PETA’S ‘Holocaust On Your Plate’ Tour Comes To Dublin After Being Banned In The Uk

Giant Graphic Display Juxtaposes Today’s Factory-Farm Horrors With Nazi Death Camps

For Immediate Release:
14 May 2004

Contact:
Sean Gifford +44 20 7357 9229, ext. 226
Dawn Carr +44 20 7357 9229, ext. 224

Dublin – Despite being banned throughout the UK, PETA’s controversial ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ display is coming to Dublin. The display, which consists of eight 6-metre-square panels, each showing photos of factory-farm and slaughterhouse scenes side by side with photos from Nazi death camps, graphically depicts the point made by Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer when he wrote, ‘In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis’:

Date:  Monday, 17 May
Time:  12 noon – 2 pm
Place: Temple Bar Square

Condemned as ‘graphic’ by the Greater London Authority and ‘shocking and outrageous’ by Manchester City Council, the display has been banned from London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow.  In London, the display was confiscated by police, and in Birmingham, an activist was arrested simply for displaying the images.

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 ‘dehumanize’ 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 even enough room 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 that innocents are being tortured in their 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 PETA US Campaign Coordinator Matt Prescott, members of whose family were murdered by the Nazis. ‘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 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 MassKilling.co.uk.

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