This Sunday we fulfilled our usual volunteer stint at the Oregon Humane Society. While in the cattery staff area I noticed a sign I'd seen before, reading (from memory): "Cleanliness is the key to staying alive around here." Which is true insofar as it goes: keeping diseases from spreading amongst a stressed feline population is certainly vital. The phrasing strikes a troubling tone, however.

I am certain that I've come across almost exactly the same phrase in Holocaust literature, as an example of the cruel ironies of official slogans in Nazi death camps. Exhorting slaves to avoid typhus while working them to death would be typical.

Not that the two situations are in any way comparable, most obviously in their respective intent. An alien observer, however, might find the differences so finely nuanced as to represent defensive justification.

So what to do? A more felicitous phrasing of the cattery's notice might help; an examination of my subconscious unease with the way humans treat animals probably would propose solutions too inconvenient for such a sap as myself to enact.