The movie the Secret of NIMH is essentially a movie that calls out how humans have negatively impacted the environment and specifically animals. The first animal welfare issue the movie focuses on is how farms have impacted the lives of rodents such as mice, rats, and shrews. Before the agricultural revolution, these animals could live peacefully in fields and not be disturbed by plows or other farming equipment. The mouse family that the movie focuses on struggles with being able to relocate her family before the farmer plows his field. All of the animals that live in the area know that their homes will be destroyed in the plowing process and are forced to uproot their lives in order to move. Unfortunately, the mouse, Mrs. Brisby, cannot do this because her son had pneumonia and can’t move.
The second issue that this movie covers in the issue behind animal testing. The rats in the movie had once been used in animal testing labs and had been treated poorly and had been injected with a drug that rewired their brains and caused them to focus on other things besides finding food and basic survival. We later find out that NIMH stands for the National Institute of Mental Health and the rats and mice used in the experiment were basically being tortured and then given an injection that gave them human-like minds.
This part of the plot basically shows how humans over time have used animals for their own benefit without thinking of the long-term or even short-term effects on the animal. Even though this still goes on today we are seeing slow but steady improvement towards recognizing animal welfare and not using them for our own gain.
One example of this is on September 28, 2018, the entire state of California banned the sale of animal-tested cosmetics which has been highly debated over for the past several years. Also in recent time, California banned full-service restaurants to give out plastic straws. I guess more states need to look at California’s example because we only have one Earth and it would be a shame to destroy it.
Christie's Environmental Systems Blog 