Animals in the Declaration of Human Rights

By Laura Streminsky

Despite remarkable progress in human rights, one group remains so profoundly marginalized that most people don't even recognize them as victims. Their oppression is woven into nearly every aspect of society—so normalized that their enslavement, slaughter, forced impregnation, and mutilation are often overlooked. Although we consume them daily, we rarely stop to consider their lives.

In the time it takes to read this paragraph, millions of these sentient creatures will be killed—needlessly, and mostly for the sake of taste.

In Animals in the Declaration of Human Rights, I examine the values we uphold as moral imperatives and confront the staggering disconnect between those ideals and our actions. How have we authored a document that celebrates life and liberty while denying those very rights to the vast majority of Earth's individuals?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laura Streminsky
• Release date: May 16, 2025
• ISBN: 9798231223626

Book preview

Image credit: Farm Transparency Project

Every year, millions of pigs perish in gas chambers. This book is dedicated to each and every one of them, as well as the trillions of other animals that we murder every year.

"I SPENT MY CHILDHOOD years in the Warsaw Ghetto, where almost my entire family was murdered along with 350,000 other Polish Jews. And people sometimes will ask me if that experience had anything to do with my work for animals. And it didn’t have a little to do with my work for animals; it had everything to do with my work for animals. Throughout our ordeal we fortified ourselves by the slogan ‘Never Again.’ It was an article of faith that our sacrifice would not be in vain. That the world would be so shocked by what was done to us that they would never allow atrocities like these to be perpetrated again.

In 1975 after I immigrated to the United States I happened to visit a slaughterhouse where I saw terrified animals subjected to horrendous crowding conditions while awaiting their deaths, just as my family members were in the notorious Treblinka Death Camp. I saw the same efficient and emotionless killing routine as in Treblinka. I saw the neat piles of hearts, hooves, and other body parts, just so reminiscent of the piles of Jewish hair, glasses, and shoes in Treblinka. And I recalled the famous admonition by famed Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer that ‘for the animals, all men are Nazis, and life is an eternal Treblinka.’

And then, it finally dawned on me: ‘Never Again’ is not about what others should not do to us. ‘Never Again’ means that we must never again perpetrate mass atrocities against other living beings. That we must never again raise animals for food or any other form of exploitation. And that’s when I became an activist for animal rights."

-  Dr. Alex Hershaft, Holocaust Survivor

My mother doesn’t have a grave, but if she did I would dedicate it to the geese. I was a goose too.

-Marc Berkowitz, Holocaust survivor

In relation to animals, all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.

-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish Writer & Nobel Laureate

Context

THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION of Human Rights (UDHR) emerged from the darkest period in human history: the Holocaust. An international community forced to confront the torture and murder of more than six million Jews, and millions of others, gathered togetether over the course of two years to write a document that would establish universal moral standards by which all nations would be held accountable. The Declaration was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, in Paris, France—a day now commemorated as Human Rights Day.

At the core of the UDHR are the principles of nonviolence, peace, and equality that are meant to guide nations in creating laws that respect the dignity and personhood of everyone. Eleanor Roosavelt, head of the UN Commission on Human Rights, said that we must ask ourselves if we are doing all we can to "make clear our desire to live in peace and friendship with all our neighbors in the world community.¹" And yet, all of the Declaration’s writers, as well as the rest of the world, neglected to extend the rights promised in the Declaration to the most vulnerable members of society. After giving her speeches about peace and nonviolence at the UN, Eleanor Roosavelt likely went home to a meal of the flesh of someone abused and brutally murdered. The writers of the UDHR only cared to apply their ideas of equality to a relatively narrow group of individuals– humans– while excluding most of the individuals on the planet.

Since the adoption of the UDHR, we’ve made incredible strides in the recognition of human rights. Marginalized groups like women, people of color, and LGBTQ people have gained protections that have allowed them to live more freely and gain power in western societies. While humans have lessened oppression among ourselves, we’ve imposed significantly worse treatment on non-human animals, usually disregarding their rights and well-being in the pursuit of profit. Developed countries have turned killing into an industrial pursuit, murdering individual after individual in assembly-line style murder. Legislation like the Animal Welfare Act have done nothing to prevent abusive practices that parallel those that were imposed on victims in the Holocaust, like bodily mutilation, extreme crowding, and gassing. Despite increased availability to nutritional, non-animal foods, the demand for animal secretions and flesh has increased dramatically, even as the world has come to realize the importance of fundamental rights. The torture and murder of trillions of animals every year rarely gets acknowledged simply because the victims do not look or act like us.

The UDHR is a document written in the shadow of unimaginable atrocity. When we agreed on its principles, we vowed that such an atrocity would never happen again. And yet, our Never Again is happening again, but this time we are all oppressors.

Deindividualization and Subjugation

I COMPARE HUMAN ATROCITIES to the plight of animals because there is little separating the two, except the scale of suffering. Each animal, human or nonhuman, is an individual who has wants and needs, who has a mother, who maybe has brothers and sisters or babies of their own. Each animal has their own personality. They each have different temperaments. They may be extroverted or introverted. They have their favorite foods, and favorite places, and favorite individuals. We are quick to recognize these personalities in our own dogs and cats, but we fail to realize that the animals that we most abuse are exactly like the ones we know and love. Think of any non-human animal you have ever loved or cared for– every second, we murder thousands of individuals just like that one. How do we not realize that each cow, every chicken, every pig, is as much an individual as our beloved non-human companions, and exactly like ourselves?

To answer that question, let’s turn to a human example. In 2015, a photograph of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdilying face-down on a Turkish beach appeared on the front page of newspapers around the world. The picture was viewed by millions of people and sparked global outrage about the Syrian war and the refugee crisis. However, prior to the popularization of this picture, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that, conservatively, 250,000 Syrians had been murdered at the time of publication of Aylan’s photo, with very little attention from the global community.² The Identified Victim Effect demonstrates that humans resonate more strongly with a single victim and their personal story than a group of victims, even if the group consists of thousands or millions of victims with the same background and story as the individual. When people are turned into a they, they are no longer individuals.

If you ever walk into a chicken factory farm, you might mistake the thousands of chickens for a large, white carpet. There is the population of a small city cramped into a single facility, with each chicken not allowed to live past a fraction of their natural life span and unable to make natural connections with each other or the outside