The Animal Holocaust

The Animal Holocaust

By David A. Weseloh, Ph.D.

It is hard to give the exact number of animals that are killed throughout the world each year but it is estimated that it is about 45 billion. That means about 5,137,000 animals are killed every hour throughout the world. It takes slightly over one hour to equal the numbers of innocent Jews that were killed in the Jewish Holocaust. Would you believe that there has been about 2,600,000,000,000 animals killed in the world since the end of WWII? The 2.6 trillion animals killed for food and experimentation since WWII is an educated guess. That is a little less then a half million times as many Jews that were killed in the Jewish Holocaust. The word "holocaust" can apply to both the animal holocaust and the Jewish Holocaust and does not take away from the Jewish Holocaust. The comparison is valid since both get rounded up and placed into cages (concentration camps). They both are tortured and sometimes starved in the case of laying hens. They are both eventually slaughtered.

If we look at just the USA then we find an estimated 9.5 billion animals killed each year. That is 1,084,000 animals killed ever hour or about 18,067 animals killed every minute. With 301 animals killed every second, that is about one and a half time as many people killed on the train in Spain by terrorist in the beginning of March. Then we say that we do not want to upset our flesh eating friends by trying to convert them. I think that we should do anything ethical to at least slow down their eating of animals. I have said this before and I will say it again: I would rather see all people in the world eating half the numbers of animals then to have a million additional people become vegans. The former would be equal to three billion vegans. That would save 22,500,000,000 (22.5 billion) animals each year.

Now is the time to concentrate on getting our family and friends to cut back on their consumption of flesh. We should try to get them to switch from small animals to the larger animals like cows. Of course it would be great if we could get them to become vegans but I think that we all know that this is extremely difficult. Cutting back would be much easier to accomplish. Then if we could get them to cut back another half, that would be a quarter of what they now eat. We could try to step them down until they are vegans in twenty years or so. Can you see my logic? We need to do whatever we can to save the animals. There is a real animal holocaust in the world and we are on the front lines to save them. We can not surrender! We can not retreat! We must go forward!