Vampire Stories Offer Animal Rights Allegories

You know a cause has hit the mainstream when it's featured in the latest vampire movie.

Vampires have long been known as allegories for issues ranging from consumerism to racism to sexuality. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer series has even inspired college courses across the country dedicated to its messages about society. In recent years, there's been an especially strong connection between vampire stories and animal rights.

One of the basic tenets of animal rights is, as former Change.org blogger Stephanie Ernst put it, that "nonhuman animals are not inferior to humans, but simply different from humans, with their own unique characteristics and abilities and, like humans, with the desire and right to live natural lives."

And what better way to get people thinking about the way we treat animals as food than to put people on the menu? And lately, there seems to be an increasing focus on what vampires eat. In the Twilight series, the "good" vampires who eschew human blood call themselves "vegetarians." In True Blood, vampires integrate into human society after Japanese scientists create an artificial blood substitute (which reflects the recent announcement that scientists in the Netherlands have begun growing meat in a laboratory); vampires who continue to drink human blood are portrayed as deviants.

This past weekend, in the recent and the most obvious example of this trend, Daybreakers brought factory farmed humans to the big screen.

Near the beginning of Daybreakers, a televised pundit argues that humans have been reduced to a mere food supply. Humans are confined in factory farm conditions and the industrial harvesting of blood has made them an endangered species. The hero refuses to drink human blood. Yet, his brother challenges his moral consistency, pointing out that even if he doesn't eat humans, he works for the largest corporation in the world, which harvests them for food and research.

With a dwindling supply of human blood, the scientists are scrambling to find a substitute (someone needs to hook them up with the True Blood scientists!). Vampires turn into primal creatures when they don't get enough human blood; even drinking other animal blood starts the deterioration. At one point, the Corporate Bad Guy tells the Idealistic Good Guy that he never plans to stop harvesting humans; that the majority of the population would be happy with a substitute, but there will always be a market for the "real thing." Sounds a bit like the agriculture industry's rhetoric about meat, doesn't it?

By portraying humans as the food supply, these vampire stories raise a lot of questions about how we view animals in our society. Some people will ignore the issues and just go to see the special effects. But others will connect the blood-red dots. It may not lead everyone to a vegan conclusion, but it will help raise consciousness about what it means to farm and eat animals.

Photo credit: Lionsgate (Daybreakers poster)