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The Holocaust & the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities

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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.

[...].

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.

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.

When I heard that Karen Davis was writing "The Holocaust & The Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities," I had to wonder: Do we really need more evidence, however persuasive, demonstrating how the genocide of Jews and other humans in World War II is similar to the institutionalized abuse of farmed animals? Will Davis shed fresh light on a subject already illuminated by other animal advocates such as Charles Patterson, whose groundbreaking 2002 book "Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust" is a comprehensive examination of the controversial and troubling connection between factory farming and Hilter's Final Solution?

But in reading her take on the subject, it is clear that Davis can indeed contribute something meaningful on this matter and furthermore offers an intriguing perspective on issues ancillary to the main argument. Davis, the president and founder of United Poultry Concerns, explains that her book grew in part from PETA's 2003 "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign (which was, in turn, inspired by "Eternal Treblinka"). PETA toured the country with this exhibit, displaying graphic photos of chickens in crowded cages and stacks of dead pigs alongside disturbing images of concentration-camp inmates in their tightly packed wooden bunks and the piled bodies of Jewish Holocaust victims. The juxtaposition of these comparable scenes was meant to stimulate contemplation, but it also raised the ire of groups like the Anti-Defamation League and even Jews for Animal Rights.

No doubt hoping to avoid much of the criticism PETA (and Patterson) faced, Davis is sensitive to readers who may regard the Holocaust as such a sacrosanct point in human history that any parallel with the slaughter of animals for food is, for them, profane. "For many people," she writes, "the idea that it is as morally wrong to harm animals intentionally as it is to harm humans intentionally borders on heresy." Notwithstanding this sensitivity, she invites the reader to consider how the forced labor of the concentration camp is akin to the internalized forced labor of chickens on factory farms. (The "henmaid" in her title is an inspired allusion to Margaret Atwood's popular 1986 novel "The Handmaid's Tale," which describes a near-future dystopia in which a large segment of women have no control over their reproductive systems and are routinely inseminated, only to have their offspring taken away. Such an existence is no mere fiction for farmed animals, who have been deprived of their dignity and freedom.)

Although a slim book (it weighs in at only 133 pages, including the notes, references and index), this is a dense volume and not exactly what I was expecting from the author of More than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality. With its references to existentialists Kierkegaard and Sartre, "The Holocaust & The Henmaid's Tale" reads more like an academic text than your typical book on animal rights and seems intended more for scholars than those already well versed in the atrocities of animal agriculture. The writing, however, is lucid and compelling; indeed, chapter three stands out as one of the most poignant and thought-provoking descriptions I have ever read on the brief, tragic life of a battery hen. Davis takes pains to clearly contextualize our use of the very word "holocaust" and demonstrates that taking what the Nazis did to the Jews and comparing it with society's enslavement and slaughter of non-human animals is meant to raise the status of animals rather than demean humans.

Still, the author is well aware that many people remain indignant about this issue, and consequently she has an extra hurdle to overcome. It's difficult enough to convince the average meat-eater that animals have as much right to live in peace as humans do. Add to that a topic as emotionally provocative as the systematic murder of millions of Jews and you're likely to incite anger. (To wit, a typical anti-animal-rights site posts this sentiment on the topic: "I cannot wrap my mind around the fact that there exists a group of people who put the Holocaust on the same level as meat packing.") Davis manages to diffuse the controversy, I believe, by focusing much of her attention on the link between language and attitudes. She discusses, for example, how Holocaust victims have described being "treated like animals," but that for many people such a comparison does not work in reverse. She writes: "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.... 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.'"

Not surprisingly, Davis has found much inspiration in "Eternal Treblinka," which contends that the Nazis applied the efficiency of animal agriculture and science to their own fascist agenda. But she takes Patterson's premise a step further. She asserts that the controversy that surrounds comparing the confinement and mass murder of "undesirables" with the abusive system of factory farming - comparing the suffering of human animals with that of non-human animals - emphasizes the very speciesism that allows animals to be exploited. More to the point, turning a blind eye to abuse gives us both "They were only chickens" and "They were only Jews."

I believe we need "The Holocaust & The Henmaid's Tale," if for no other reason than to remind us that the oppression of animals serves as the model for all other forms of oppression and therefore must not be ignored. There is, after all, a correlation between the activity of scholars and activists and how much the consciousness of the general public is raised. As Peter Singer observes in his introduction to the 2006 edition of "In Defense of Animals," in 1970, when the modern animal movement was just gaining currency, the number of writings on the ethical status of animals was tiny; yet today, he estimates, it must be in the thousands. Consider how far the movement has come in the last three and a half decades, and how much the writing of advocates has inspired us. Let's hope Karen Davis' new book will raise more awareness than it does anger.

Mark Hawthorne, author of Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism

I first discovered Dr. Davis' organization, United Poultry Concerns, while doing an internet search for animal rights superstar Pamelyn Ferdin (and she would HATE to be called that!). I have been a fan of UPC and Davis' pioneering work ever since.

I was already a Vegetarian, but Davis' book "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs" helped me make the decision to go Vegan, which has been an amazing force for personal change.

Earlier this year, I finally got around to Davis' "More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual and Reality", and found its compelling arguments to be all the more reason to celebrate UN-Turkey Day as an antidote to the wholly noxious Xtian holiday "Thanksgiving".

With "The Holocaust & the Henmaid's Tale", Davis has emerged as a leader in articulating the philosophy of the animal rights movement. Davis delves deeply into man's history of cruelty to animals under the guise of scapegoating and ritual sacrifice, and the reader may conclude that today's meat industry is little more than an ongoing mass slaughter-ritual updated to the age of the machine.

As for relative sufferings and their hierarchy of importance, Davis tackles the penultimate emblem of mass suffering, the Holocaust, and compares it successfully with the daily slaughter of millions of sentient beings in the name of human gluttony and imperialistic perfidy. Just as the claim that the 9/11 attacks in the US were more "tragic" than the slaughters in Columbia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, etc. is laughable, so too is the notion that non-human suffering cannot be compared to human suffering. Suffering is suffering, and seeking an end to same should be the goal of all reasoning beings.

Health and political motivations notwithstanding, the only really good reason to become a Vegetarian and/or Vegan is if you believe that kindness is a virtue worth practicing. As Davis herself concludes, "Who but the Nazi in us disagrees?"

An intensely engaging, disturbing and ultimately uplifting experience, Davis' "The Holocaust & the Henmaid's Tale" takes its place alongside classics such as Pete Singer's "Animal Liberation" and John Robbin's "Diet for a New America" as essential animal rights texts.

In her bold and insightful book, which she dedicated to "all the soft and innocent lives who are at our mercy," Karen Davis, a longtime animal activist and president of United Poultry Concerns, examines the parallels between the Holocaust and the current abuse of billions of animals on factory farms that culminates in their cruel murder in slaughterhouses.

She passionately makes a strong case for comparing the two atrocities--different with respect to the identity of the victims and the purpose of the killings but chillingly similar in so many other ways--the designation of the victims as expendable, inferior, and unworthy of life; the herding and confinement; the industrialized slaughter; the complicity of the bystanders; and the pervasive arrogance and indifference that allows it to happen.

This compelling book argues convincingly that we have a mandate to think about, protest against, and learn from these twin atrocities--one completed in the middle of the last century, the other continuing every day. Not to do so is to condone and support the fascist mentality that produced them.

Davis is also the author of "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry" and "More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality."

Her years of hands-on experience rescuing and providing shelter to the feathered "soft and innocent lives" victimized by the poultry industry gives her latest book its special urgency and poignancy. Highly recommended.

--Charles Patterson, author of "Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust"