Eternal Treblinka
A Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

All of God's creatures have rights, a fact that most people don't seem to recognize. This includes both human and non-human animals, but not all of them can speak for themselves. As we continue to disregard the value of the lives of the billions of animals we eat, we also are destroying our air, land and water.

FROM

Karen Davis, PhD, United Poultry Concerns (UPC)
June 2015

The SS called its tube leading to the death center the "Road to Heaven," but, Patterson asks, how does their mockery differ from meat industry scientist, Temple Grandin, who calls the tube she designed for driving cattle to their death the "Stairway to Heaven"?

The May 14 New York Times article about the avian flu situation in Iowa [Egg Farms Hit Hard as Bird Flu Affects Millions of Hens, The New York Times, May 14, 2015] provides a much better snapshot of reality than its editorial view of “A Humane Egg”:

Still, as farmers and their employees double down on biosecurity measures at the big farms and work to clean the vast barns for new flocks, local businessmen return nearly every weekday morning to their favorite breakfast spot to trade theories on why bird flu keeps spreading.

The way these men casually kill millions of birds and enjoy their breakfast (I’m sure there’s a holocaust on their plates) reminds me of Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka, of which I wrote in my review of Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust:

Patterson shows how human concentration and killing centers are virtually identical to farmed animal concentration and killing centers. Tubes into which cows and pigs are driven single-file to their deaths are no different from the tubes at Treblinka and elsewhere that led from the disrobing rooms to the gas chambers, down which naked people were driven by guards using their fists, whips, and rifle butts-which is how we treat millions of farmed animals every day. The SS called its tube leading to the death center the "Road to Heaven," but, Patterson asks, how does their mockery differ from meat industry scientist, Temple Grandin, who calls the tube she designed for driving cattle to their death the "Stairway to Heaven"?

Some will say that treating creatures badly in order to eat them is a far cry from treating creatures badly simply because you hate them, but a key point of Eternal Treblinka is that the psychology of contempt for "inferior life" links the Nazi mentality to that which allows us to torture and kill billions of nonhuman animals and human beings with no more concern for them and their suffering than Hannibal Lecter and Jame Gumb feel for their victims apart from the pleasure they derive from the taste of their victims' pain in The Silence of the Lambs. That book says that the plight of the lambs screaming in the slaughterhouses--the whole human enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and murder-"will not end, ever."

Eternal Treblinka reminds us of all those other slaughterhouses that were running alongside the human ones-the "[a]round-the-clock killing and butchering" conducted at Treblinka, Auschwitz, in Dresden, and elsewhere.

In their diaries and letters, Nazi officials dwell on their meals. One writes to his wife:

The sight of the dead - including women and children - is not very cheering. Once the cold weather sets in you'll be getting a goose now and again. There are over 200 chattering around here, as well as cows, calves, pigs, hens and turkeys. We live like princes. Today, Sunday, we had roast goose (1/4 each). This evening we are having pigeon.


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