Reply #53: Just like religious keepers have no monopoly on morality [View All]

Animal rights people have are not the sole authorities on what the definition humane conditions are all about(who even said the all agree). Most people understand what the reflections mean in peoples care in the animals that surround them (children pick up the vibes quick)

http://www.upc-online.org/summer2002/etreview.html
Eternal Treblinka:
Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
By Dr. Charles Patterson
Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD

(snip)
Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. -Theodor Adorno

Parallels between our treatment of nonhuman animals and humans considered to be less than human is what this harrowing book is about. To view such parallels as an insult to humankind merely illustrates its thesis. In her Forward, attorney Lucy Rosen Kaplan says that Eternal Treblinka should be read by all who are not afraid to understand that the suffering that humans have so relentlessly inflicted on animals over the course of our species' history is one and the same with the suffering we so often inflict on each other. Eternal Treblinka should also be read by those who shy away from this thesis.

One of the values of Eternal Treblinka is that it places the Nazi Holocaust within a larger psychological and historical context. It isn't only modern capitalist society that commits the atrocities it depicts, although our society could hardly be topped. As Animal Liberation Front founder, Ron Lee, says in the book, "We have been at war with the other creatures of this earth ever since the first human hunter set forth with spear into the primeval forest. . . . Speciesism is more deeply entrenched within us even than sexism, and that is deep enough."

Treblinka was a Nazi death camp in Poland that began operating in 1942. The title, Eternal Treblinka, is taken from the meditations of Herman Gombiner, the main character in the Nobel Prizewinning author Isaac Bashevis Singer's story, "The Letter Writer." Herman, who lost his entire family to the Nazis, is thinking about a mouse he befriended whose death he believes he caused, and his sadness leads to a larger thought: "What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world-about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

Eternal Treblinka presents theories from various thinkers including Freud, Montaigne, Carl Sagan, Judy Chicago, and Barbara Ehrenreich on the human penchant for war, violence, and the subjugation of other forms of existence. It looks at traditional methods of subduing animals in pastoral cultures, noting that "astration continues to be the centerpiece of animal husbandry." And like the infamous 20th-century psychologist Harry Harlow, who devised experiments to induce terror in young monkeys and pathologic aggression in their mothers, herders around the world separate mother cows from their young by cruel and painful means: "The Nuer tie a ring with thorns around the calf's muzzle, which pricks the mother's udder. . . . Lapps smear excrement on the udders of reindeer does in order to keep their fawns from sucking them." The Tuareg "pierce the nasal septum of the calves with a forked stick that makes sucking painful." They "cut the noses of camel and cattle calves to keep them from sucking their mothers."
(snip)