One year ago I read an author's manuscript.
Today, that book is in print, and you should
add this one to your summer reading list:

ETERNAL TREBLINKA by Charles Patterson

I have just been informed by Mr. Patterson that
his Eternal Treblinka has been nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize. To order the book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1930051999/dorwaybookshelf
(you may have to clip and paste this enitre
quote if it appears in your email on two lines)

AFTER READING ETERNAL TREBLINKA, I WROTE THIS COLUMN:

The flight from Newark, New Jersey, to
Portland Oregon lasted six hours.

On the plane, I read the rough draft version of
"Eternal Treblinka," an extraordinary book written
by Charles Patterson that equates the real life and
death experiences of ten billion farm animals raised
each year for human consumption to the same Nazi
atrocities suffered by six million Jews who became
Hitler's "Final Solution."

This is one of the best written, best researched
animal rights books that I've ever had the
pleasure to preview.

Fresh from the memory of having read about Jews
stuffed into cattle cars as they were being transported
to the slaughterhouses of Aushwitz and Dachau, I
myself became witness to the twenty-first century's
foremost example of man's inhumanity to other living
creatures. Our tortured kin. The animal holocaust.

Last Thursday morning, I drove from Portland to
Mount St. Helens in Washington State. I had been
attending the Raw Foods Festival in Portland, and
found a few hours in between my talks to visit the
scene of America's greatest natural volcanic disaster.
On this hot summer day, I drove across a bridge
spanning the cascading Columbia River, separating
Portland from Vancouver. There next to my car was
a 40-foot long silver van with holes large enough to
see through.

Inside of the truck were dairy cows.
They were packed tightly together—with no room
to lie down. The cows had served man's purpose.
Each individual lived her short lifetime of stress, first
birthing a child who would be immediately taken from
her, then injected with hormones that would painfully
stretch her udder, depleting calcium from her own
bones so that she would generate enough milk to fill
100 half-pint containers for school children to drink
each day. Her ancestors naturally produced enough
milk to have filled just four of those same containers.

The cow whose eyes I look into for just one moment
would be made to suffer through hours or days of
driving hundreds or thousands of miles to what was
to become a dairyman's final solution.

Yesterday she died a violent death shared by 10,000
of her sisters.

Today she will share that same fate with 10,000 other
Guernsey and Holstein cows on Route 80 or Route 66
or I-95, in Kansas, New Jersey, or Florida, on highways
and neighborhoods where your children and mine sleep
comfortably unaware of the predestined doom for living
beings who have done nothing to merit such treatment.
Tomorrow the same, and the day after that. Eternal death.
Eternal slaughter. Eternal Treblinka.

A holocaust occurs while meat eaters turn the other way,
denying that such horrors could possibly exist. Were the
German and Polish people who knew the fate of those
trucked to Buchenwald and Treblinka any less moral
or guilty than those who comprehend the truth about
what really happens to farm animals?

I followed the truck for a bit until it veered off to the left,
and I continued my drive in another direction. I took the
high road, and she took the low road, and her look will
forever haunt me. Her body will produce 2,000
quarter-pounders for one of many fast food franchises.
Her anus and cheeks, arms and legs, back and udder
will be served so that others can have it their way. Today's
slaughter will feed 20,000,000 people, and the year's tally
of Elsie and her sisters will add up to seven billion kids
meals served.

I feel the slaughterhouse. I hear the screams and know
their fear. I smell the sweat and blood and suffer their pain.
I internalize the agony and distress of transported animals.
I envision the once green fields in which these animals
grazed and the cold metallic ramp and smell of warm
sticky blood that flows on the slaughterhouse floor
and stains the psyche of us all.

I imagine the stun gun bolt to the head.
The upside-down hoisting and the sliced
neck artery. The animal who chokes on her blood,
and the man who slices off her legs as she kicks
in fear from the ensuing pain of butchery. The last
fifteen seconds of a death that no creature deserves.
The arrogance of a man who eats the flesh and
dares not consider the origin of each bite.

Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer once
wrote about a man's love for his departed pet mouse:

"What do they know—all these scholars, all
these philosophers, all the leaders of the
world — about such as you? They have convinced
themselves that man, the worst transgressor of
all the species, is the crown of creation. All
other creatures were created merely to provide
him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated.
In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the
animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

I ceased eating meat four years ago. I now look at
my pet dog, whom my daughters rescued from a
shelter one day before she was due to be injected
with man's final solution. I have come to love her.
Her name is Tykee, the goddess of fortune. Is she
unlike the baby lamb or calf who is separated from
her mother and shipped to the exterminator? I reflect
on the Amazon parrot who recognizes me and sings
"hello" when I visit my parents. Does the bird with
green feathers differ significantly from the chicken
with white plumage?

Do they not feel pain and deserve the right to live? I
cannot eat them. I can no longer be then cause for
their pain, although I once was a part of their genocide.
I once denied responsibility for the acts of terror that
occurred outside of my vision…outside of my
consciousness. Their bodies were cut into smaller
pieces and were broiled, baked, and fried.

Oh, that same crime of arrogance to which I now
plead guilty! My penitence? Community service.
I explain the act to meat eaters, and some turn
their backs on me. Close their eyes. Shut their
ears. Who wishes to deal with the truth and reality
of death?

Arriving at Mount St. Helens, I carefully read one
plaque after another, taking note of performances
both heroic and ironic. I consider the day that
once silenced the birds and boiled to death fish
in the streams. A blink in the eye of geological
time that stripped the landscape of the color green,
divested pine trees of their needles and scattered
whole trees like matchsticks across barren mountain
tops.

I examined the original seismographs and warnings
from hundreds of scientists to the residents to evacuate
their homes and come to terms with an absolute truth.

I became dumfounded by the arrogance of one man,
Harry R. Truman, who lived alone in a cabin aside the
lake below a mountain that would soon explode with
the magnitude and power equivalent to 27,000
Hiroshima-type blasts.

A man who declined to leave that mountain.
A man who denied a truth shared by others. An
arrogant man who looked death in the face and
refused to respect man's destiny. I try to imagine
his final moment of sensibility. At the same time,
in my own mind's eye I call upon the face of a
cow in a truck on a bridge.

Robert Cohen
http://www.notmilk.com