On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, Michael Pugliese wrote:
> This at the end was an amazingly insensitive statement>...A quote from
> PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk (Washington Post, November 13, 1983), shows
> how far a biocentric view can lead to moral relativism and disregard for
> human suffering: "Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six
> billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses."
To be fair, this same parallel has been drawn by people who are unimpeachable when it comes to holocaust sensitivity, namely Isaac Bashevis Singer and Theodor Adorno. The former wrote a short story called "Eternal Treblinka" (for domestic animals, in his view, life is an eternal Treblinka) and I'm pretty sure I heard him making this chicken comparison at least once in an interview. And I've seen Adorno quoted to the effect that "Auschwitz begins when people look at a slaughterhouse and say: they're just animals."
So while I admit there's something about your quote bugs me -- I think it's the fact that the chicken numbers are bigger as if that made it more important -- I guess this is one of those places where context determines meaning. In other words, it's creepy when creepy people say it, and not creepy when not creepy people say it. So that the presence of the analogy alone doesn't necessarily prove people are creepy. Just that they really, really empathize with battery chickens.
Michael