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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Speaking of the Unspeakable, October 1, 2006
This review is from: The Holocaust & the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities (Paperback)
Speaking of the Unspeakable
Founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, Karen Davis has played the major role in taking domestic fowl - the most abused and violated animals in America - from the neglected margins of the animal protection movement to their present status as a central focus of campaigns against factory farming. Her books, Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs and More than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality are the standard animal rights works on domestic fowl.
Her newest book, The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale, is an invaluable contribution to one of the most contentious debates plaguing the animal rights community. But to understand why, we have to make a quick trip back in time.
A Holocaust: It's What's for Dinner
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe whose haunting novels and stories form an extended meditation on the Holocaust. In one of those stories, "The Letter Writer," the protagonist observes that "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."
In 2002, holocaust historian Charles Patterson picked up on Singer's theme. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust argued that morally, psychologically, and logistically our imprisonment and murder of animals is equivalent to the Nazis' treatment of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other victims of their blandly efficient murder machine.
In 2003, PETA launched a traveling display inspired by Patterson's book. Juxtaposing photographs of human prisoners in Nazi concentration camps with eerily similar pictures of animal prisoners in factory farm concentration camps, The Holocaust on Your Plate was a vivid and moving indictment of animal enslavement and murder.
A firestorm of criticism quickly ensued, summarized in an Anti-Defamation League press release calling the display "abhorrent," and asserting that "Abusive treatment of animals should be opposed, but cannot and must not be compared to the Holocaust. The uniqueness of human life is the moral underpinning for those who resisted the hatred of Nazis and others ready to commit genocide even today." The issue split the animal rights community. Some activists defended the PETA display; others worried that the animals' cause would suffer from the backlash.
Into these whitewater rapids, Roberta Kalechofsky, founder and president of Jews for Animal Rights, launched Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem with Comparisons, a small book (59 pages) in which she argued that while our enslavement and murder of animals is a horrific crime that must be stopped, comparisons to the Jewish holocaust are illegitimate. (Kalechofsky's bona fides as an animal rights advocate are unassailable. For more than two decades, she has been a powerful and pioneering voice for animals.)
First, Kalechofsky argues that the Jewish holocaust was the end product of centuries of historical and cultural evolution that make it a unique event that cannot be meaningfully compared to anything else. And second, if the Jewish holocaust is allowed to become a "generalized metaphor" (pg. 34) for every kind of atrocity, it becomes devalued and loses its meaning.
From Treblinka to Tyson's
The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale is Karen Davis' rebuttal. Her "henmaid" is a battery chicken on a factory farm, whose life of deprivation, devaluation, depersonalization, and early uncomforted death reminds Davis of the eponymous "Handmaid" in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel - and of the victims of fascism in Hitler's camps. When she is talking about her beloved chickens, Davis' compassion for the plight of our animal victims makes any merely intellectual argument against comparing their suffering to ours seem facile and self-serving.
It is on this foundation of bone deep compassion that Davis constructs her defense of comparing atrocities. First, she argues that while every atrocity is a unique event in terms of the historical, social, economic, and cultural conditions that led to it, they are all alike in the suffering that they cause, and from a moral standpoint, it is the suffering that matters. Thus, Davis argues that "An atrocity can be both unique and general." And since one sentient individual can never truly feel the pain of another, comparisons of pain - metaphors of pain, if you will - are the only way that we can feel empathy and compassion for others, and the only way that we can learn to become moral beings. Thus, comparisons of atrocities are an essential part of the process by which we become ethical individuals who create an ethical society.
It is not the Jewish holocaust that is unique - from ancient times, genocide has been a commonplace of human history - it is our sensitivity to it that is unique, and if this unique sensitivity can be used to awaken a heightened moral awareness of other atrocities, including the atrocities we commit against animals, that is a valid and valuable use of the holocaust metaphor.
The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale is not a diatibe. It is, in fact, solidly within the tradition of the best kind of academic writing, judicious, carefully reasoned, free of jargon, and accessible to the general reader.
Quoting Isaac Bashevis Singer, Davis reminds us that, "[T]here is no evidence that people are more important than chickens." Then she adds, "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 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?"
Norm Phelps is the author of The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights According to the Bible and The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A most important book, October 11, 2006
This review is from: The Holocaust & the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities (Paperback)
[...].
Karen Davis' short, intellectually rigorous, historical, sociocultural, and imminently readable book is a **must** read. Davis is an excellent writer with years of personal experience working for all sorts of animals who find themselves in factory farms and feedlots, and her message is clear and convincing - there are striking parallels between the interminable and inexcusable suffering we bring to billions of food animal beings each year and the treatment of human beings during the holocaust. While it may move some - perhaps most - readers outside of their comfort zones, this is good and necessary for stimulating us all to act more strongly on behalf of all animals who suffer innumerable disturbing and unspeakable atrocities at out hands. And, nowhere are these atrocities more apparent and "in our face" than in slaughterhouses and factory farms which are truly prisons of torture where animals interminably suffer and die and also see, hear, and smell the senseless and ruthless pain, suffering, and death of others, often family members and other friends. One doesn't have to be sentimental to "feel" for food animals, for there are plenty of scientific data that support that claim that they are sentient beings who have preferences and a point of view on what is happening to them and to their friends. Their emotional lives aren't secret, private, or hidden, they're public. Animals tell us clearly what they're feeling and we must not deny what is so very obvious.
Let me emphasize that Karen Davis' book isn't just another Holocaust book. There are many new ideas and some of the major themes that distinguish this book from others include Davis' account of the life of a battery hen from the hen's point of view, her characterizations of internalized forced labor, chapter 5 on "Procrustean Solutions," a rich discussion of ritual sacrifice and genocide as identify destruction, not just physical extinction, Davis' distinctions between pain and suffering, and her chapter on her 9/11 controversy with Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation.
I'm sure that this book will make you shake your head from side to side in disbelief, wondering how things ever got to be so horribly messy and how any human being can ignore what we do to innocent nonconsenting animals every second of everyday. How do we live with the moral boundaries we draw almost solely for our convenience? How did this mentality arise?
Our relationship with nonhuman animals is a complex, ambiguous and challenging affair, and we must continually reassess how we should interact with animal kin. This book will make you do just that. Let's not forget that animal emotions are the gifts of our ancestors. We have them, and so do they. We aren't alone in the emotional arena. It's "bad biology" to argue against the existence of animal emotions. Scientific research in evolutionary biology, cognitive ethology and social neuroscience, along with our own personal observations, support the view that many animals have rich and deep emotional lives and that they are sentient beings.
I strongly suggest that you read this book, think deeply about the numerous issues that Karen Davis raises, share it with your friends and family, and thank Karen for writing such a moving and bold book. I continually go back to it because it is so rich, deep, clear, disturbing, and novel.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bird-brains no more!, September 12, 2005
This review is from: The Holocaust & the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities (Paperback)
La Rouchefoucauld once quipped that "we all have an infinite capacity to endure the suffering of others." Nowhere does this apply with greater accuracy than in the case of those animals farmed for food.
Karen Davis has written a profound book and I challenge you to read it without being transformed. It stems from a famous comment by the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer that when it comes to animals "all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka." Karen Davis who has a reputation among those interested in animals for a ferocious and unyielding intellect applies it here with ruthless efficiency. She tells us how in the 1960s she was preoccupied with reports of the concentration camps, with the Civil Rights Movement, and a "radical extension of those perceptions to include the largest class of innocent victims on earth." Animals slaughtered for food, and especially chickens who are slaughtered or otherwise exploited (for their eggs) to the tune of 8 billion a year in the U.S. alone.
Are you offended by the comparison with the holocaust? You shouldn't be, and if you read this book, I promise you will see her point, and realize that most of us have engaged in "an arbitrary delimiting of moral boundaries." Why? Because we have been "socialized not to perceive animals, especially `food' animals as individuals with feelings." Read chapter three of this short book (which I read in a single sitting), the life of a single battery hen, in which she demonstrates with deep insight that "there is nothing in the natural evolution of hens to prepare them for this situation." Your eyes will be opened, for that situation is hell on earth for chickens. When you realize she is telling the unvarnished truth, a truth rarely written about, there is no way around the sudden awareness that these sensitive animals are in a kind of concentration camp. She quotes a powerful comment by C. David Coats, in his book Old MacDonald's Factory Farm: "The analogy is plain and undeniable; for both groups are held at the mercy of unfeeling keepers, deprived of freedom, crowded into small spaces, mutilated, tattooed, branded, and permanently marked, subjected to genetic experimentation - and ultimately murdered."
This colonization of animals, this appropriation of their very souls, is really no different than any other colonial assault on native human inhabitants of the African and American continents. Suffering is suffering, whether it happens to us, to our friends, our enemies or to animals. To claim an exclusive right to suffering is pure prejudice and a very parochial prejudice at that.
Is this extension of the insights of mass murder to animals mere "sentimentalism?" Not if you believe scientists like Ian Duncan (no animal rights activist, but Professor of Biology at the University of Guelph), who has written about the suffering of chickens who develop respiratory infections such as airsacculitis from constantly inhaling harmful bacteria in the crowded conditions in which they are kept. You think the eggs you eat come from a different kind of chicken? Unlikely. Joy Mensch of the University of California at Davis points out that 99 percent of US laying hens are in cages, "averaging eight hens per case where they develop osteoporosis because they get no exercise and because their limited calcium is mobilized for constant eggshell formation instead of bones." Is this natural? Is this what hens evolved to do? Of course not. They have perfectly natural behavior which they are never allowed to express. They should be in a forest, sunbathing, dustbathing, raising their young, flying in groups, not waiting to be slaughtered in a silent, dark warehouse. What deep hypocrisy (and cynicism) to use the term "happy hens". They may experience pain, but surely they don't suffer, you think? Then why do scientists, again no animal right sympathizers, say 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?" Bird-brains? That term has just been given a death-sentence by the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, an international group of scientists who have recently demonstrated in Nature Neuroscience Reviews (February 2005) that there is "now overwhelming evidence that the bulk of a bird's brain is not, as scientists once thought, mere `basal ganglia'...rather an intricately wired mass that processes information in much the same way as the vaunted human cerebral cortex."
This is an important work, and an exciting read. There is not a dull sentence in the whole book. Spend a few hours with it and I guarantee you will emerge a changed person.
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