| From: Intermountain Jewish News in October http://ijn.com/archive/2003%20arch/092603.htm#story3
Preventable suffering
Editor:
Regarding "PETA's 'Holocaust on Your Plate' campaign hits Denver," by Andrea Jacobs (Aug. 22):
It's a mistake to separate the Holocaust from other atrocities committed by human beings. This seems more like privileging the Holocaust than affirming its uniqueness. Despite differences between the Holocaust and our daily infliction of suffering and death on millions of innocent animals, instructive comparisons exist. The Holocaust is a human issue, not just a Jewish one.
I. B. Singer said we pretend that animals don't feel in order to justify our cruelty. Is comfort with cruelty an embedded human trait? Is the attitude "I'm superior" and "you're inferior" endemic to our species?
Why, when we have the technology to duplicate animal products with textured vegetable protein, do people continue to demand butchery and corpses? Why do we praise technology for developing substitutes for cruel practices in other areas while balking at its use to eliminate slaughterhouses? Has Singer's philosophic vegetarianism had any effect on mainstream Jewish lifestyle?
This is not to suggest that the Jewish community should be expected to rise above the rest of humankind, but that the Jewish response raises questions about our species no less than does Nazism.
A question the Holocaust poses: When will we humans have enough of inflicting massive preventable suffering, given that we know suffering so well, and claim to abhor it?
KAREN DAVIS PhD
President, United Poultry Concerns
Machipongo, Virginia
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. http://www.upc-online.org
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United Poultry Concerns, Inc.