Kirstin Marie Waldkoenig Orden de los libros

Since its coinage during the Holocaust, "genocide" has been a term reserved for violence against humans. Simultaneously, many writers and activists have made comparisons between the Holocaust and human violence against nonhuman animals, or have identified such violence as genocide. A character in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals calls this move a cheap and tirelessly familiar comparison (Coetzee 1999, 50). But what, exactly, is illicit about the use of the term "genocide" to discuss harms against nonhumans? Can nonhumans be victims of genocide? What is at stake in our choice to include or exclude them from our understanding of genocide?