Holocaust analogy in animal rights

Individuals and groups have drawn direct comparisons between animal cruelty and the Holocaust. The analogies began soon after the end of World War II, when literary figures, many of them Holocaust survivors, Jewish or both, began to draw parallels between the treatment of animals by humans and the treatments of prisoners in Nazi death camps. The Letter Writer, a 1968 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a literary work often cited as the seminal use of the analogy. The comparison has been criticized by organizations that campaign against antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, particularly since 2006, when PETA began to make heavy use of the analogy as part of campaigns for improved animal welfare.

Comparisons

Perhaps the earliest use of the analogy comes from Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, a German concentration camp survivor and journalist, who wrote in 1940 in his "Dachau Diaries" from inside the Dachau Concentration Camp that "I have suffered so much myself that I can feel other creatures' suffering by virtue of my own". He further wrote, "I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale".

Another Holocaust survivor who has written on the subject is Alex Hershaft, now a vegan activist, who also compared the treatment of livestock to the Holocaust. He has stated that "We're focusing on the victims rather than the cancer of oppression itself", and that "I noted with horror the striking similarities between what the Nazis did to my family and my people, and what we do to animals we raise for food: the branding or tattooing of serial numbers to identify victims, the use of cattle cars to transport victims to their death, the crowded housing of victims in wood crates, the arbitrary designation of who lives and who dies — the Christian lives, the Jew dies; the dog lives, the pig dies." Polish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, made the comparison in several of his stories. In the 1968 The Letter Writer, the protagonist says, "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka." In The Penitent the protagonist says "when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi". J. M. Coetzee, a South African–Australian writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, said of the Nazis' treatment of Jews: "... in the 20th century, a group of powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what they preferred to call the processing – of human beings." In her 2005 book The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities, animal rights advocate Karen Davis says that the horrors of the Holocaust and the treatment of animals by contemporary society can and should be "reasonably and enlighteningly compared" as a way to raise awareness to something that "most people do not want to hear about, or have trouble imagining, or would just as soon forget." The general population cannot fathom the comparison, she maintains, as the Holocaust has become "iconic and 'historical,' whereas the human manufacture of animal suffering is so pervasive that many people find it hard to even regard the slaughter of animals as a form of violence." She quotes Matt Prescott, creator of PETA's controversial "Holocaust on your Plate" campaign, who says "Holocaust victims WERE treated like animals, and so logically we can conclude that animals are treated like Holocaust victims." In 2014, philosopher and animal rights activist Steven Best argued that using a phrase like "animal holocaust" in a serious way can help illuminate the "incomprehensible scale and scope of the violence humans inflict on animals," which amounts to hundreds of billions of terrestrial and aquatic animals killed annually just for food alone. He also notes that conditions on CAFOs "resemble the mechanized production lines of concentration camps" where animals are "forced to produce maximal quantities of meat milk and eggs – an intense coercion that takes place through physical confinement but also now through chemical and genetic manipulation. As typical in Nazi compounds, this forced and intensive labor terminates in death." Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar wrote that if we had not accepted the inhumane transportation of animals to the slaughterhouses we would not have accepted the transportation of humans to the concentration camps. In another article, she wrote that every act of cruelty suffered by thousands of living creatures is a crime against humanity. American animal rights activist Gary Yourofsky compared factory farms to concentration camps. He has stated, "Jews have been, while animals still are, treated like nothing, as if their lives don't matter. You can also compare the two holocausts this way. ... Go to the nearest cow or pig slaughterhouse and remove the animals and replace them with humans. You have now re-created Birkenau." The ADL has also listed a number of animal rights groups that have made the comparison. No Compromise, a website for radical animal liberationists, likened the direct action of the Animal Liberation Front to "those who destroyed Forever [sic] the gas chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz".

PETA comments and imagery

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