An understandable resentment can
come from the sense that the uniqueness of one’s own group’s
experience with suffering is appropriated to fit the
experience of another group. One group’s experience with
suffering is unique, but not in such a way that it precludes
comparisons or analogies with the suffering of other groups.
For this reason, an experience of oppression, such as the
Holocaust, may serve as an appropriate metaphor to reveal
similarities inherent in other forms of oppression, such as
the oppression of nonhuman animals by human
beings.
_________________________
“Holocaust victims WERE treated
like animals, and so logically we can conclude that animals
are treated like Holocaust victims.” – Matt Prescott, creator of PETA’s “Holocaust on Your
Plate” campaign
“They are being treated as if
they were animals.” International Red Cross
Committee about prisoners in Iraq under American
supervision.
A
metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase
denoting one kind of object, action, or experience is used in
place of another to suggest a likeness between them. A purpose
of metaphor is to provide a familiar language and imagery to
characterize new perceptions. In the case of atrocity, a key
purpose of these perceptions is to generate concern and
inspire action on behalf of the victims. When the oppression
of one group is used metaphorically to illuminate the
oppression of another group, justice requires that the
oppression that forms the basis of the comparison be
comprehended in its own right. The originating oppression that
generates the metaphor must not be treated as a mere figure of
speech, a mere point of reference. It must not be treated
illogically as a lesser matter than that which it is being
used to draw attention to.
However, if these requirements
have been met, there is no good reason to insist that one form
of suffering and oppression is so exclusive that it may not be
used to raise moral concerns about any other form of
oppression. A perfect match of oppressions or calculus of
which group suffered more isn’t necessary to make reasonable
comparisons between them. If a person is offended by the
comparisons regardless, it may be that the resentment is more
proprietary than just, and thereby represents an arbitrary
delimiting of moral boundaries.
That there could be a link
between the Third Reich and society’s treatment of nonhuman
animals is hard for most people to grasp. That nonhuman
animals could suffer as horribly as humans in being reduced to
industrialized products and industrial waste and treated with
complete contempt– a clear link between Nazism and factory
farming – contradicts thousands of years of teachings that
humans are superior to animals in all respects. Not only is
this a “humans versus animals” issue in the minds of most, but
by this time the Holocaust has become iconic and “historical,”
whereas the human manufacture of animal suffering is so
“normal” and pervasive that many people find it hard even to
regard the slaughter of animals as a form of violence. Yet the
continuity is there. In this article I argue that comparing
our systemic abuse of nonhuman animals to the Holocaust can
enable us to gain some concrete knowledge about the
destructive elements in human nature and what it means to be
at the mercy of these elements. And I ask whether we
have the ability – the will – to transform ourselves since we
claim to hate violence and to value life.
Invoking the Pain of
Others
Many Jewish people resent the
comparisons that are currently being made by some animal
advocates between the human-imposed suffering endured by
millions of Jews under the Nazis and billions of nonhuman
animals each year at the hands of animal exploiters. For, as
Susan Sontag says in her book, Regarding the Pain of
Others, “It is intolerable to have one’s own sufferings
twinned with anybody else’s” (2003, 113). Tellingly, Sontag
does not include animals in her book on the iconography of
suffering or submit her particular claim about the
intolerability of “twinned” suffering to analysis. She does,
however, cite the reaction of the Sarajevans to a photo
gallery of their plight that included images of the Somalians’
plight. “For the Sarajevans, it was . . . simple. To set their
sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to
compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo’s martyrdom to a mere
instance. The atrocities taking place in Sarajevo have nothing to do with what happens in
Africa, they exclaimed” (Sontag,
113).
While noting that “[u]ndoubtedly
there was a racist tinge to their indignation” (113), Sontag
assumes that sufferings can be legitimately compared, but she
does not pursue the matter. Nonetheless, two important issues
emerge. First, members of an oppressed group often resent
comparisons of their suffering with members of another
oppressed group because they believe that the analogy demotes
their suffering from something unique to “a mere instance” of
generic suffering. Second, more than this, a group may feel
that their suffering actually is more important than that of
any other group. The question of just comparisons between or
among different groups is important, since it is not just any
suffering, but the unjust, deliberately imposed suffering
one’s group has already endured (suffering intentionally
imposed by humans as opposed to suffering incurred in the wake
of a natural disaster such as an earthquake) which adds to the
resentment one feels in having to protect one’s own group
experience from appropriation by another goup. The original
injustice should not be compounded by the further injustice of
being used, in Richard Kahn’s words,
merely as “an emblem for more pressing matters” (Kahn 2004).
A
problem that remains to be solved, notwithstanding, is how to
win attention to sufferers and suffering that most people do
not want to hear about, or have trouble imagining, or would
just as soon forget. One way is to use an analogy (a logical
parallel), or a metaphor (a suggested likeness) that already
has meaning and resonance in the public mind. For example,
oppressed people, such as slaughterhouse workers, say of
themselves, “We are treated like animals,” and people who
raise chickens for the poultry industry likewise compare
themselves in the situation they are in to “animals.”
Matt Prescott, the creator of
the controversial “Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit for People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), argues that the
analogy works both ways. His exhibit, which consists of eight
60-square-foot panels, each juxtaposing photographs of factory
farm and slaughterhouses with photographs from Nazi death
camps, depicts the point made by Yiddish writer and Nobel
laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who in his short story “The
Letter Writer,” wrote, “In relation to [animals], all people
are Nazis.”. Prescott, who is himself a Jew with relatives who
died under the Nazis, says that “when Holocaust survivors
today try to relate the horrors they lived through, this is
the very first analogy that comes to mind. They say, ‘we were
treated like animals’” (Sept. 12, 2003).
Treatment versus
Experience
However, the appropriation of
animal suffering to express human suffering is seldom accorded
the justice of reciprocity. On the contrary, at the time of
this writing, many Jewish people have expressed indignation
over comparisons that are being made by animal advocates
between the human-imposed suffering endured by billions of
nonhuman animals each year and the suffering endured by
millions of Jews under the Nazis. At the same time, many Jews
support the comparisons and were sensitized to animal
slaughter after experiencing or conceptualizing the massacre
of Jews, as Charles Patterson demonstrates throughout his
book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust (2002). My own stance on the issue appeared in a
1999 profile of my work in The Washington Post. In “For
the Birds,” Washington Post writer Tamara Jones
declared at the outset: “Yes, Karen
Davis is serious when she says the extermination of 7 billion
broiler chickens is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust”
(Jones 1999, F1). After publication of the article, I received
a voice-mail message denouncing my stance as anti-Semitic,
even though the article stressed how my preoccupation with the
evils perpetrated on innocent victims under Hitler had evolved
to illuminate my awareness of humanity’s relentless
institutionalized assault upon nonhuman animals (Jones, F5).
In
a letter to the editor, an indignant writer justifies using
animals to express human Holocaust suffering, but not the
reverse: “Yes, the Nazis treated us like animals, maybe worse
than animals,” she writes. “But it’s just an expression we
use” (Jacobs 2003). It is acceptable, in other words, to
appropriate the treatment of nonhuman animals to characterize
one’s own mistreatment, but not the other way around.
Advocates of this position believe that they can legitimately
use the experience of nonhuman animals to characterize their
own experience, even when the animals’ experience has not been
duly acknowledged or imaginatively conceived of to any degree,
and perhaps has been dismissed without further inquiry. If so,
it may be asked why anyone would compromise the case for the
incomparability of one’s own suffering by comparing it to the
suffering of animals, given that nonhuman animals and their
suffering are regarded as vastly inferior.
But
it is precisely the distinction between “treatment” and
“experience” that fuels resentment. To be “treated like
animals” is an insult because the experience of animals is
assumed to be vastly inferior to that of any human being, most
of all one’s particular group. The worth of animals has
traditionally been regarded as instrumental worth only.
“Animals were put on earth for humans to use” is the standard
formula, with “responsibly” or “humanely” tacked on as an
afterthought. Presuming an immeasurable gulf between humans
and animals allows one to appropriate animal abuse as a
metaphor for one’s own mistreatment while simultaneously
dismissing the metaphor, and hence the “animals,” as “just an
expression.” In this figure of speech the term “animal” has no
concrete or independent meaning even as “animal.” It is simply
a code word for “humans badly treated by other humans,” though
not necessarily in a sense that is troubling to the speaker,
who may be as likely to dismiss the suffering of nonhuman
animals with another formula, “They’re only animals.”
Invisible Mass
Suffering
None of us knows, omnisciently,
who suffers more in conditions of horror, human or nonhuman
individuals. It may be that beyond a certain point, we cannot
fully apprehend the reality of anyone else’s suffering. In her
book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry says that “A
person whose pain it is, knows it effortlessly, the person
whose pain it is not, cannot know it even with effort.” While
Scarry’s point is about human pain and the inability of other
people to fathom it, what she says could apply to nonhuman
animal pain and suffering as well: “It is easy to remain
wholly unaware of its existence; even with effort, one may
remain in doubt about its existence or may retain the
astonishing freedom of denying its existence; and finally, if
with the best effort of sustained attention one successfully
apprehends it, the aversiveness of the ‘it’ one apprehends
will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual ‘it’” (Scarry
1985, 4; quoted in Adams 1996, 183).
The
problem of apprehending the pain of others is increased when
the others are in a situation of mass suffering. The
individual is submerged in a sea of suffering from the
standpoint of onlookers. This is the opposite of the personal
experience of being inside one’s private hell while engulfed
by the hell of others. No wonder people who have suffered as
whole populations are desperate to be seen. No wonder
they resent having their suffering compared to the suffering
of another group. What is felt to be even worse than being
“twinned” with another group is to be indistinguishable to all
forms of consciousness outside one’s own consciousness, which
will be obliterated in one’s own death.1
A
fundamental difficulty in drawing attention to the plight of
factory-farmed animals is, similarly, that every situation in
which they appear is a mass situation, one that appears to be,
as in reality it is, a limitless expanse of animal suffering
and horror (Davis 2004). Every factory-farm scene replicates
this expanse, mirroring its magnitude of unmanageability.
Except for the “veal” calf, whose solitary confinement stall
and large sad eyes draw attention to him or herself as a
desolate individual, all that most people see in looking at
animal factories are endless rows of battery-caged hens,
wall-to-wall turkeys, thousands of chickens or pigs. What they
hear is deathly silence or indistinguishable "noise.” They see
a brownish sea of bodies without conflict, plot, or endpoint.
To
the public eye, the sheer number and expanse of animals
surrounded by metal, wires, dung, dander, and dust renders all
of them invisible and impersonal. There are no “individuals”
and no drama on which to focus, only a scene of abstract
suffering. Their horrifying pain is not even minimally grasped
by most viewers, who are socialized not to perceive animals,
especially “food” animals, as individuals with feelings. These
dispassionate onlookers have no concept of animals as sentient
beings, let alone as individuals with projects of their own of
which they have been stripped, such as their own family life
and the comfort it brings, which was their birthright in
nature.2
Notwithstanding, it is
reasonable to assume that animals imprisoned within
confinement systems suffer even more, in certain respects,
than do humans who are similarly confined. This occurs in a
similar way that a mentally impaired person might experience
dimensions of suffering in being rough-handled, imprisoned,
and shouted at that elude a person capable of conceptualizing
the experience. Indeed, one who is capable of conceptualizing
one’s own suffering may be unable to grasp what it feels like
to suffer without being able to conceptualize it, of being in
a condition that could add to, rather than reduce, the
suffering. It is in this quite different sense from what is
usually meant, when we are told that it is “meaningless” to
compare the suffering of a chicken with that of a human being,
that the claim resonates. The biologist, Marian Stamp Dawkins,
says that other animal species “may suffer in states that no
human has ever dreamed of or experienced” (Dawkins 1985, 29).
Matthew Scully writes in Dominion of the pain and
suffering of animals in human confinement
systems:
For
all we know, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate,
blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an
animal shelter or slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal
suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and
all-encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts
that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but
consolation. Whatever’s going on inside their heads, it
doesn’t seem “mere” to them. (2002, 7)
The 9/11 Controversy
For
many Americans, the worst, most unjust suffering to befall
anyone happened on September 11, 2001. Mark Slouka, in his essay “A
Year Later,” in Harper’s Magazine, puzzled over “how it
was possible for a man’s faith to sail over Auschwitz, say,
only to founder on the World Trade Center” (Slouka 2002, 37). How was it that so many
intelligent people he knew, who had lived though the
20th century and knew something about history,
actually insisted “that everything is different now,” as a
result of 9/11, as though, Slouka marveled, “only our
sorrow would weigh in the record”? People who said they’d
never be the same again never said that while watching on
television or reading in the newspaper about other people’s
and other nations’ calamities. In saying that the world as a
result of the 9/11 attack was “different now,” they didn’t
mean that “before the 9/11 attack I was blind, but now I see
the suffering that is going on and that has been going on all
around me, to which I might be a contributor, God forbid.” No,
they meant that an incomparable and superior outrage had
occurred. It happened to Americans. It happened to them:
“Rwanda? Bosnia? Couldn’t help but feel
sorry for those folks, but let’s face it: Rwanda did not have a covenant
with God. And Jesus was not a Sarajevan,” Slouka spoofed
(39).
Following the 9/11 attack, I
published a letter (Davis 2001; 2002) that raised such consternation in
the mainstream media that it got me on the Howard Stern show
(April 10,
2002; August 27, 2004). Without seeking to diminish the
horror of 9/11, I wrote that the people who died in the attack
arguably did not suffer more terrible deaths than animals in
slaughterhouses suffer every day. Using chickens as an
example, I observed that in addition to the much larger number
of innocent chickens who were killed (more than 8.5 billion
chickens in the United States in 2001), and the horrible
deaths they endured in the slaughter plants that day, and
every day, one had to account for the misery of their lives
leading up to their horrible death, including the terror
attack they had suffered several hours or days before they
were killed, euphemistically referred to as “chicken
catching.”
I
compared all this to the relatively satisfying lives of the
majority of human victims of 9/11 prior to the attack and
added that we humans have a plethora of palliatives, ranging
from proclaiming ourselves heroes and plotting revenge against
our malefactors to the consolation of family and friends and
the relief of painkilling drugs and alcoholic beverages.
Moreover, whereas human animals have the ability to make some
sort of sense of the tragedy, the chickens, in contrast, have
no cognitive insulation, no compensation, presumably no
comprehension of the causes of their suffering, and thus no
psychological relief from their suffering. The fact that
intensively raised chickens are forced to live in systems that
reflect our dispositions, not theirs, and that these systems
are inimical to their basic nature (as revealed by their
behavior, physical breakdown, and other indicators), shows
that they are suffering in ways that could equal and even
exceed anything that we have known. Industry sources note, for
example, that hens caged for egg production are so overwrought
that they exhibit the "emotionality” of “hysteria,” and that
something as simple as an electrical storm can produce “an
outbreak of hysteria” in four-to-eight-week-old “broiler”
chickens confined by the thousands in buildings (Bell and
Weaver 2002, 89; Clark, et al. 2004, 2).
I
wrote my rebuttal in response to comments made by philosopher
Peter Singer, who in a review of Joan Dunayer’s book,
Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (2001)
challenged the contention that we should use equally strong
words for human and nonhuman suffering or death. He wrote:
“Reading this suggestion just a few days after the killing of
several thousand people at the World Trade Centre, I have to
demure. It is not speciesist to think that this event was a
greater tragedy than the killing of several million chickens,
which no doubt also occurred on September 11, as it occurs on
every working day in the United
States. There are reasons for thinking
that the deaths of beings with family ties as close as those
between the people killed at the World Trade Centre and their
loved ones are more tragic than the deaths of beings without
those ties; and there is more than could be said about the
kind of loss that death is to beings who have a high degree of
self-awareness, and a vivid sense of their own existence over
time” (Singer 2002, 36).
There are reasons for contesting
this statement of assumed superiority of the human suffering
caused by 9/11 over that of the chickens in slaughterhouses,
starting with the fact that it is not lofty “tragedy” that’s
at issue in Dunayer’s book Singer is challenging, but raw
suffering. 3 Moreover,
there is evidence that the highly social chicken, who is
endowed with a “complex nervous system designed to form a
multitude of memories and to make complex decisions” (Rogers
1995, 218), has self-awareness and a sense of personal
existence over time. And who are we to say what bonds chickens
living together in the chicken houses might or might not have
formed? The chickens at United Poultry Concerns (the sanctuary
that I run) form close personal attachments. Even chicken
exploiters admit that they do (Davis 1996, 35, 148). The
avian cognition specialist, Lesley J. Rogers, quoted above,
says in her book, The Development of Brain and Behaviour in
the Chicken, that modern studies of birds, including
chickens, “throw the fallacies of previous assumptions about
the inferiority of avian cognition into sharp relief” (Rogers,
218).
Cognitive Distance from Nonhuman
Animal Suffering
But
even if it could be proven that chickens and other nonhuman
animals suffer less than humans condemned to similar
situations, this would not mean that nonhuman animals do not
suffer profoundly, nor does it provide justification for
harming them. Scientists tell us, for example, that hens in
transport trucks have been shown “to experience a level of
fear comparable to that induced by exposure to a
high-intensity electric shock” (Mills and Nicol 1990, 212).
What more do we need to know? Our cognitive distance from
nonhuman animal suffering constitutes neither an argument nor
evidence as to who suffers more under horrific circumstances,
humans or nonhumans. Even for animal advocates, words like
“slaughter,” “cages,” “debeaking,” “forced molting,” and
“ammonia burn” can lose their edge, causing us to forget that
what have become routine matters in our minds – like “the
killing of several million chickens that occurs on every
single working day in the United States,” in Peter Singer’s
reality-blunting phrase – is a fresh experience for each bird
who is forced to endure what these words signify.
In
any case, the cognitive distance can be reduced. Vicarious
suffering is possible with respect to the members of not just
one’s own species but also other animal species, to whom we
are linked through evolution. As Marian Stamp Dawkins says in
her essay, “The Scientific Basis for Assessing Suffering in
Animals,” just as the lack of absolute certainty does not stop
us from making assumptions about feelings in other people, so
“it is possible to build up a reasonably convincing picture of
what animals experience if the right facts about them are
accumulated” (Dawkins 1985, 28).
Animal Sacrifice and the
Holocaust: Falsifying the Fate of
Victims
In
“Taking Life or ‘Taking On Life,’” Carol J. Adams and Marjorie
Procter-Smith cite the following anecdote from the
19th-century women’s movement:
When Pundita Ramabia was in this
country she saw a hen carried to market with its [sic]
head downward. This Christian method of treating a poor, dumb
creature caused the heathen woman to cry out, “Oh, how cruel
to carry a hen with its head down!” and she quickly received
the reply, “Why, the hen does not mind it”; and in her heathen
innocence she inquired, “Did you ask the hen?” (Adams and
Procter-Smith 1993, 304)
Similar to the myths circulated
by US slavery owners about their human “property” during the
nineteenth century, animal victimizers typically insist that
their victims don’t mind their plight, or that they don’t
experience it “as you or I would,” or that the victims are
complicit in their plight, even, on occasion, to the point of
gratitude. The victims, in other words, are not really
“innocent.” Thus, for example, at his trial, Nazi leader Adolf
Eichmann pleaded, regarding his deportation of tens of
thousands of Jews to their deaths, that the Jews “desired” to
emigrate, and that “he, Eichmann, was there to help them”
(Arendt, 48). This is not exceptional psychology, as students
of sexual assault – one form of rape – are well aware. Indeed,
victimizers are very often likely to represent themselves, and
to be upheld by their sympathizers, as the innocent parties in
their orchestrations of the suffering and death of others. In
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt cites an Egyptian
deputy foreign minister who claimed, for instance, that Hitler
was “innocent of the slaughter of the Jews; he was a victim of
the Zionists, who had ‘compelled him to perpetrate crimes that
would eventually enable them to achieve their aim – the
creation of the State of Israel’” (Arendt 1994, 20). If you
want to hurt someone and maintain a clean conscience about it,
chances are you will invoke arguments along one or more of
these lines: the slave/animal doesn’t feel, or doesn’t know or
care, is complicit, or isn’t even there. In the latter
case the victim is configured as an
illusion.
This is a commonplace of
victimizer psychology: the transformation of the sacrificial
victim into a manifestation of something else in disguise, a
being or spirit imprisoned in the manifestation that wants to
be “let out,” a “vermin” or viral infection that requires a
bloodletting ceremony of purgation to protect the community,
“race,” or nation. In such cases, not only is the victim
reconfigured to suit the victimizer’s agenda, but the
victimizer too is different from what he or she appears to be
– a murderer, say, as in the portrayal of Hitler is, “in
reality,” the benignly-motivated liberator of a spiritual wish
within the Jewish people to be free (think also of U.S.
president George W. Bush as the alleged “liberator” of the
Iraqi people).
To
this day, animals are ritually sacrificed by Hindus whose
practice is based on the idea that
“the sacrifice of an animal is not really the killing of an
animal.” The animal to be sacrificed “is not considered an
animal,” but is, instead, “a symbol of those powers for which
the sacrificial ritual stands” (Lal 1986, 201). Nor are Hindus
the only ones who transmute animals rhetorically in this way.
Consider the idea presented by
Christian theologian Andrew Linzey, who in trying to rescue
nonhuman animals from the traditional Christian opprobrium and
moral indifference cites an interpretation in which animal
sacrifice “is best seen as the freeing of animal life to be
with God” (Linzey 1986, 130).
Indeed there is a tradition of
thought in ancient Greek religion, in Judaic mysticism, and in
other sectors of human culture in which nonhumans are said to
benefit from being sacrificed by humans to the point of
voluntarily “stretching out their necks” to assist in being
slaughtered (Porphyry 1965, 36-37; Schochet 1984, 236-244;
Schwartz 2001, 124-127). Advertisers tell us that pigs
want to become Oscar Meyer wieners, and in the sacrificial
language of Western science, animals who are but “tools of
research” under one aspect stand forth as “engaged” in animal
experimentation (Paul-Murphy, et al. 2004, 9). As Schochet
says about the doctrine of metempsychosis (the belief that
human souls can become trapped in “lower” life forms as
punishment for their misdeeds), this doctrine, rather than
promoting vegetarianism, “militated in favor of the
consumption of flesh, for one thereby did the animal a favor”
in releasing the human soul within to pursue its higher
destiny (Schochet 244).
Challenges such as the
“Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit, and Charles Patterson’s
book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust (2002), help to restore a more likely version of
the animals’ point of view. They stimulate people to confront
how animals must feel being torn from their mothers at birth,
mutilated, dumped in filthy dark buildings, treated like trash
and brutally murdered. They force us to recognize that these
animals, powerless to defend themselves, are condemned to the
same excremental universe, the same abyss of abasement,
loneliness, pain, and terror of imprisonment as were the Jews,
Gypsies, homosexuals, and others characterized as “life
unworthy of life” under the Nazis. They flout the taboos and
expose the rationalizations. They puncture the solipsism in
which we surround ourselves, in order to rescue billions of
unacknowledged animal victims from anonymity and the ignominy
and injustice of being consigned to the fate of a false and
inferior existence in our minds.
The Absent
Referent
The
holocausts - burnt offerings – of the ancient Hebrews
consisted of countless nonhuman animals, as did the religious
animal sacrifices conducted throughout the ancient world by
the Greeks, Hindus, Muslims, Native Americans, and other
cultures (Regan 1986; Davis 2001, 33-43). Yet we are not
supposed to regard those animals or their counterparts in
today’s world, where the consumption of animals for food rises
to ever-greater levels. We are not supposed to contemplate the
experience of animals in being turned into “burnt offerings,”
meat, metaphors, and other forms that obliterate their lives,
personalities, feelings, and identities that we choose to
confer.
The
“Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit restores what feminist
writer, Carol Adams, refers to in The Sexual Politics of
Meat as the “absent referent” (Adams 1990; 2000, 40-48).
An absent referent is an individual or group whose fate is
“transmuted into a metaphor for someone else’s existence or
fate” without being acknowledged in its own right. According
to Adams, “Metaphorically, the absent
referent can be anything whose original meaning is undercut as
it is absorbed into a different hierarchy of meaning.” The
rape of women, for example, can be applied metaphorically to
the “rape” of the earth in such a way as to obliterate women.
As Adams explains:
The
absent referent is both there and not there. It is there
through inference, but its meaningfulness reflects only upon
what it refers to because the originating, literal, experience
that contributes the meaning is not there. We fail to accord
this absent referent its own existence. (1990,
42)
In
the role of absent referents, nonhuman animals become
metaphors for describing human experience at the same time
that “the originating oppression of animals that generates the
power of the metaphor” is unacknowledged (Adams, 43), as when people say, “We’re treated like
animals.” The meaning of the animals’ fate, for the animals
themselves, for each individual him and her, is absorbed into
a human-centered hierarchy in which the animals do not count,
or even exist, apart from how humans use, or have used, them.
Our use becomes their ontology – “this is what they are”
– and their teleology – “this is what they were made for.”
This process of “obscuring the
face of the other,” as Maxwell Schnurer describes in his
essay, “At the Gates of Hell,” is “vital to the reduction of
living beings to objects upon whom atrocities can be heaped”
(2004; 109, 117). And it is not species-specific. As Schnurer
explains the process of obscuring the face of the other to
achieve self-exoneration:
In
the case of the Holocaust, it was necessary to sustain a
complex infrastructure that enabled each participant to
disguise his or her responsibility. In the case of animals, as
Adams notes, it is essential that the
acts of killing, enslaving, and torturing animals be well
hidden from sight, so that the consumer only ever sees the
finished “product.” For both systems of oppression, it is
critical that the process be as compartmentalized as possible.
The reason to obscure the face of suffering is as obvious as
it is hidden – the vision of terrible actions can elicit
sympathy and compassion, and often call for remedy.
(117)
Who “Owns” the Holocaust?
The
word holocaust is not species-specific, and therefore Jews
have no ownership rights over it. From whatever source the
word “Holocaust,” as it is now employed, came from, Jews have
taken it over from the Greek word, holokauston, which
in ancient times denoted their own and others’ cultural
practice of sacrificing animals, to designate the Nazi
extermination of the European Jews.4
Conceivably, those animals could complain that their
experience of being forcibly turned into burnt offerings (and
to please or sate a god they would not necessarily have
acknowledged as their god) has been unjustly appropriated by
their victimizers, who are robbing them of their
original experience of suffering. Through PETA’s “Holocaust on
Your Plate” exhibit, the animals reclaim their
experience, past, present, and future. Taking the animals’
view it may be said of them, as Bruno Bettelheim said of the
millions of Jews and others who were systematically
slaughtered by the Nazis, that “while these millions were
slaughtered for an idea, they did
not die for one” (Bettelheim 1980,
93).
In
Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the
Holocaust, Boria Sax observes that the very word
Holocaust “pertains to animal sacrifice.” Holocaust
means “burning of the whole” (Sax 2000, 156). Sax explains
that among the people of the ancient Mediterranean, the slaughter of animals was
generally “a festive occasion with the inedible parts, bones,
and gall bladder together with a little meat left on the altar
for a deity, while the rest was consumed by human beings.”
In
Hebrew sacrifice, a Holocaust was the entire animal “given to
Yahweh to be consumed by fire. The prototype was the sacrifice
of the shepherd Abel to Yahweh from his flock.” Use of the
word holocaust for the Nazi murders, according to Sax, is
“based on an identification between the Jewish people and the
sacrificed animal. The imagery parallels the way Christ is
traditionally represented as the sacrificial lamb. In a
strange way the term Holocaust equates the Nazis, as
those who perform the sacrifice, with priests of ancient
Israel” (Sax,
156).
Sax
says that the term holocaust was “first popularized in the
1960s by American Jews” (156). There was a felt need in the
late 1950s, according to James E. Young in Writing and
Rewriting the Holocaust, to distinguish between the
particular Jewish experience under Hitler and the general
experience of being a prisoner or killed in World War Two.
Even so, the term holocaust, in being invoked to capture the
essence of a unique catastrophe, was borrowed from ancient
sacrificial usage and Jewish history in order “to grasp the
unfamiliar in familiar terms” (Young 1988, 87).
Nor
did the term holocaust arise strictly in reference to ancient
history. “Holocaust” came to demarcate the experience of
European Jews under the Nazis at a time when the term
holocaust was used to characterize everything from World War I
(“that holocaust swept over the world”) to the “holocaust of
housework” (crashing glassware), as shown by numerous examples
taken from the Palestine Post from 1938 to 1947
(Petrie, 2-3). According to Jon Petrie’s investigation of the
etymology of the word, in the early 1960s, the most common
referent of “holocaust” was nuclear war and destruction. For
example, the cover of the November 4, 1961 magazine The
Nation announces: “SHELTERS WHEN THE HOLOCAUST
COMES.”
Petrie thinks that American
Jewish writers “probably abandoned such words as ‘disaster,’
‘catastrophe,’ and ‘massacre’ in favor of ‘holocaust’ in the
1960s” because “holocaust” with its evocation of the then
dreaded nuclear annihilation effectively conveyed something of
the horror of the Jewish experience during World War Two
(Petrie 2004, 4).
Nobel Prizewinning author Isaac
Bashevis Singer, who grew up in a Polish village where his
father was a Hasidic rabbi, has one of his fictional
characters, Herman Gombiner, say in the story, “The Letter
Writer,” that towards the animals, all humans are Nazis, and
for the animals, every day is Treblinka. (Treblinka was a Nazi
death camp in Poland that began operating in 1942.) Herman,
who lost his entire family to the Nazis, is thinking about a
mouse he befriended whose death he believes he caused, and his
sadness leads to a larger thought:
In
his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy to the mouse who had
shared a portion of her life with him and who, because of him,
had left this earth. “What do they know – all those scholars,
all those philosophers, all the leaders of the world – about
such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the
worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of
creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide
him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In
relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is
an eternal Treblinka. And yet man demands compassion from
heaven” (1935, 271).
Rather than trivializing “Nazi”
and “Treblinka,” this usage conceptualizes these terms and the
events to which they refer, making them stand for a certain
type of atrocity – an extremity of inhumanity, victimization,
and misery – of which there may be more than one
manifestation, if not in every respect, yet in significant
respects. In Enemies: A Love Story, the protagonist,
Herman, visits a zoo. He compares the zoo to a concentration
camp:
The
air here was full of longing – for deserts, hills, valleys,
dens, families. Like the Jews, the animals had been dragged
here from all parts of the world, condemned to isolation and
boredom. Some of them cried out their woes; others remained
mute (Singer quoted in Rosenberger 2004).
Even animal rights author
Roberta Kalechofsky declares, despite her opposition to
Holocaust comparisons, that “Most suffering today, whether of
animals or humans, suffering beyond calculation, whether it is
physiological or the ripping apart of a mother and offspring,
is in the hands of other humans. Pain is a curse, and
gratuitous pain inflicted by humans on other humans or on
animals is evil” (Kalechofsky 2003, 6-7).
An Atrocity Can Be Both Unique
and General
Paradoxically, then, it is
possible to make relevant and enlightening comparisons, while
agreeing with the approach taken by the philosopher, Brian
Luke, towards animal abuse. Luke writes: “My opposition to the
institutionalized exploitation of animals is not based on a
comparison between human and animal treatment, but on a
consideration of the abuse of the animals in and of
itself” (Luke 1996, 81).
Paradoxically, while the words
“Nazi,” “Treblinka,” and “Holocaust” represent unique
historical phenomena, they can also transcend these phenomena
to function more broadly. And a broader approach to the
Holocaust would appear to hold more promise for a more
enlightened and compassionate future, surely, than attempting
to privatize the event to the extent that its only permissible
reference is self-reference. A broader approach also provides
a more just apprehension of past and present atrocities, while
connecting the Nazis and the Holocaust to the larger ethical
challenges confronting humanity.
In
A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the
Americas 1492 to the Present, Native American scholar Ward
Churchill writes that the experience of the Jews under the
Nazis “is unique only in the sense that all such phenomena
exhibit unique characteristics. Genocide, as the nazis
practiced it, was never something suffered exclusively by the
Jews, nor were the nazis singularly guilty of its practice”
(Churchill, 1997, 35-36). Furthermore, Churchill argues in his
Forward to Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on
the Liberation of Animals: “Given that the key to the
‘genocidal mentality’ resides, as virtually all commentators
agree, in the perpetrators’ conscious ‘dehumanization of the
Other’ they have set themselves to exterminating, it follows
that removal of the self-assigned license enjoyed by humans to
do as they will to/with nonhumans can only serve to better the
lot of humans targeted for
dehumanization/subjugation/eradication” (Churchill 2004,
2-3).
Matt Prescott, who directs the
“Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit, argues that “Comparisons to
the Holocaust are undeniable and inescapable not only because
we humans share with all other animals our ability to feel
pain, fear and loneliness, but because the
government-sanctioned oppression of billions of beings, and
the systems we use to abuse and kill them, eerily parallel the
concentration camps.” He explains:
The
methods of the Holocaust exist today in the form of factory
farming where billions of innocent, feeling beings are taken
from their families, trucked hundreds of miles through all
weather extremes, confined in cramped, filthy conditions, and
herded to their deaths. During the Holocaust, hundreds of
thousands of men, women and children died from heat
exhaustion, dehydration, starvation or from freezing to the
sides of cattle cars. Those who arrived at the concentration
camps alive were forced into cramped bunkers where they lived
on top of other dead victims, covered in their own feces and
urine. They were forced to work until their bodies couldn’t
work anymore, and were then herded to their deaths in
assembly-line fashion. Ten billion animals a year in the
U.S. suffer through these same
horrors every single day. We must ask ourselves: sixty years
later, have we learned nothing? Why are we still transporting
animals through all weather extremes, forcing them to endure
extreme heat and cold? Why are we still confining them in
conditions so dirty, the only way to keep them alive is
through the extreme overuse of antibiotics? Why are we still
ripping children away from mothers and leading them by the
necks and legs to the kill floor?
Moreover, Prescott points out
that the United States Holocaust Museum states in its
guidelines for teaching about the Holocaust that “The
Holocaust provides a context for exploring the dangers of
remaining silent, apathetic, and indifferent in the face of
others’ oppression” (2004).
One
of the many questions that emerge from the current debate
about the use of the Holocaust to illuminate humankind’s
relationship to billions of nonhuman animals is the extent to
which the outrage of having one’s own suffering compared to
that of others centers primarily on issues of identity and
uniqueness or on issues of superiority and privilege. The
ownership of superior and unique suffering has many claimants,
but as Isaac Bashevis Singer observed speaking of chickens,
there is no evidence that people are more important than
chickens (Shenker 1991, 11).
There is no evidence, either,
that human suffering, or Jewish suffering, is separate from
all other suffering, or that it needs to be kept separate and
superior in order to maintain its identity. But where, it may
be asked, is the evidence that we humans have had enough of
inflicting massive preventable suffering on one another and on
the individuals of other species, given that we know suffering
so well, and claim to abhor it? In Eternal Treblinka: Our
Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Charles Patterson
concludes that “the sooner we put an end to our cruel and
violent way of life, the better it will be for all of us –
perpetrators, bystanders, and victims” (Patterson 2002, 232).
Who but the Nazi within us disagrees? If we are going to
exterminate someone, let it be the fascist
within.
†Karen
Davis, PhD. is the founder and President of
United Poultry Concerns (www.upc-online.org), a
nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate
and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. She is the
author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside
Look at the Modern Poultry Industry; A Home for Henny;
More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual,
and Reality; and Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey:
A Poultryless “Poultry” Potpourri (a cookbook). Karen is
currently writing a book titled The Holocaust and the
Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing
Atrocities
______________________________
1At the same
time, a human or nonhuman animal’s suffering may be so
extreme, so unnatural and unbearable, that the longing arises
never to be “seen” again. Take the poem “The Snow Leopard in
the MetroToronto Zoo” by Jason Gray:
He pads on
grassy banks behind a fence
with measured paces slow and tense.
Beyond his cage his thoughts are sharp and
white;
he lives a compelled anchorite.
A solid ghost gone blind with all the green,
he waits and waits
to be unseen. (Gray 2003, 56)
2 In fact,
however, when the public is exposed to some of the more
“dramatic” scenes taking place behind the scenes that are
still largely hidden from view – e.g., force-feeding of ducks
and geese to produce foie gras, artificial insemination and
masturbation of “breeder” turkeys on which the commercial
turkey industry is based, treatment of newborn chicks at the
hatchery, candid-camera looks at what really goes on inside a
slaughterhouse – there is a much greater sense of the
individuality of each animal and, one hopes, greater empathy.
Undercover video investigations are starting to make this
happen – to foreground individual animals in their struggle
against their abusers in the midst of the mass-suffering in
which each animal is submerged in factory-farm
settings.
3 Peter Singer’s
position regarding the superiority of most human adult
suffering and death over the suffering and death of most, if
not all, nonhuman beings may be inferred, for example, in his
discussion of damming a river that will adversely affect the
nonhuman animals in the area: “Neither drowning nor starvation
is an easy way to die, and the suffering involved in these
deaths should . . . be given no less weight than we would give
to an equivalent amount of suffering experienced by human
beings. . . . But the argument presented above does not
require us to regard the death of a nonhuman animal as morally
equivalent to the death of a human being, since humans are
capable of foresight and forward planning in ways that
nonhuman animals are not. This is surely relevant to the
seriousness of death, which, in the case of a human being
capable of planning for the future, will thwart these plans,
and which thus causes a loss that is different in kind from
the loss that death causes to beings incapable even of
understanding that they exist over time and have a future. It
is also entirely legitimate to take into account the greater
sense of loss that humans feel when people close to them die;
whether nonhuman animals will feel a sense of loss at the
death of another animal will depend on the social habits of
the species, but in most cases it is unlikely to be as
prolonged, and perhaps not as deep, as the grief that humans
feel” (Singer 2000, 96).
4 Many Jews
don’t like to use the word holocaust anymore because it has
been used to apply to too many things not unique to the Jewish
experience; so some scholars are opting for other words like
Shoah, Churban, the Event, and the Tremendum to try to
recapture some sense of singularity. See, e.g., James E. Young
(1988, 85-89). See also Nathan Snaza
(2004, 12).
References
Adams, Carol.
J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian
Critical Theory. New York, NY: Continuum., 1990;
2000.
Adams, Carol
J., and Marjorie Procter-Smith. “Taking Life or ‘Taking on
Life’?” Ecofeminism and the Sacred.. Ed. Carol J.
Adams. New York,
NY: Continuum. 1994.
Arendt, Hannah.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
New York, NY: Penguin. 1963;1994.
Bell, Donald D.,
and William D. Weaver, Jr., eds. Chicken Meat and Egg
Production, 5th ed. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2002.
Best, Steven
and Anthony J. Nocella II
eds.Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on the
Liberation of Animals. New York, NY: Lantern Books. 2004.
Bettelheim,
Bruno. “The Holocaust: One Generation Later.” Surviving and
Other Essays. New
York, NY: Vintage Press.
1980.
Churchill,
Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in
the Americas 1492 to the
Present. San
Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.
1997.
Churchill,
Ward. Forward: “Illuminating the Philosophy and Methods of
Animal Liberation.” Terrorists or Freedom Fighters:
Reflections on the Liberation of Animals. Ed. Steven Best
and Anthony J. Nocella II.
New York, NY: Lantern Books. 2004.
Clark, Dustan,
et al. “Understanding and Control of Gangrenous Dermatitis in
Poultry Houses.” University of Arkansas
Cooperative Extension Service. 2004.
Davis, Karen.
Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the
Modern Poultry Industry. Summertown, TN: Book Publishing
Company.1996.
Davis, Karen.
More Than a Meal: The Turkey in
History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality. New York: Lantern Books. 2001.
Davis, Karen.
“An Open Letter to Vegan
Voice,” United Poultry Concerns. December 26, 2001.
Published in Vegan Voice No. 9. 2002. NSW,
Australia. (March-May)
17, 2002.
Davis, Karen.
“Open Rescues: Putting a Face on Liberation.” In Terrorists
or Freedom Fighters? A Reflection on the Liberation of
Animals. Steven Best and Anthony
J. Nocella II, eds. New York, NY: Lantern Books. 2004.
Dawkins, Marian
Stamp. “The Scientific Basis for Assessing Suffering in
Animals.” In Defense of Animals. Peter Singer,
ed. New York,
NY: Basil Blackwell.
1985.
Dunayer,
Joan. Animal Equality: Language and Liberation.
Derwood, MD: Ryce Publishing. 2001.
Gray, Jason.
“The Snow Leopard” (In the MetroToronto Zoo). And We
The Creatures. C.J. Sage, ed. San Jose, CA: Dream Horse Press. 2003.
Jacobs, Andrea.
“PETA’s ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ campaign hits Denver.” Intermountain
Jewish News. August 22, 2003.
Jones, Tamara.
“For the Birds.” The Washington Post. November 14, 1999. F1,
F4-F5.
Kahn, Richard.
Email communication to Karen Davis,
February 15, 2004.
Kalechofsky,
Roberta. Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem
with Comparisons. Marblehead, MA: Micah
Publications. 2003.
Lal, Basant K.
“Hindu Perspectives on the Use of Animals in Science.”
Animal Sacrifices: Religious Perspectives on the Use
of Animals in Science. Tom
Regan, ed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
1986.
Linzey, Andrew.
“The Place of Animals in Creation: A Christian View.”
Animal Sacrifices: Religious Perspectives on the Use of
Animals in Science. Tom Regan,
ed. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple
University Press.
1986.
Luke, Brian.
“Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation.” Beyond Animal
Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of
Animals. Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, eds.
New York, NY: Continuum. 1996.
Mills, D.S.,
and C.J. Nicol. 1990. “Tonic immobility in spent hens after
catching and transport.” The Veterinary Record 126.
March 3, 1990: 212. Quoted in Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned
Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry.
Karen Davis. Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company. 1996.
109-110.
Patterson,
Charles. Eternal Treblinka:Our Treatment of Animals
and the Holocaust. New York, NY: Lantern Books. 2002.
Paul-Murphy,
Joanne, et al. “Veterinarians and Biomedical Researchers Agree
Animals Feel Pain.” AWIC Bulletin (National
Agricultural Library Animal
Welfare Information Center) 12.1-2
Summer 2004: 9.
Porphyry.
On Abstinence From Animal Food. Thomas
Taylor, trans. Esme Wynne-Tyson, ed. London & Fontwell:
Centaur Press Ltd. 1965.
Prescott, Matt.
“Giant Graphic Display Shows How Today’s Victims Languish in
Nazi-Like Concentration Camps.” People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA) April 3, 2003.
Prescott, Matt.
Email communication to Karen Davis,
September 12, 2003.
Prescott. Matt.
Email communication to Barbara Lorincz, February 19,
2004.
Regan, Tom, ed.
Animal Sacrifices: Religious Perspectives and the Use of
Animals in Science. Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
1986.
Rogers, Lesley
J. The Development of Brain and Behaviour in the
Chicken. Wallingford, Oxon
(UK), Cab International:
1995.
Rosenberger,
Jack. “Vegetarian Advocate: Isaac Bashevis Singer.” Satya
September 2004. 28-29.
Sax, Boria.
Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the
Holocaust. New
York, NY: Continuum.
2000.
Scarry, Elaine.
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
NY: Oxford
University Press. 1985. Quoted in
Carol J. Adams. “Caring About Suffering.” Carol J. Adams in
Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the
Treatment of Animals. Josephine Donovan and Carol J.
Adams, eds. New York,
NY: Continuum. 1996.
Schnurer,
Maxwell. “At the Gates of Hell: The ALF and the Legacy of
Holocaust Resistance,” Terrorists or Freedom Fighters:
Reflections on the Liberation of Animals. Steven Best and
Anthony J. Nocella II, eds. New York, NY: Lantern Books.
2004.
Schochet,
Elijah Judah. Animal Life in Jewish Tradition: Attitudes
and Relationships. New York, NY: Ktav Publishing
House. 1984.
Schwartz,
Richard H. Judaism and Vegetarianism. New York, NY: Lantern Books.
2001.
Scully,
Matthew. Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of
Animals, and the Call to Mercy. New
York, NY: St.
Martin’s Press. 2002.
Shenker,
Israel.
“The Man Who Talked Back to God: Isaac Bashevis Singer,
1904-91.” The New York Times Book Review, August 11,
1991: 11.
Singer, Isaac
Bashevis. “The Letter Writer.” The Séance and Other
Stories. New
York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
1935. Rpt. in The Collected Stories. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1983:
250-276.
Singer, Peter.
Writings on an Ethical Life. New York, NY: HarperCollins: 2000.
Singer, Peter.
“Book Review: Animal Equality: Language and Liberty by Joan Dunayer
[2001].” Vegan Voice (NSW,
Australia), No. 8 (Dec.-Feb.),
2000: 36.
Slouka, Mark.
“A Year Later: Notes on America’s
Intimations of Mortality.” Harper’s Magazine.
September, 2002: 35-43.
Snaza, Nathan.
“(Im)possible Witness: Viewing PETA’s ‘Holocaust On Your
Plate.’” Center on Animal Liberation Affairs (CALA): Animal
Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal 2.1.
2004.
Young, James E.
Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 1988.
