Are these prairie dogs wondering what makes them prairie dogs? Jeff Cibulas, with Jenny Trujillo at last NHDoc screening: “I’d rather see the truth and know how horrible it is.” Prairie dogs have a word for ​“human.” They talk about us in a language with nouns, adjectives, and variable dialects — even though, to most of us, their words sound like unintelligible squeaks.I learned that delightful fact at the last-ever film screening by NHDocs, from a vegan advocacy film about what it means to be human in a world of other animals.After 10 years of hosting local documentary film festivals, NHDocs held its final gathering Wednesday at the Cannon pub on Dwight Street, collaborating with the vegan festival Compassionfest to show animal rights activist Mark Devries’ movie Humans and Other Animals. The screening was followed by a Q‑and‑A with Devries himself.About three dozen people — some vegans, some film buffs, and some who would qualify as both — filled the pub to the point of standing-room only, snacking on plant-based burgers and greeting familiar faces with warm hugs. A sense of melancholy about the end of NHDocs morphed into hope at an announcement that the festival might soon be revived in a to-be-determined form.I had told my editors that I wanted to document the final gathering of a beloved documentary community — and I did. But I’ll admit I had a separate agenda of my own. I’ve lately been finding myself more overwhelmed than usual when I open up the newspaper to more reports of bombs and poverty — when I call someone I know to be struggling, or report on a story that I know will break my heart. I’ve been in need of a new way of handling this world of so much sorrow and suffering — something other than avoidance or distraction. So I wanted to talk to a group of people who willingly signed up to spend their Wednesday night watching a documentary about animal cruelty. Why on earth, I wondered, would they do this to themselves?I asked that question of NHDocs’ Executive Director Gorman Bechard, who’s overseen screenings of documentaries ranging from one about ​“how campers poop in the woods” to ​“films about the Holocaust.” He’s well aware, he said, that many would rather avoid sad documentaries. In response to one of his own projects about animal abuse, people have told him, ​“Your film sounds so great — but I can’t watch it!” (He then proceeded to make a ​“happy animal rights movie” for their benefit.)That aversion to hard-to-swallow information extends beyond the documentary world, Bechard mused. ​“So many people are not reading the news.” His hope with NHDocs, he said, was in part to create a community counter to that instinct — a community that revolves around learning, in ways both heavy and fun. ​“We should never stop learning,” he said. One attendee of the screening, Jenny Trujillo, told me she’s one of those people who don’t watch or read the news, partly as a means of self-protection. ​“I’m pretty isolated from the world,” she said. When she does expose herself to painful facts, she feels their impact intensely. We soon discovered that we’d each become vegan during the fall of 2019 after watching similar documentaries about factory farms. At the screening, nearly everyone I spoke to avoided meat or animal products at least to some extent — except for Trujillo’s partner, Jeff Cibulas. Cibulas said he’d been various combinations of vegan and vegetarian at points of his life, but he’s currently an omnivore. He wanted to watch Wednesday’s documentary, he said, because he wanted to challenge himself to rethink his dietary decisions. “I’d rather see the truth and know how horrible it is,” Cibulas said. ​“It’s something you don’t even want to think about.”As the title suggests, Humans and Other Animals’ overarching goal is to deconstruct a cultural dichotomy between humans and animals. It’s a three-part film: first an exploration of animal qualities that mirror humans, then a series of gutsy attempts to investigate animal farming practices shrouded in corporate secrecy, then a philosophical takedown of ​“speciesism” outlooks that privilege the worth of human lives over other animals’. By the end of the film, Devries offers a clear take on his own question of what makes humans so categorically different from other animals: according to him, the answer is nothing at all, aside from genetic technicalities. At one point during his narration, a comically relatable exasperation seeps through: ​“How come so many of us believe things without REASONS?”The film reminded Trujillo of a pet chick that her grandmother gave her as a child in Colombia. Trujillo named the chick Carlota. When the baby became a fully-grown chicken, her grandmother killed the animal to make soup. “I got a little emotional thinking about my pet,” Trujillo said. ​“Also thinking about pigs.”Standing room only at the Cannon. As someone who also gets emotional thinking about pigs, I have to admit: this movie was not for me. I found it overly didactic and full of clumsy analogies.Cibulas, however, was moved by the film’s argumentative side. He wasn’t sure he’d immediately stop eating meat, he said, but he found the philosophical exploration of the humans-versus-animals dichotomy to be ​“mind-blowing.”I was personally more interested in Devries’ relentless efforts to document what really goes on behind the closed doors of factory farms. Over the course of the film, Devries visits pig, dairy, chicken meat, and egg farms, documenting barns of tightly-packed pigs and rows of cows living in their own excrement. He bumps up against ​“Ag Gag” laws, state regulations that can restrict undercover or unsolicited filming of animal agriculture practices.As the film makes clear, Devries refuses to be deterred. At one point, he disguises himself as a construction worker in order to get a hidden camera up close to a chicken transport vehicle.The lengths Devries goes to just catch a peek into the inner workings of farms that fill so, so many Americans’ fridges felt absurd — and they illustrate how far members of our species will go to conceal and help others forget the systems that produce our food. I wondered if humans have a unique propensity among animals for denial. That might have been my takeaway had I watched the documentary alone. But I was in a room full of people who had voluntarily gathered to watch footage of animal suffering spliced between musings on the nature of humanity. The small crowd was overriding any instinct to cocoon away from the world’s sorrow, instead choosing to build a whole community around witnessing hard truths. Maybe what makes humans distinct is our willingness to watch things we know will be painful to see.Then again, I wonder what prairie dogs tell each other when their hearts break.