When you watch movies such as the Oscar-winner 12 Years a Slave or any film that deals with the Holocaust, you can’t help but ask yourself how you’d react if you’d lived through the events portrayed.

We think we’d have the moral steel to be abolitionists or stand against Nazism, yet we’re often indulging in the “condescension of posterity” – overlaying modern enlightenment onto situations in which people had few means to know or act better.

Illustration: michaelmucci.com

While the majority of us reject the relatively recent beliefs that women or people of different races are inferior, it’s a reasoning most humans still embrace as “obvious” or “natural” when it comes to the rights of animals. We are their superiors; we can thus do with them what we like.

This is the core argument of the 2013 documentary Speciesism, a disturbing movie about the ethics of eating meat. Unlike most films of this genre, filmmaker Mark Devries does not just shock with undercover clips of animal cruelty.