Glasgow Council Ban Won’T Stop ‘Holocaust On Your Plate’ Exhibit

Graphic Display Juxtaposes Today’s Factory-Farm Horrors With Nazi Death Camps; Group Hopes to Avoid Arrests Over Its Views, But Is Prepared

For Immediate Release:
8 June 2004

Contact:
Andrew Butler 020 7357 9229, ext 230
Dawn Carr 020 7357 9229, ext 224

Glasgow – Despite a city-wide ban imposed by Glasgow City Council, members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are set to show a scaled-down version of the controversial ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ display in Glasgow’s George Square tomorrow. The exhibit graphically depicts the point made by famed Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer when he wrote, ‘In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis’, by showing that what is being done to animals on factory farms and in abattoirs while people ‘look the other way’ is analogous to what was done to Jews, gypsies and gays during World War II.

The display, paid for by a Jewish PETA member in the US and coordinated by international animal rights campaigner Matt Prescott, members of whose family were murdered by the Nazis, consists of eight large panels, each showing photos of factory-farm and abattoir scenes side-by-side with photos from Nazi death camps:

Date:  Wednesday, 9 June
Time: 12 noon sharp
Place: George Square, west end, opposite the war memorial

The exhibit has visited more than 70 cities around the world, including Amsterdam, Warsaw, Copenhagen, New York and Stuttgart. Last month, it made its UK debut in London’s Trafalgar Square, where PETA activists defied a ban imposed by the city of Westminster and the Greater London Authority by displaying mobile versions of the exhibit, which were later seized by police. The panels were also confiscated in Birmingham, and one activist was arrested for showing the display.

PETA wants people to consider how the victimisation of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others who were characterised as ‘life unworthy of life’ during the Holocaust parallels the way that modern society abuses and justifies the slaughter of animals. Just as the Nazis tried to ‘dehumanise’ Jews by forcing them to live in filthy, crowded conditions, tearing them away from their families and killing them in assembly-line fashion, factory farmers deny animals all that is enjoyable and natural to them and treat them as nothing more than meat-, egg- and milk-making ‘machines’. Hens who are raised to produce eggs are crammed on top of each other in small wire cages that do not afford them enough room even to spread a single wing and have their beaks seared off with a hot blade so that they can’t peck each other for space. Pigs are kept on barren, sore-inducing concrete-floored stalls and have their tails cut off – and males suffer the additional abuse of castration – without painkillers. Calves raised for veal are torn from their mothers within hours of birth and kept in tiny, dark stalls, where their joints swell from trying to balance on slippery, waste-covered slats.

‘People are in denial about the torture that is taking place in their own backyards, and that is the very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible – the belief that we can do anything we want to those we decide are different or “inferior”’, says Prescott. ‘We are asking people to bring a deep, all-encompassing compassion into their hearts and onto their tables by embracing a diet that respects other forms of life.’

For more information about PETA’s ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ Campaign and to view the display, please visit MassKilling.co.uk.

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