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AUGUST 2014 DOGGIERESCUE.COM MAGAZINE


Many, humans that is, argue that humans deserve to be treated in a different way to animals because we “think for ourselves” and “know right from wrong”. However, where do these arguments stand when you consider the evidence that we protect the welfare of infants or the profoundly disabled that can arguably do neither of these, above the welfare of animals?


As Sam De Brito recently argued in a review of the 2013 documentary Speciesism directed by Mark Devries, what does it say about the human condition if the belief that animals are for our benefit is in fact nonsensical? Does it mean that “we are destined to be seen as horrifically cruel and as ignorant as the slave master who “knew their


property didn’t mourn when their children were taken from them?”


This documentary goes one traditionally dangerous step further. In an interview with a Holocaust survivor, who compared a return visit to the death camps where his family had been exterminated and was struck by the piles of glasses, boots and hair, with a visit to a US


slaughterhouse, he said the following: “ I saw piles of hearts and hooves and I got to thinking about the dispassionate process used in both cases, that the perpetrators felt no guilt…. that my fellow Jews were transported in cattle cars. It made me realise that the slogan ‘never again’, was not really about what others shouldn’t do to us.”


If relating our speciesism to the Holocaust seems ridiculous and extreme to you, then consider the following words from Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was Jewish, in his story The Letter Writer:


“In relation to (animals), all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”


This really is a thought worth contemplating as you fire up your next barbeque.


❶Sam De Brito “We are all Nazis over Animal Rights” The Sun Herald April 27 2014 ❷Katrina Fox http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-17/fox-speciesism-the-final-frontier/5263372


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