Birmingham Ban Does Not Stop Controversial ‘Holocaust On Your Plate’ Exhibit

Graphic Display Juxtaposes Today’s Factory-Farm Horrors With Nazi Death Camps; Arrests May Occur

For Immediate Release:
12 May 2004

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

Birmingham – Despite a last-minute city-wide ban imposed by the city of Birmingham because of the graphic nature of the campaign, members of PETA will show a scaled down version of the controversial ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ display in Birmingham’s Victoria Square today. 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’.

The display, coordinated by PETA US campaign coordinator Matt Prescott, members of whose family were murdered by the Nazis, consists of eight large panels, each showing photos of factory-farm and slaughterhouse scenes side-by-side with photos from Nazi death camps:

Date:  Wednesday, 12 May
Time: 12 noon sharp
Place: Victoria Square, in front of the Town Council building

On Tuesday, the campaign made its UK debut in London’s Trafalgar Square, where PETA activists defied a similar ban imposed by the city of Westminster and the Greater London Authority by displaying mobile versions of the exhibit before having them wrested away by police.

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.’

The current leg of the exhibit’s tour also includes stops in London, Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin and Brussels. The exhibit has visited more than 70 cities around the world, including Amsterdam, Warsaw, Copenhagen, New York and Stuttgart, Germany.

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

#