NOTE: This post is the 2nd of 2 posts about The Animal Holocaust. Here is the 1st: https://treespiritproject.com/cattle-ranching/holocaust-comparison/
If the comparison between the infamous Nazi Holocaust and humanity’s treatment of the world’s animals wrankles, please first read the 1st post’s thorough explication. (And then I’m happy to read your comments or objections: https://treespiritproject.com/contact-jack
The largest, longest-running holocaust in human history.
Approximately 12,000,000 humans (and among them 6,000,000 Jews) were killed by the Nazis during World War II.
So which statement below is most correct in comparing this historic atrocity to humanity’s worldwide treatment of animals today?
1) The Animal Holocaust is 10x larger than the Nazi Holocaust.
2) The Animal Holocaust is 100x larger than the Nazi Holocaust.
3) The Animal Holocaust is 1,000x larger than the Nazi Holocaust.
4) The Animal Holocaust is 10,000x larger than the Nazi Holocaust.
5) The Animal Holocaust is 100,000x larger than the Nazi Holocaust.
6) The Animal Holocaust is 1,000,000x larger than the Nazi Holocaust.
7) The Animal Holocaust is 10,000,000x larger than the Nazi Holocaust.
Since over 100,000,000,000 (billion) land animals ARE killed by humans EVERY YEAR — including this year, and next year — the correct answer is #7.
This does NOT include the additional 1.7 trillion marine animals, mostly fishes, which are pulled from the world’s oceans and fed to humans, and fed to animals which humans will later eat.
The Animal Holocaust is 10 MILLION x larger than the Nazi Holocaust.
The sheer numbers of defenseless, sentient fellow Earthlings — the world’s non-human animals — that we humans kill unnecessarily* is too big for humans to visualize or imagine. The number of deaths is so big they lose meaning. The scale of animal devastation is intellectualized, abstracted — and ignored [*Unnecessarily, because most humans in industrialized societies continue to eat animals only from habit and for palate pleasure, not out of necessity.]
Every year, we humans kill approximately 100 billion land animals — mostly chickens, cows, pigs, sheep, and turkeys — and at least 1.7 trillion marine animals — mostly fish, but also marine mammals — just for food. Still more hundreds of millions are killed for clothing, for entertainment, and needless experimentation in the name of science, which values human life above all other life, devaluing the lives of all other animals .
The Animal Holocaust is ongoing and never-ending. Unlike the Nazi Holocaust, also know as the Shoah, the Animal Holocaust began long before you were born and before your ancestors were born.
The Animal Holocaust in operating at full speed, right now, as you read these words.
There is a 99% likelihood you are participating in the Animal Holocaust by eating animals — or eating animal products like dairy and eggs. Because only about 1% of the human population is fully vegan.
Every nation and every person on Earth is participating in the Animal Holocaust.*
*Unless you are a practicing vegan, of course.
The Animal Holocaust is worldwide. Every nation on Earth participates. Every vegetarian — those who choose not to eat animal flesh, but eat dairy and/or egg products — is participating in the Animal Holocaust. And to beat you to the counterpunch: just because the vast majority of humans do it, still doesn’t make it right, or moral, or justifiable. Human slavery was once accepted too, and finally is no longer (acceptable, that is; of course it still exists).
The Animal Holocaust is mostly hidden from view — yet not secret.
You know it’s going on. You know you are participating in it every day of your life or close to it.
I don’t wanna know. And I don’t wanna think about it.
You are probably uncomfortable reading this essay. Because you probably consider yourself someone “who cares about animals.” Or even professes to love them — yet continues to eat them out of habit. Or justifications like “protein” or “Vitamin B-12” or “it’s too expensive to be vegan” (in fact it’s cheaper to eat vegan). The uncomfortable truth is you want to keep eating them.
Humans are in both an historical and daily habit of killing.
You are, as are all humans, a creature of habit. And we are social animals who follow the herd, and the overwhelming majority of humans eat animals or animal products every day of our lives.
Forever killed young: most animals ar CHILDREN when we kill them.
The vast majority of food animals are killed as soon as possible, to maximize profit. Since “farmed” and “wild caught” animals only exist to be eaten, we kill them as soon as possible, at a fraction of their natural lifespan.
The average lifespan of a COW is 15-20 years.
The avg. dairy cow is slaughtered when 6 YEARS old —1/2 to 1/3rd her natural lifespan.
And each year each mother cow is forcibly impregnated. And when her baby is born, it is typically taken from her within the first 1-2 days, right after she gets her mother lactating. The calf gets none of her mother’s milk — it’s sold for humans to consume.
After 6 or 7 cycles of forced impregnation and baby-taken, she is “spent,” no longer produces enough milk to be profitable, and is only then killed, which is really just putting her out of her misery.
The average beef cow is slaughtered when 1.5 to 2 YEAR old — 1/10th his natural lifespan.
You can make the argument that the life of a cow raised for its flesh (“beef”) has a less emotionally miserable life than the dairy cow who lives to be a milk producer for humans. The “beef” cow lives a much shorter life, but far fewer are forcibly ejaculated for their semen (which is then used to forcibly impregnate females.
But then again, their life of confinement and servitude is much shorter than the dairy cow’s. As soon as beef cows reach full size as very young adults, it is most profitable to “bring them to market” — slaughter and dismember them, than to let them live longer.
The average pig is 5-to-7 MONTHS old when slaughtered for human food & clothing. Average natural lifespan: 15-20 years.
And of course pigs — along with cows, chickens, turkey, sheep and every animal humans have subjugated, confined, sexually molested and bred for maximum growth, or milk production, or (chicken, turkey) body fat and a disturbingly young death — are really just products-for-profit. For many of these animals (granted not all), what “farmers” sometimes excuse as the “one bad day” of their death in the slaughterhouse could reasonably be argued to be the opposite: their “one good day” when their life of confinement and mutilation and manipulation finally ends, with a knife in the throat or a few torturous minutes in a CO2 (pig) gas killing chamber.
The avg. age of a chicken killed for human consumption is 6-to-7 WEEKS. Natural lifepan? 15-20 years.
And chickens aren’t just killed young; they’re killed as infants. And, as with so many “farmed” animals, are artificially bred to grow unnaturally — and unhealthily — fast.
• The average age of a chicken raised for her eggs is 2-to-3 years old.
• The average age of a chicken raised for her flesh is 6-to-7 weeks old.
• The average age a baby male chick in the egg industry is shredded — alive — in an industrial masticating machine is 24 hours old.
LEARN MORE about the young deaths of animal slaughtering from the Farm Transparency Project: https://www.farmtransparency.org/kb/food/abattoirs/age-animals-slaughtered
The Animal Holocaust is hidden in plain sight, so deeply ingrained and embedded into the fabric of the world’s societies as to be invisible. And denied.
The vast majority of American institutions and industries approve of, participate in, and promote the Animal Holocaust, which is the systemic, industrialized mass killing of millions of animals for human consumption.
Institutions include all religious organizations, schools, universities, the television and movie (Hollywood) industries, public relations, and of course agricultural businesses and corporations and their advertising, public relations, advertising, and marketing agencies. And of course your local neighborhood “small” animal farmer, who typically sends his animal children off to be killed at efficient, less expensive industrial slaughterhouses.
Odds are you’ll object to the use of the term “holocaust” to describe what we humans animals do to non-human animals. If you don’t object, you’ll feel more uncomfortable about supporting this unquestioned, foundational practice of our society, and feel a daily, internal contradiction and discomfort.
You know about it, but don’t want to know about it.
You must deny some or all of the assertions in this essay, because otherwise your internal contradictions will be amplified. We all were raised with these contradictions, before we could think and decide anything for ourselves.
When you were a child, it wasn’t your fault. Now it is.
As an adult, you ARE responsible for your actions now that you know. Our internal contradictions are difficult and uncomfortable to acknowledge. Especially when faced with the truth that eating animals every day causes fellow sentient, emotional creature — in every important way like a dog, cat or horse — unimaginable pain and suffering.
For example, how can all these thoughts simultaneously be true for you?
1) “Pigs are strange, silly, funny-looking animals.”
2) “I’ve heard pigs are highly intelligent; even smarter than dogs.”
AND
2) “I love eating bacon.”
You likely feel discomfort as you read these words.
Because part of you knows all of these assertions are true, and that you are actively participating in and perpetuating, yesterday and today and tomorrow, the Animal Holocaust, the largest moral atrocity of our time.
The Animal Holocaust existed long before the Nazi Holocaust.
In fact, U.S. animal slaughterhouses were the model for the Nazi’s human slaughterhouses.
Chicago’s revolutionary, industrial slaughterhouses were designed, built and operating before Henry Ford’s auto assembly line.
Ford was inspired by viewing the efficiency and speed with which animals could be killed and torn apart, a “dis-assembly line’ of killing and dismemberment and “processing.”
Adolf & Henry Ford: mutual fanboys
Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Henry Ford. He displayed a photo of the famous American businessman and industrialist on his wall.
And Henry Ford was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, as they were both antisemites. Ford distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of an infamous, fictitious, fabricated, antisemitic Russian propaganda essay, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Ford published excerpts from “Protocols,” from 1920 to 1927, in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, through his nationwide auto dealerships.
Despite being exposed as fraudulent in 1921 by The Times of London and in subsequent investigations, the “Protocols” circulated widely and influenced antisemitic movements. Reinforcing hateful stereotypes and justifying Jewish persecution, which fueled Nazi propaganda, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
EXCERPT: In Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, Henry Ford is the only American referred to favorably, where Hitler calls him the “only a single great man.” He continues, “Ford, [who], to [the Jews’] fury, still maintains full independence… [from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions.” *