“The jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like jews” Is there an animal holocaust?

Abstract

A minimum of coherence and moral decency would make people who eat meat have to face the harsh accusation that Coetzee and PETA throw: such people are a kind of neo-Nazis because they allow, and even encourage, millions of valuable and sentient beings to die in those new concentration camps called slaughterhouses and industrial farms. But is there a way to deal with such an accusation without denying obvious facts about the suffering and value of animal life? The aim of the present text is to explore three possible answers to this accusation. The first argues that the animalist falls into anthropomorphism by wrongly assigning personality to non-human animals. The second holds that the moral disagreement between animalists and non-animalists is a confrontation of incompatible moral intuitions that cannot be resolved rationally through argumentation. The third affirms that the appeal to empathy does not cause moral concern for animals. A frequently cited counterexample of the connection between cruelty and empathy is the generalized love of animals on the part of the Third Reich.