International Eat an Animal for PETA Day (belated)

Last week was the International Eat an Animal for PETA day. PETA of course is the extreme animal rights group that among other things sponsors the "milk sucks" website.

Sometimes, the stunts are amusing, such as when they launched into their "drink beer not milk" campaign, targeting universities of course. However, they have now crossed the line in my opinion with their latest campaign which they are now bringing to Europe after a successful US tour.

The campaign is called "Holocaust on your plate". and it compares the meat industry to... the Holocaust.

Just as millions of Europeans ignored the concentration camps, allowing them to operate for seven years simply because they were not themselves being victimized, millions of people today turn away from the horrors of factory farming

My problem with this exhibit is simple. Words and events have meanings attached to them, and if words are used in the wrong context, then they lose their meaning. A common example is the term "hero" used to describe victims of 9/11 who did nothing but die in a skyscraper.

Similarly, the Holocaust was a singular and particularly grievous occurrence in the history of our species. For slightly lesser crimes (on scale at least) we have the word genocide, which would be appropriately used in the case of Rwanda, Armenia and Bosnia.

Calling a small group of killings a "genocide" cheapens a word that should be an immediate call to arms around the world. If a genocide is used to describe, say, the attack on Iraq, how do you differentiate when faced with a real genocide.

Similarly, while PETA's cause might be just in regards to factory farming, their use of the Holocaust cheapens the uniqueness of the event as an example of what must never happen again on this planet.

When PETA does something as callously insensitive as this, the correct response is to make sure that they do not get their message across. I missed the event last week, but tomorrow I will be eating as many different animals as possible in honour of PETA.