The Animal Holocaust
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Last updated
Holocaust, n, 1 Destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war - Oxford Dictionaries via Google A holocaust is not to be confused with the historical event The Holocaust. Objectively, animal agriculture has and continues to actively slaughter on a mass scale. Therefore, objectively, by definition, what animal agriculture is doing is a holocaust.
Critics of the use of the term 'the animal holocaust' typically claim as their core argument that those who use this term are antisemitic. However: 1. Comparing animal agriculture to The Holocaust is an effective way to communicate the seriousness of the situation. 2. Nothing about this harms Jewish people. 3. People who have survived The Holocaust have themselves described animal agriculture this way.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish-American writer who has written in Yiddish and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, is a famous example. His childhood friends died in The Holocaust. In his books he has likened our treatment of other animals to The Holocaust and the behaviour of Nazis: "What the Nazis had done to the Jews, man was doing to animals" - Enemies "In relation to them [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka" - The Letter Writer (Treblinka was an extermination camp.) Several other qualified people have made similar comments: "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals." - Theodor W. Adorno, a Jewish-German philosopher Charles Patterson, whose father died fighting in World War 2 before he had a chance to know him, is a holocaust scholar, has been a professor at multiple institutions, and authored the book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust - the title of which borrowed from Isaac Bashevis Singer's aforementioned quote. The United States Holocaust memorial museum features this book. Another great example of this term put in practice is the Holocaust on Your Plate campaign by PETA. This campaign was created by the Jewish man Matt Prescott who had personally suffered the loss of relatives in Nazi concentration camps. The campaign was additionally funded by a Jewish philanthropist. "The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible—that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different or inferior'—is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day. ... The fact is, all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness. We're asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms." - Matt Prescott
John Sanbonmatsu said during a 2007 ISUD Hiroshima conference that dehumanization, viewed from a different perspective, is simply leveraging the already-existent speciesism ideology in order to make the objectification of humans easier. But if we were to eliminate speciesism, we would be taking away that tool and would make it harder to objectify and commit atrocities against humans. In other words, people who believe we can objectify nonhuman animals when it's convenient don't have a far leap to make to conclude that they can objectify other humans when it's convenient.