As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.

Singer uses Herman’s reaction to animal slaughter to draw a deliberately shocking moral analogy: the logic that permits humans to dominate and kill other species resembles the ideology of absolute hierarchy that underwrote Nazi racism. The point is less to equate sufferings quantitatively than to expose a shared principle—power confers entitlement—and the self-satisfied “smugness” that can accompany it. By framing speciesism as a form of racism, the passage challenges readers to see ethical concern as extending beyond one’s own group, and to recognize how easily cruelty becomes normalized when victims are defined as fundamentally “other.”