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 I usually regard the “stupid pet tricks” of the animal rights movement with a mixture of indifference and disdain. People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals (PETA) president Ingrid Newkirk, for instance, gleefully anticipates the arrival of a hoof & mouth epidemic in the U.S. The April 14, 2001, issue of World magazine quotes her as "… openly hop[ing] that it comes here …. It would be good for animals, good for human health, and good for the environment." According to The Orange County Register, April 17, 2001, another recent PETA priority was lobbying Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to "drop animal products from his [prison] diet." McVeigh demurred: "…I suggest hitting Ted [the Unibomber] Kaczynski up for his opinions on the subject" he said.
PETA expects a guy who blows up a daycare center to care about animals? Of course, stranger things have happened. Many antivivisectionists support partial-birth abortion. But how does PETA feel about McVeigh's life; the lives of the people he murdered; or do they only care about the lives of the animals he is eating on death row?
When students at a K-12 Christian school in Orange County, CA were allowed to view the slaughter and butchering of a steer as part of a section on agriculture, local news papers reported that the principle was swamped with hate mail from animal rights activists. Some of it suggested that the school should have killed the principle and saved the steer (Orange County Register, May 22, 2001).
Non sequiturs abound in the PETA mind but the organization’s odd interest in abortion sets new standards for incoherence. A March 19, 2001 U-Wire story began with an improbable headline which read "PETA woos Boston campus pro-lifers." The article reported that the animal rights group was launching an advertising campaign featuring the slogan "Pro-Life? Go Vegetarian!" The ads were planned to run first at Boston-area colleges and then at schools nationwide.
Aaron Gross, a Harvard Divinity School student and College Action Campaign coordinator for PETA said his organization "is attempting to convince students that eating meat is incompatible with pro-life beliefs." This is sort of like PETA’s recent, goofy effort to convince Southern Baptists that Jesus was a vegetarian and so Christians should be too.
PETA's Website (http://www.PETA.org) expressly disavows any position on abortion but this cockamamie ad campaign is another example of the organization's penchant for muddled sensationalism. The last big PETA college ad campaign involved the give-away of bottle openers that said "Drinking Responsibly Means Not Drinking Milk - Save a Cow's Life" (http://www.milksucks.com). The campaign slogan, of course, was "Got Beer?" How's that for a socially responsible message for students among whom binge drinking is claiming more lives than ever before?
First of all, pro-life carnivores (omnivores?) are pro-HUMAN-life; not pro-SUBHUMAN-life. PETA, of course, rejects the term "subhuman" as pejorative and inaccurate. Most of its members don't believe human life is more sacred (in either the secular or sectarian sense) than that of other animals. Existential issues are obviously not resolvable by objective analysis but if PETA wishes to plunge itself into the scalding caldron of abortion politics (even while saying they aren't) they need to reconcile a few inconsistencies of their own.
Answering the silly with the absurd, one might ask on what grounds this nincompoop group claims that consuming a cow is more cowardly than chomping a carrot?
Their Website says it's because vegetables lack brains, nervous systems and the like. This is a "form & function" argument and it may be true but it is also a very slender reed on which to hang the advocacy of mass vegicide. Is a nervous system the only way to achieve sentience? Might there also be morally significant alternative means through which to be conscious of and responsive to one's environment?
The San Jose Mercury News, August 10, 1999, featured a story headlined "From chemical weapons to self-preservation, plants are apparently much savvier than we think":
Biologist Jack Schultz sees plants a little differently than the rest of us.
'Plants are just very slow animals,' said the Pennsylvania State University researcher, who is a pioneer in the growing field of plant communication. 'They have a lot of the same characteristics. They just don't do things very fast.'
* * *
When a plant is bitten by a bug, it can send out a chemical alarm and summon friendly insects to protect it – an ability researchers hope to exploit to protect crops.
It can tell when a neighbor is under attack and quickly shore up its own defenses.
When infected, a plant may even run a fever, researchers report – part of a complex reaction involving the release of salicylic acid, commonly known as aspirin, that appears to keep the infection from spreading.
New studies indicate that some plants may be territorial, protecting their turf by releasing chemicals that keep the roots of others in check.
And their exquisite ability to discriminate between light of different colors allows them to tell when a competitor is getting too close, so they can shoot up quickly and avoid being shaded.
It makes sense that plants would have a wide range of capabilities, Schultz said: 'Since plants can't run away from things, they have to be able to respond to the environment or to the changes around them. They're stuck with where they are.'
* * *
More than 100 species of plants are now known to actively respond to attack by insects or other pests, said Anurag Agrawal, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Davis, where experiments over the past 15 years have illuminated these interactions.
'Essentially this is analogous to an immune system in animals ….'
* * *
Cut a leaf with a pair of scissors and the plant barely responds, [Marcel] Dicke [a chemical ecologist at Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands] said. But plop a hungry caterpillar on it, and within a few hours the chemicals are potent enough to attract predators that come looking for a caterpillar to eat.
When a vegetarian decapitates a cabbage it would, therefore, appear they are slaughtering an aware, interactive being. Therefore, categorically denying rights of personhood to any creature without a brain might seem excessively neurocentric to a progressive botanist (progressive as in "enlightened" rather than "liberal," the latter being what leftists used to call themselves before the term became synonymous with failed policies). Perhaps the term "veg-out" should be deemed akin to a racial slur. Could wearing cotton be the moral equivalent of donning wool, or even fur? PETA says flesh-feasting pro-lifers have blood on their hands but we say PETA members have sap on theirs!
And what about those other creatures PETA people annihilate so remorselessly – and by the billions? Every vegetarian has an immune system that exterminates bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, chlamydia, spirochetes and protozoa. And protozoa may be the simplest single-cell organisms of the animal kingdom but they are animals nonetheless. How ethically does PETA treat ingested protozoa? Oh sure, PETA members may disparage the microbial IQ but these mini-merchants of mortality and morbidity have proved themselves clever adversaries in the battle to cure any number of dread diseases.
Animal rights advocates might blame their immunosavagery on out-of-control lymphocytes (T cells and B cells) or other leukocytes (granulocytes, monocytes and macrophages). But blame shifting ill-becomes an advocacy group which aspires to be taken seriously on matters of animal ethics. Immunosuppressants are readily available by prescription. And the question returns, who will speak for disenfranchised pathogens?
The bottom line is this: We all kill and kill we must. But what must we kill?
If we don't kill animals, malnutrition could make at least some of us vulnerable to a host of ailments, including opportunistic infections. I know, I know. There are nutritionists who argue that plants alone are sufficient to meet our need for high-grade protein, etc. But there are also nutritionists who dispute this claim. Furthermore, most nutritionists are meat-eaters (though taste, it is true, may play a larger role than science in motivating this preference). And there are large populations of people to whom vegetables, by reason of geography, weather, etc., are not readily available.
If we don't kill pathogens, pathogens will kill us and quickly, as in AIDS and other immune disorders. There is no "germ" lobby because germs are the common enemy of all living things. It's kill or be killed by these rapacious, tenacious little assassins. Survival of the fittest.
But how does an unborn child threaten our survival? Overpopulation hysteria is just that. Some of the world's most densely populated regions enjoy some of the world's highest standards of living. Most of the world's privation is more attributable to bad government, bad economics, bad farming, bad distribution, etc., than to overpopulation.
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