom of mutual love, joy, trust and forgiveness. 

Among the animals we meet at Farm Sanctuary is Snickers, a massive bull who quietly chews his cud as his human friend, a young man in coveralls named Harold Brown, talks to us about their enduring relationship. Brown describes how on his first visit to Farm Sanctuary he felt compelled to adopt one of the cows. Gene Bauston promptly matched him with Snickers, then a tiny calf who had recently arrived at Farm Sanctuary with his mother, Rosie. As Brown fed the skittish Snickers apples, the two hit it off. A year later, on his next visit Brown wasn't sure if Snickers would recognize him when he called him from across the barn. But when he stretched  his arms out in greeting, the now full-grown bull ran right over (“...as fast as a cow can run”) and gently thumped his massive head against Brown's chest. 

Growing up as a 4-H farm boy, Brown had been taught to shun any emotional attachments to farm animals. Privately he wept for those he had to give away. Yet as an adult, he became a hardened animal farmer himself. Snickers’s providential thump would be his emotional redemption. "He hit me right in the heart," Brown tells the camera, choking back tears. "That’s when my life turned around."

Throughout Peaceable Kingdom, Stein intersperses life-affirming stories like Harold and Snickers’s with video that is almost too painful to watch: a "downer" cow so beaten down by the system she can no longer walk; a wide-eyed calf kept chained and anemic to produce tender white veal; a terrified pig hopelessly fleeing its fate outside a slaughterhouse. 

Peaceable Kingdom is devastating and uplifting. It calls into question how a supposedly civilized society can tolerate such institutionalized brutality toward earth’s most vulnerable beings. Yet it leaves the viewer with hope. It invites us to follow in the footsteps of Brown and others and extend our circle of compassion to the billions of anonymous, yet sensitive and feeling souls most of us will never know or see.