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March 14, 2003/Adar2 10 5763, Vol. 55, No. 29
Take the Holocaust off PETA's plate
PAULINE DUBKIN YEARWOOD
Chicago Jewish News
As a longtime animal rights activist and sometime member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), I have not always been in favor of that organization's high-profile public campaigns on such issues as fur, product testing and vegetarianism.
Not because I don't agree with their stance on those issues. I do. As one of the pioneer animal rights organizations in the United States, it has been tremendously effective in raising public consciousness about animal abuse. The organization also works efficiently behind the scenes and has been responsible for a number of major victories, such as persuading cosmetic companies to stop testing their products on animals.
But some of PETA's public relations campaigns, I believe, are misguided because they draw more attention to themselves than to the animals they are trying to rescue.
With this in mind, when I heard that PETA was planning a campaign against meat and factory farming using images and metaphors from the Holocaust, I feared what would come next. Now that the "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign has been made public, my thoughts are painfully divided.
The Holocaust was unlike anything else in history before or since. But I don't think that comparing the plight of factory farm animals to that of Jews during the Holocaust diminishes the horror of the Holocaust, because that horror can never be diminished.
But I am afraid that's what many Jews will think.
In fact, the backlash has already begun. Predictably, Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, have denounced the PETA campaign.
In addition, Roberta Kalechofsky, a Jewish vegetarian and founder of Jews for Animal Rights, said that the Holocaust "is the end result of a very complicated, theological, historical, evolutionary process that went on for 1,700 years." PETA's use of it, she said, is "sucking away all that history."
Just as the origin of the Holocaust is an extremely complex issue, so too are factory farming and the use of dead animals as food.
But they are not the same issue.
I don't see why PETA can't simply make an open and honest appeal based on the indisputable facts about animal suffering without bringing in the Holocaust.
Having said all that, I have one caveat.
I fervently hope that Jews - even those who feel outrage toward the PETA campaign - won't let this incident blind them to the reality of the abuse animals suffer on factory farms.
Save some of that outrage for the veal calves who spend every moment of their short lives in a crate so small they are unable to stand up or turn around, being fed a liquid diet that deprives them of essential nutrients so their meat will be tender and "white."
Milk-producing cows on factory farms are restrained in stalls hardly bigger than they are, kept continuously pregnant and given hormones that force them to produce far more milk than their bodies were designed to do.
Some of the worst abuses occur on chicken farms, where - to give just one hideous example - male chicks, being useless for egg production or food, are thrown into huge garbage heaps with hundreds of others and crushed alive.
The list of horrors goes on and on.
And this is exactly my point. The abuses factory farm animals suffer are so horrific they don't have to be compared to anything.
Richard Schwartz, a vegetarian activist, has for years been campaigning for Jewish groups to add animal rights to their social justice agendas, and I agree with him.
Not because factory farms are like Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Because it's the right thing to do.
Pauline Dubkin Yearwood is managing editor of the Chicago Jewish News and an animal rights and vegetarian activist. Contact her at (847) 966-0606.
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