Animals and the Holocaust

Last week, while reading Lewis Carroll's essay on Vivisection, I was a little struck by Carroll's claim that the greatest tragedy of vivisection is not the crime against the animal, but the crime within the experimenter. At first, this seemed a little backwards to me because I always thought that the reason some people are so adamant about animal rights and vegetarianism and all of that stuff is because they believe that animals are, in fact, equal in some way to humans. I can't agree with this, but Carroll's claim that we are in fact hurting ourselves when we are cruel to animals makes sense to me.



J.M. Coetzee (in true Carroll fashion), in her work The Lives of Animals claims that the chief horror of the Holocaust is that the killers "refused to see themselves in the place of their victims, as did everyone else." (??) There can be no doubt in my mind that crimes against humans ALWAYS outweigh crimes against animals, but Coetzee's argument here mirrors Carroll's argument in his aforementioned essay. Oppression against and violence towards other fellow beings totally destroys our human character. As humans, we all have the capacity for things like sympathy, compassion, and love. This is what makes it beautiful to be a human. During WWII, Nazi doctrine essentially required that it's soldiers abandon their compassionate and sympathetic nature. Not only were Jews being physically torn apart, but the Nazi's were violently rending themselves from their own humanity.



In our course packet on the readings comparing the Holocaust to violence against animals, Bentham makes a point about the shirking of responsibility for the tragedy and crimes against humanity. During the Nuremberg Trials, "men often denied that they were guilty, because they 'were only following orders." (744) In the same way, I feel like people can justify being cruel to animals because they have to do it for money, or because if they don't they will get fired. After watching Earthlings though, I am compelled to say that some people do it because they legitimately enjoy being cruel. I would argue that all people are born with a sense of right and wrong, and that all people are also born with the ability to feel compassion and have sympathy. When we are forced into situations where we "have" to compromise or violate our morals, our ethical stance is blurred and we lose touch with our humanity. In this way, people who work in cattle plants and slaughter houses become sadistic.

To take the allegory just a little bit further, let's take just a deeper look at the Nuremberg Trials (because I think this is pretty interesting stuff...). This "I was just following orders" excuse not only is something that can easily be applied to the justification of pointless violence against animals (PVAA!), but it is something that really should be avoided altogether in a much larger sense. We talked about this in class last week very briefly, but if you are in a situation that requires you to violate your own morals, you need to have the strength of character to stand up for what you believe. In Prometheus Bound, we see the same moral dilemma. Prometheus, a titan, has just stood up for his belief even though he had to break Zeus' law to do it. Now, he is being convicted and punished for it. Zeus' punishment requires that Prometheus be shackled to a rock for all eternity, so Zeus sends for Olympus' favorite smithy, Hephestus, to make some mackles (magic shackles!) that will never break. Hephestus doesn't believe that the punishment is just, but he does it anyway. Like the Nazi's of WWII, or the workers in meat factories, Hephestus bails on his own moral convictions for a more appealing attempt at self-preservation. The question, however, is that is it better to preserve yourself physically (to keep yourself free from violence and death) or to preserve yourself morally?



There is supposed to be another quote in here but I don't have my book with me at the moment, so I might stick it in here when I get home.