AR-News: Letter in Independent (London) supporting Holocaust exhibition

[Karen Dawn]

The Independent

May 10, 2004

 FACTORY-FARMED ANIMALS SUFFER IN THE SAME WAY AS HOLOCAUST VICTIMS


Sir: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) is sorry that the
Greater London Authority misunderstands our "Holocaust on Your Plate"
exhibition, in which we use graphic photographs to show the similarities
between the oppression and murder during the Holocaust and the slaughter of
animals raised for food ("Holocaust used to show animals' suffering", 7
May).

The exhibition was funded by a Jewish philanthropist who has spent the past
25 years affiliated with one of the world's foremost Holocaust
organisations. It is based on the thoughts and lives of Holocaust survivors
and others who lost entire families and responded by rejecting cruelty to
all beings. I embraced the project because my mother's family was
Polish-Jewish, and many in our family perished in concentration camps.

The victims are of different species, but the system of confinement, abuse,
prejudice and slaughter are the same. Every year in Europe, billions of
animals are imprisoned in concentration camps that we call factory farms.
They will be rounded up, trucked hundreds of miles, herded through the doors
to the kill floor and slaughtered.

Tragically, those who dismiss the abuse of animals on factory farms today
sound hauntingly similar to those who dismissed the suffering of Jews
because they were considered "subhuman". As Jewish philosopher Theodor
Adorno, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, wrote, "Auschwitz begins
wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only
animals".

MATT PRESCOTT

Campaign Coordinator People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

Norfolk, Virginia, USA