OpEds: Stop the animal holocaust

By Eyal Megged | Ha’aretz
[Originally posted Saturday, September 08, 2012]

Stunned hog on the conveyor of death.

How are enlightened people capable of ignoring the gap that exists between the amount of suffering caused to animals when they are being murdered, and the amount of pleasure such an enlightened person gets from eating their flesh.

This is a dry turn of phrase that suits to a tee the inspirational circulars disseminated by the ministry. At my request, my son was able to squeeze out a few more words from the document received at his school, and the most salient argument there was that the lecturer is “a vegan who has an extreme influence on his listeners.”

That’s strange, I thought. According to that logic, it is possible to say about anyone who describes horrors he has endured that “he has an extreme influence on his listeners.” Yourovsky indeed describes in horrifying detail what he has seen in slaughterhouses, in chicken coops, in sheep pens and in cattle farms; but after all (with all the obvious, countless differences ), Holocaust survivors who go to the schools every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day also include “extreme contents” in their lectures that are likely to shock the innocent souls of their young listeners.

But perhaps the difference lies in the horrors of the past and the horrors of the present. Between the Holocaust that happened in the past and the holocaust that is taking place now. Perhaps it is easier to digest a memory than to digest a reality that it is still possible to change. I have no doubt that I lost a lot of outraged readers already in the previous paragraph: How is it possible to compare the Holocaust of the Jews at all, The Holocaust with a capital T, to what is happening in the valley of death of the helpless animals at our mercy?

However, from the point of view of an extreme vegetarian like me, the prohibition imposed on Yourovsky about describing, at my son’s school and other schools to which he was invited, the horrors that we perpetrate on the helpless animals is no less grave than a situation in which Holocaust survivors would be prevented from describing what they underwent in the death camps.

From my point of view, the ongoing holocaust of animals is as terrible and horrific as the Holocaust of people. Both were perpetrated on living creatures. The one group suffered and the other group continues to suffer. Then the world declined to intervene and now the world declines to intervene.

In my eyes, there is no difference between one kind of suffering and another. The only difference is that the holocaust of the animals can be stopped. The anger that motivates Yourovsky to sabotage torture farms and monstrous laboratories stems from that same holy feeling that motivated justice and freedom fighters throughout the generations to intervene on behalf of the wretched and miserable of the human race.

I still can’t comprehend how an enlightened person is capable of ignoring the scandalous gap that exists between the amount of suffering caused to animals when they are being murdered, and the amount of pleasure such an enlightened person gets from eating their flesh. I have not understood, and I still do not understand, how a conscientious person can be completely shut off from the subject on the agenda. How cultured people ignore the daily bloodshed in the slaughterhouses, the legal extermination of helpless animals that is carried out because of the human lust for meat.

It is possible to think that at at any rate, high school students are not exposed to extreme content at any juncture. In a short while, though, they will not merely be exposed to extreme “content,” but to an extreme reality. How absurd and stupid it is to decide to prevent these youth, who in another year will be joining the army, from listening to a person who is trying to put an end to violence and torture, only because he wants to try to persuade them to stop eating steak.