Chapter Sections
1. The Broad Setting
2. Mass Extinction
3. The Animal Holocaust
How to Do Animal Rights - and Win the War on Animals
"Their suffering is intense, widespread, expanding, systematic and socially sanctioned. And the victims are unable to organize in defence of their own interests." Henry Spira (1)Mass extinction is not the only human scourge on animals; animals live in a continuing holocaust. The Animal Holocaust is the mass destruction of animals by humanity and is a direct comparison with Nazi mass murder, particularly of Jews. The animals most often referred to in the Animal Holocaust are domesticated animals that people raise for food. However, more generally, Animal Holocaust victims include any animals and their populations that humans control, systematically abuse or destroy, such as fur-farmed animals, laboratory animals and free-living wild animals.
The Animal Holocaust resembles the Nazi perpetrated Holocaust in the use of business-like mass slaughter, mediated by transports, factory farms (concentration camps) and slaughterhouses (death camps). Other pertinent comparisons are performing experiments on inmates and turning inmates into commodities, such as skin goods and soap. Perhaps the most telling comparison is the contempt for the victims' humane treatment and the widespread disregard for their rights. People today generally do not think of animals as beings who are mutilated, tortured and slain. They see them merely as 'animals', there for the purpose of satisfying human needs.
No one really knows how many domesticated animals people kill every year in the Animal Holocaust, but for a brief round up see Chapter 7: Animal Numbers Raised & Killed. Staggering totals include the two million pigs killed every week in the United States, the 12 million pigs killed per week in China (2), and the seventy billion chickens killed worldwide annually (3a, 3b). Humanity has killed literally trillions of animals since the Second World War and we are killing them at an accelerating rate as our population increases and the mechanisation for the Animal Holocaust gathers pace. Shamed for his membership of the Nazi party the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) is cited as saying in a 1949 lecture: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps..." (4). The Animal Holocaust is treated in modern books such as Charles Patterson's Eternal Treblinka (5). The book's title comes from a quote attributed to author and Holocaust survivor Isaac Beshevis Singer, "To animals, all people are Nazis. For them it is an eternal Treblinka."
Some animal rights groups juxtapose imagery of the Holocaust and the Animal Holocaust to publicise their campaigns and shock people into admitting the scale and existence of the human abuse of animals. Their message is that animals are not ours to abuse but that we must treat them with respect. However, the Holocaust / Animal Holocaust juxtaposition has angered many people and organisations who see it as an inappropriate and corrupting comparison, tasteless and trivialising because of humanity's (assumed unique) moral basis. They say that the Holocaust / Animal Holocaust juxtaposition may gain the cause of animal rights some attention but will lose it support in the long-run. Whether or not you agree, the comparison shows that humanity has the attitude and practical capacity to destroy sentient beings on a vast scale and this makes some people stop to consider their role in the slaughter and make other people take action against it.
References
(1) Spira, Henry. Fighting to Win. In Peter Singer (ed): In Defense of Animals. Basil Blackwell: New York. 1985:194-208.
(2) Live Swine Selected Countries Summary. Production (Pig Crop). In Livestock and Poultry: World Markets and Trade. United States Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, Office of Global Analysis. Circular Series DL&P 2-07 November 2007. www.fas.usda.gov (accessed February 2008).
(3a) Livestock and Poultry: World Markets and Trade. United States Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, Office of Global Analysis. Circular Series DL&P 2-07 November 2007. www.fas.usda.gov (accessed February 2008.)
(3b) The World Egg Industry - a few facts and figures. International Egg Commission (web site accessed February 2008.)
(4) Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger, Art and Politics. 1990:34. (This quote is sometimes mis-attributed to Heidegger's 1954 essay, The Question Concerning Technology.)
(5) Patterson, Charles. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. Lantern Books: New York. 2002.
| How to Do Animal Rights - and Win the War on Animals. © Roger (Ben) Panaman, April 2008. All rights reserved. |