Animals Suffer a Perpetual 'Holocaust'

'Kay

Isaac Bashevis Singer fled Nazi Europe in 1935 and came to this country. He married my grandmother, who had escaped from Hitler's Germany in 1940. He went on to become a lauded author and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His family -- those who stayed behind -- were killed in the concentration camps.

My grandfather was also a principled vegetarian. He was one of the first to equate the wholesale slaughter of humans to what we perpetrate against animals every day in slaughterhouses. He realized that the systems of oppression and murder that had been used in the Holocaust were the systems being used to confine, oppress and slaughter animals. He attributed to a character in one of his books something he believed in himself: "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis. For [them], it is an eternal Treblinka."

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, has come under fire from the Anti-Defamation League for a campaign highlighting my grandfather's ideas as well as writings from others -- including German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was forced into exile by the Nazis, and Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, who was imprisoned in Dachau -- that compare the suffering of Holocaust victims with that of farmed animals.

How does one "oppress" an animal?

I don't know what to say here exactly. Yes, there is such a thing as animal abuse, but understand this, I love animals, I respect animals, and I also remember that animals ain't people. They just ain't. I can forgive any person who survived a deathcamp a little looniness, I cannot even comprehend what they went through, but I don't have to take it seriously either.

As a chef I'm always amused by this kind of stuff. I have a story. I used to work at an East Coast resort in Virginia. We had beautiful bay windows in the dining room that overlooked the lush manicured lawns and a graceful fountain. Ducks would gather in the mist and float around serenely in the pool in Spring and Summer and during those times sales of Duck entrees plummeted. As soon as the Ducks migrated and people couldn't see them anymore, Duck sales went through the roof, in fact it was our biggest seller, as soon as people didn't have to look at them.

I think of those folks whenever I hear people bleating about this crap.

I think most slaughter these days is as humane as it can be, but, it is slaughter after all. Slaughter is killing and will always have some element of the brutal associated with it.

But to compare the slaughter of chickens to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust?

Well...That's just loopy.

PS-If you ask nice I may share the story of the loopy female California chef and the suckling pig, if you ask nice.

h/t Stop The ACLU

PETA Loonies
Stephen R. Dujack
Holocaust?