THE HOLOCAUST AND THE HENMAID'S TALE
A Case For Comparing Atrocities (Lantern Books NY2005)
By Karen Davis
Reviewed by Margaret Setter

Although I have been a grass-roots animal rights activist for nearly 20 years, until I read this book I knew virtually nothing about the author, Karen Davis. The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale is a slender volume of only 113 pages. It is however, a most sensitive and passionate portrayal of the lives (and deaths) of the most abused and demeaned of all living creatures; factory farmed chickens, turkeys and ducks.

In Chapter three the author sets out in meticulous detail the appalling suffering factory farmed hens endure. This begins with the baby hen, one of thousands of orphan chick embryos inside an industrial incubator. Her heart is beating, her nervous system is beginning to form” and by the time she reaches her sixth day, “she has the face of a little bird”.

On the twentieth day of her incubation she uses an egg tooth that disappears soon after hatching to saw her way out of the shell and takes her first breath of the stale air, full of cigarette smoke and other noxious fumes that comprise the environment in which she will spend her brief life span.

The males whose brief lives are brutally extinguished are the lucky ones. The female is endures many painful procedures and rough handling by workers. She exists “in a universe of cages”, for which nothing in her biological evolution has prepared her.

Genetically manipulated to lay up to 300 eggs per year, she is soon exhausted, an ugly parody of the beautiful bird she might have been in the wild. So savage is the system that by the time she is fifteen months old, her productivity has declined to the point she is no longer profitable to feed. She is taking up space and must be trashed. Ignorant people say that chickens don’t know they are going to die, but they do, and they do not die easy deaths.

Forty years ago, when a poultry farmer friend of mine converted his small poultry operation into a battery system (often with just one bird per cage) I rationalized what I instinctively understood to be cruelty with the thought that perhaps the birds were not sufficiently intelligent to mind.

How mistaken I proved to be. But I was in good company as even philosopher Peter Singer has expressed doubts about the intellectual and emotional capacity of chickens. (1)

This goes to show that no matter how clever or learned we may be, our knowledge is often uncertain, subject to change in the light of fresh evidence and argument. Dr Leslie Rogers of the University of New England (Australia), is the author of a scientific paper that threatens to overturn previous assumptions.

Her investigations reveal that seventy-five percent of a bird’s brain consists of an intricately wired mass that processes information in much the same way as the much vaunted human cerebral cortex.

In 2003 People for The Ethical Treatment of Animals launched their “Holocaust On Your Plate” campaign. Matt Prescott, who happens to be Jewish, designed a set of large panels that juxtaposed photographs of factory farms with photographs taken in the Nazi death camps. This forced an explicit comparison between human and animal suffering that most people do not wish to confront.

The comparison was an affront to many Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust and their descendants. Given the horrors they endured under the Nazis it is understandable they should assert exclusive rights to the use of the concept. But can the claim that the Nazi holocaust was a singular historical event be upheld?

Davis respectfully disagrees. She presents a convincing argument to demonstrate that the roots of the Nazi Holocaust lay deep in European history. She also points to the fact that most Jews, unable to communicate the nature and magnitude of their suffering, often fall back on the analogy, “We were treated like animals”.

Matt Prescott argues that the analogy works both ways. Holocaust victims WERE treated like animals, and so logically we can conclude that animals ARE treated like Holocaust victims. The Nobel laureate author, Isaac Bashevis Singer made this connection explicit in his famous observation that when it comes to the animals “all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka”.

Heinrich Himmler, founder of the Nazi SS and administrator of the death camps, was a chicken farmer. He acquired a considerable fund of knowledge gained from his selective breeding of chickens. He had the mistaken belief, common at the time, that intellect and behaviour were solely determined by genetic factors.

The Nazis seized on this dogma with the aim of realising their dream of creating an Aryan super-race, a necessary corollary of which was the elimination of all members of the population considered racially inferior.

It is my opinion that Jews were the not the only target of this evil design, for the camps also functioned for the benefit of German industrialists and among those enslaved were Slavs, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as socialists and communists and other political opponents of the regime.

I therefore agree with Davis that is it legitimate to use the analogy “we were treated like animals” (a logical parallel), and the metaphor (a suggested likeness), of the Holocaust, as a heuristic device, because these concepts already have meaning and resonance in the public mind.

What I find most attractive in Davis’s approach is that she seldom takes the part of the distanced observer. As a college student in the 1960s she was active on issues of racial conflict that paralleled the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement at the national level, while at the same time immersing herself in books dealing with Nazism and Stalinist Russia.

Most activists will not find it difficult to relate to the effect this growing understanding of humanly engineered suffering had on such an intelligent and sensitive woman. Her preoccupation became “like a cancer eating her alive”, eventually forcing her to give up college.

She tells the story, not because she equates her suffering with that of holocaust and other victims but to draw the comparisons that extended the boundaries of her moral imagination to encompass “the largest class of innocent victims on earth”.

Animal suffering inside the closed walls of factory farms is invisible. Corporations profiting from that suffering expend billions of dollars in keeping it that way. The bodies of the animals they abuse and kill become processed into high value-added foods that are marketed to consumers, with often disastrous consequences to their physical and mental health.

Modern industrial animal production involves human control over animals’ sex lives and reproductive organs that that is essentially sexual abuse. When the same abusive manipulations are performed on terrified, struggling birds thousands of times in any one working day, it is not surprising that deep-seated human urges to hurt and humiliate the body of another living being come to the fore and are acted upon.

We humans have erected a barrier between us and other animals, while at the same time most humans breach this barrier by consuming and metabolizing their body products. The barrier is breached symbolically in mythology and religion, where gods assume animal form to rape and/or impregnate mortal women. This pagan concept of god/man/animal was carried over into Christianity.

In the story of the Annunciation God is symbolically present as the dove who hovers above the virgin as the angel announces she is with child to the Holy Spirit. Her son Jesus is destined to become the “sacrificial lamb” whose agony and death on the cross “takes away the sins of the world”.

Davis estimates the number of chickens killed worldwide each year as in excess of 40,000 million! These deaths are testament to Hitler’s assertion that “he who does not possess power loses the right to life”. Animals, particularly chickens, are defenceless in the face of this human onslaught. When this number is added to by the slaughter of billions of animals of other species it will become obvious to anyone with a grain of sensitivity that we are confronted by an animal holocaust.

The “Genocidal mentality” has strong roots in European and American history. Fascism takes many forms. It is not the result of one political defeat but arises out of a long insidious social process.

The same system that is responsible for so much animal suffering hangs over us all. I well remember the case of Angela Davis, university lecturer, civil rights activist and avowed communist, who in 1970 was falsely accused of kidnap and murder by the then notorious chief of the FBI, Herbert B. Hoover.

After she was hunted down as America’s Most Wanted Criminal, President Nixon appeared on television to formally congratulate Hoover.

I salute Angela Davis as a shining star for deprived African Americans, who continue their struggle against hundreds of years of racism and oppression.

Angela Davis, after two years spent in an underground jail, before being tried and acquitted. James Baldwin had written: If we know, then we must fight for your life, dear sister, as though it were our own…For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. Thirty years later, I had the honour and privilege to hear this remarkable woman speak to a capacity audience in Sydney Town Hall.

More recently, In March this year Father John Dear SJ, social justice and animal rights advocate, spoke to a meeting at a university in Sydney. He called on those present, mostly people of faith, not to remain silent but to become involved in the manifold struggles for peace and democracy in Australia.

John Dear has already experienced a year in America’s jails. On his return he again faces trial, not for any crime, but for the civil offence of disobeying a police order to desist from attempting to deliver a peace letter to the office of a United States Senator.

We are all threatened by the forces who seek further incarceration of Father John Dear. Animal rights, human rights: All are an intrinsic part of the same struggle. We must refuse to submit to the leadership of those who do not care how many millions of people they murder. We “must fight for their lives, as if they were our own, for if they take them in the morning, they will be coming for us that night”.

1. http://www.upc-online.org/011226vegan_voice_singer.html