There are few things that upset people more than the sentiment carried with the following statement:

Comparing animal agriculture to tragedies such as slavery or the Holocaust is, at best, counter-productive, because it is offensive to most people. Public health research has shown that frightening or guilting people is rarely going to motivate them to reevalutate their behavior. Instead, they will hate you, whatever cause you’re standing up for, and anyone else who stands with you. They will become more firm in their beliefs and less uncertain about the ethics of their behavior.

But just because something is offensive doesn’t make it incorrect. That this even needs to be stated is an indictment of what passes for discourse today. The culture of critical theory and identity politics places feelings above all else; if it seems offensive to a disadvantaged population, then it’s wrong. This fallacy undergirds the social justice warriors who care not about what is true, only what feels good. To them, the truth yields to emotion, not as a matter of human folly to be resisted, but as a matter of policy.

To be sure, slavery and the Holocaust differ from animal agriculture in fundamental ways. For one, slavery and the Holocaust were the result of discrimination based on ethnicity (and religion, for the latter). Black people, Jews, and other victims of the Holocaust were forced to work, were tortured, and were brutally, callously murdered. Today, animals are killed for food. Therefore, a major difference is that black people and Jews were murdered because of their identity, while animals are killed because their meat tastes good. The Holocaust was largely about pursuing the extinction of the Jews, while animal agriculture requires that more cows, pigs, and chickens are born every day in order that supply meets demand. Thus, the former was about exterminating a group of people; the latter is about perpetuating species so that they may provide us with what we want.

The most salient legacy of the Holocaust and slavery is the unimaginable suffering that took place during that time and for many years afterward. Millions of lives were lost, many more were displaced, and the reverberations of those dark times continue to this day. While it is impossible to quantify the suffering that continues— particularly in the form of poverty and inequality of opportunity in the case of slavery — it is possible to compare the body count, even if you believe animals are only capable of a minimal amount of suffering in relation to humans. Again, counting bodies does not take into account the lives that were displaced or the continuing after-effects of tragedies like the Holocaust or slavery, but it does provide a starting point whereupon we can begin to compare these tragedies to animal agriculture. Because it provides an easier, more straightforward comparison than does slavery, I will use the Holocaust as the measuring stick to calculate how the farming of animals compares, but the following argument likely applies to slavery as well.