Today is World Day for Farmed Animals

You can find information about related events at Mercy for Animals’ blog. Please also watch their video, “Farm to Fridge”:



Before you determine to avoid watching it, consider these words from Dietrich von Haugwitz, a man from an aristocratic German family conscripted into the Wehrmacht at the end of World War II who came to the US after the war and became involved in the animal rights movement:

As for parallels with Germany during and after the war, von Haugwitz sees a similar mentality at work here in the United States. “I’ve always been upset about so many Germans I knew who, at the end of the war, said, in effect, ‘But we had no idea! We really didn’t know anything about Auschwitz and what happened to the Jews. There was no way of knowing. We weren’t allowed to know those things. And if one talked about it, one would have been arrested,’ etc. etc. etc.”

“Baloney!” he says. “People knew very well that the Jews were systematically removed from everywhere and shipped off like cattle, and they lent a hand everywhere to the expulsion. As for the details of the extermination, people didn’t want to know! And that is my main gripe. Rumors circulated, and some people knew some things, but most people said, in effect, ‘If you know, please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know the details.’ Because it would have been too upsetting.”

He sees the same denial operating today. “I have a large animal rights video collection, but it’s hard to show people what goes on in slaughterhouses and in animal labs. They don’t want to see it. It would spoil their appetite.”

*From Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (2002), KL 3019.