Animal Rights Messel / Tierrechte Messel
Obituary for Helmut F. Kaplan
We were deeply saddened to learn that the author and animal rights philosopher Helmut F. Kaplan passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in the spring. With his death, the animal rights movement in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland has lost a thinker whose writings and ideas helped shape a generation of activists throughout the German-speaking world.
Helmut F. Kaplan was one of that now-rare breed of animal advocates who did not shy away from directly challenging the deepest obstacles and ethical breaking points of our society. As a fiercely outspoken voice within the Austrian animal rights movement, he took a courageous and uncompromising stand against speciesism in art – most prominently in his critical engagement with the work of Hermann Nitsch.
What one might naturally expect from an animal rights activist is, in reality, the exception: While many activists embrace anti-speciesism in art, they surprisingly often shy away from the consequences that arise from criticizing the established art world as soon as one focuses on the concrete manifestations of speciesist art. Helmut F. Kaplan possessed this courage to engage in cultural criticism.
In this regard, he resembled the activist Andreas Bender Hochhaus, who also left us far too young. Hochhaus, who ran the vegan design company Voice-Design and was the editor of the animal liberation publication Voice Magazine until 2004, likewise took a clear stand against Nitsch and his associates, thereby setting an unambiguous course against the objectification of animals in the arts and cultural sectors; see also https://www.farangis.de/blog/speciesism-and-arts-nazi-species-nazisismism (accessed 12 September 2026).
Kaplan’s work reminds us that the “War on Animals” is based on a concept of culture that disguises the slaughter of billions of animals as normal. Even in the case of mass murders of humans, the phenomenon of the routinization of killing processes has been documented; when it comes to animals, this technocratic desensitization is the foundation of our cultures and of the lifestyles that most of us have personally chosen.
The collective fear of the idea that a body designated for killing or slaughter – whether human or animal – is or may be treated with the same industrial indifference within the system leads to knee-jerk defense mechanisms and taboos. However, this repression obscures the fact that the psychological numbness involved in the process of killing remains the same.
Kaplan, as indeed happens to many well-known activists at one point or another, faced uncompromising criticism – in his case regarding comparisons between sites of institutional violence and the question of whether people are permitted to describe institutional faunacides as atrocities. In German-speaking countries, he stood little chance with such a topic, because, as far as we can tell, the issue is generally treated in a far too simplistic manner throughout.
Helmut F. Kaplan was also prepared to voice dissent within his own theoretical milieu and to critically question positions that had long since become taken-for-granted points of reference in animal rights thought – such as the downgrading of animal rights back to merely animal welfare or reformist objectives, or recourse to philosophical constructs that, while historically significant, are extraordinarily questionable when applied to the practice of animal rights. This independence of thought was not always comfortable, but it remains equally important.
Anyone who fundamentally rejects the Holocaust comparison – as Kaplan presents it here, for example, see Wikiquote: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Helmut_F._Kaplan (accessed 12 September 2026) – instead of analyzing it more closely and first allowing the issue to be discussed, should, rather than making sweeping accusations, perhaps explain why they view this comparison, made by an animal rights activist, as disrespectful to humanity rather than as a comparison that is imprecise in how the phenomena involved are categorized, and they would consequently also have to reject Jeremy Bentham’s statement – and, ideally, entrench themselves ultimately somewhere in the spirit of Descartes:
“The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate.” [1] https://www.utilitarianism.com/jeremybentham.html (accessed 29 August 2026)
One can use comparisons and analogies to approach all these unspeakably difficult questions that animal rights activists have to grapple with. For an animal rights activist, the very question of ethical proximity arises, and there is a tendency to reject radical value judgements based on a hierarchy of being.
We shall sorely miss Helmut F. Kaplan’s voice. His work, his approaches and their impact will endure.
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[1] An argument that we, in turn, seek to use as a basis for further differentiation with regard to “thinking” and “feeling,” etc.; see > Equal Consideration for Animals (1) > https://tierrechtsethik.de/equal-consideration-for-animals-1/ [August 29, 2026]
Header image: Partial view of the gravestone of the anti-vivisectionist Martin Eduard Staudinger, https://simorgh.de/niceswine/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/martin_eduard_staudinger_german_anti-vivisectionist.pdf (accessed 12 September 2026)
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