Animal Rights and The Holocaust - PETA and The Use of Holocaust Imagery

PETA and The Use of Holocaust Imagery

Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), has herself made the comparison unambiguously, saying: "Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses."

PETA has twice used Holocaust imagery in its campaigns. In July 2003, a PETA television public service announcement called "They came for us at night," aired on U.S. cable networks, narrated by a man describing what it felt like to be transported without food or water.

In the same year, PETA's "Holocaust on your Plate" exhibition consisted of eight 60-square-foot (5.6 m2) panels, each juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory-farmed animals. Photographs of concentration camp inmates were displayed next to photographs of battery chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. Captions alleged that "like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps."

The exhibition was funded by an anonymous Jewish philanthropist, and created by Matt Prescott, who lost several relatives in the Holocaust. Prescott said: "The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible – that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different or inferior' – is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day. ... The fact is, all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness. We're asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms."

Abraham Foxman, chairman of the ADL, said the exhibition was "outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights ... The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent." Stuart Bender, legal counsel for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote to PETA asking them to "cease and desist this reprehensible misuse of Holocaust materials." There were also differing opinions within the animal rights movement. Roberta Kalechofsky wrote: "While I sympathize with PETA's aim—and am a member of PETA—I objected to this use of the Holocaust... The agony of animals arises from different causes from those of the Holocaust. Human beings do not hate animals. They do not eat them because they hate them. They do not experiment on them because they hate them, they do not hunt them because they hate them. These were the motives for the Holocaust. Human beings have no ideological or theological conflict with animals."

In 2005, Newkirk apologized for the pain the campaign had caused some people, while defending the goals of the campaign, writing:

Hard as it may be to understand for those who were deeply upset by this campaign, I was bowled over by the negative reception by many in the Jewish community. It was both unintended and unexpected. The PETA staff who proposed that we do it were Jewish, and the patronage for the entire endeavor was Jewish. We were careful to use Jewish authors and scholars and quotes from Holocaust victims and survivors ... We believe that we humans can and should use our distinctive capacities to reduce suffering in the world ... Our mission is a profoundly human one at its heart, yet we know that we have caused pain. This was never our intention, and we are deeply sorry. We hope that you can understand that although we embarked on the "Holocaust on Your Plate" project with misconceptions about what its impact would be, we always try to act with integrity, with the goal of improving the lives of those who suffer. We hope those we upset will find it in their hearts to work toward the goal of a kinder world for all, regardless of species.

The Guardian subsequently reported, however, that "the appeal has done little to calm the fury of Jewish groups." The campaign was also banned in Germany for making the Holocaust seem "insignificant and banal", to which Peter Singer, the noted animal rights advocate and writer, and a descendant of Holocaust survivors, replied by noting that "... if Peta is not allowed to state its case against our abuse of animals in the way that they judge best ... then criticism of religion could also be prohibited on the same grounds."

On February 20, 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court dismissed a legal move challenging an appeal court's ruling that PETA's campaign was not protected by free speech laws. While not entering formal proceedings to decide in the matter, the court expressed severe doubts as to whether the campaign constituted an offense against human rights in its opinion to dismiss the appeal, as had been found by the orderly courts, but acceded to the other grounds of the former rulings that the campaign constituted a trivialization of the Holocaust and hence a severe violation of living Jews' personality rights. The subtleties of the ruling are sometimes not reflected adequately in press reports.