Harper contrasts the “lack of sociohistorical context” in PETA’s video and photo campaign with what she calls the “sensitive, scholarly explorations” of Marjorie Spiegel and Charles Patterson, who have written books analysing the historical interconnections between the violent instrumentalisation of animals in farming and scientific experimentation and, respectively, slavery and the Holocaust.25 In The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Spiegel takes the reader through a brief account of the different ways chattel slavery was interlinked in the past with the forced keeping of animals, especially those destined for human consumption. She shows that white writers often compared Africans, as well as Indigenous Americans, to other animals (“brutes”), how similar instruments of control (for example, muzzles and chains) were used to restrain slaves and animals, and draws parallels between the forced breeding practices used on human slaves and farm animals. Based on such evidence, Spiegel makes a compelling case for comparing the institution of chattel slavery to industrial farming, and for taking the experiences of those oppressed by these systems as the impetus for change. “It is vital to link oppressions in our minds,” she writes, “to look for the common, shared aspects, and work against them as one. To deny our similarities to animals is to deny and undermine our own power.”26 In Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust Patterson makes a similar case that ideologies and practices of white Christian supremacy are historically interconnected to human control and abuse of other animals. Christian vilification of Jews as beasts and vermin went back centuries; National Socialist propaganda drew on and expanded these anti-Semitic metaphors. Patterson also examines the interwoven histories of forced breeding and sterilisation, eugenics and industrial slaughter that were developed and used on different species of animals and on millions of people during the Nazi genocide.27 Eternal Treblinka, like Spiegel’s Dreaded Comparison, draws out these interlocking systems, without insisting they are the same. Nor does either book claim that the histories of slavery or the Holocaust can be explained entirely with reference to similarities with the violent instrumentalisation of animals, or that a myriad of other factors did not contribute to these histories of genocide.
In contrast, all too often comparisons between animal abuse and genocide are made in sensationalist ways that reduce complex historical processes to dramatic images, slogans or simplistic analogies that emphasise similarity over difference. Some such bad comparisons can be found in contemporary defences of veganism. For example, in 2009 the vegan philosopher Gary Steiner published an article in the New York Times in which he made a reference to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Letter Writer” (the story also inspired the title of Patterson’s book). Steiner wrote that Singer “called the slaughter of animals the ‘eternal Treblinka.’”28 Singer did indeed explore the theme of human maltreatment of animals in a number of his short stories, frequently drawing comparisons with the Holocaust.29 However, to use the term “eternal Treblinka” as a shorthand for animal exploitation belittles the complexity of meaning in Singer’s fictional work. The “Letter Writer” is not a political tract; it is a moving tale about a Holocaust survivor and his multiple relationships with the human and other-than-human world, including a mouse who inhabits his house.30 Following some objections by readers to his use of the phrase “eternal Treblinka,” in a chapter entitled “Cosmopolitanism and Veganism” Steiner excused himself, saying he “had absolutely no intention of belittling the hideous fate of the Jews.”31 This strikes me as a defensive reply that demonstrates a lack of willingness to listen and engage, in Harper’s words, with other people’s accounts of the “painful history of racially motivated violence.”32
But Steiner persists — going beyond the use of the comparison between animal slaughter and the Holocaust to make it into a competition:
when we occupy the anthropocentric standpoint, we do something that is arguably much worse: we fail to appreciate the fact that this sacrifice of innocents is so woven into our everyday practices and values that we tend to shudder at the characterisation of this regime as being in any way comparable to large-scale human tragedies.33
Steiner seems to suggest that one history of mass violence — the Holocaust — enjoys greater recognition than the other — mass animal slaughter. The implication is that the anti-Semitism and other forms of racism that enabled the Nazi genocide are now fully recognised and therefore not as urgent as the issue of mass animal slaughter. A similar problem was on display in the PETA campaign “The Animal Liberation Project.” As one critic observed, the juxtaposition of black and white photos of historical violence against African-Americans, Jews and Indigenous people with colour photos of violence against animals created a visual image “implying that ‘hey oppression of minorities is in the past. It’s over!’”34 In both cases, there is a failure to acknowledge and confront the realities of persisting forms of racial discrimination and violence.
In Steiner’s usage, the Treblinka extermination camp is shed of its historical specificity and the realities of the people who perished there. It becomes instead a catchphrase to promote veganism as part of a philosophical argument. There are other examples of vegan and animal rights activists making similarly reductive references to Nazi camps. During the protests against the live export of veal calves from England to the European continent in early 1995, some activists carried placards reading, simply, “AUSCHWITZ.”35 Other campaigns have employed photographs of a pile of animal corpses next to a photograph of a pile of skeletal human bodies.36 As with the examples from PETA and Steiner cited above, these campaigns imply that anti-Semitism — like racism generally — has been overcome and allocated to history. These signs and representations try to promote animal rights by exploiting painful pasts of violence against human beings, without regard for how these campaigns will impact people living with the legacies of that violence. The political scientist Claire Jean Kim has argued that the PETA “Animal Liberation Project” is morally defensible, because it draws attention to an urgent moral issue — the mass exploitation of animals — but that it is politically indefensible “because it may complicate the project of building cross-group alliances in the context of fighting ‘interlocking structures’ of domination.”37 But I don’t think these two elements are so easily separable. It is precisely because these comparisons fail to address “interlocking structures” of domination that they are morally unjustifiable. In order to be morally defensible they would have to give full recognition to the different forms of violence referenced in the comparisons, including recognition of the ongoing forces of racism. This is where the analogies used by PETA and Steiner differ from the more carefully contextualised comparisons of Spiegel and Patterson, which are attentive to how “interlocking systems” of violence affect different species, including human beings.38
Kim is right that, ultimately, the uncritical circulation of images and words that imply or directly make comparisons between factory farming, animal experimentation and Nazi death camps is politically counterproductive. One reason for this is that competitive comparisons can never do justice to either element being compared. We cannot extend solidarity to other animals by pitting their needs against those of different groups of people. Competitive comparisons obscure the details that we need to understand in order to appreciate what is at stake in confronting violence against different groups. It feels almost absurd to have to point out that the forced breeding, raising and slaughter of farm animals for human consumption on a mass scale is not a form of genocide.39 This does not mean that it should not be opposed. PETA spokespeople claim that they make comparisons with the Holocaust and slavery in order to drive home the point that people, too, are animals, and that we have a moral obligation to all animals, not just to our own species.40 This is an important argument. But their campaigns can also be read to imply that other animals are only worthy of our consideration if we can imagine them as suffering as people have. Moreover, photographs or words that present animals as little more than distressed victims may actually reinforce rather than challenge anthropocentric