A Rat Is A Fish Is A Dog Is A Boy

Animal Rights Group Says Eating McDonald’s Will Kill You–But Finger Pointed at Wrong Food Group

2010-09-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine goes after McDonald's. But french fries have far more calories and fat than meat patties.

The Threat Animal Rights Poses to Non Animal Industries

2010-08-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

What if individual animals could sue BP or other non animal using industries for damages? The result would choke the courts and ruin the economy. Here's my take on an article in the ABA Journal that discusses the issue.

Great Review of A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy

2010-08-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

In the American Spectator. Here's my take over at Secondhand Smoke, with a link to the review itself.

Eating Meat Made Humans Exceptionally Smart

2010-08-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

I have decided not to keep a separate animal rights blog--this one--as well as a general bioethics/human exceptionalism blog, which I call Secondhand Smoke. The reason is that I end up posting all animal rights entries there anyway. So, from this post onward, when I post an animal rights-related entry at SHS, I will merely link it here rather than repeat or abridge the whole thing.

An NPR report posits that eating meat made us the human beings we are today.

Risking Aviation Safety–For Geese>

2010-07-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

Now this really drives me nuts. There is certainly nothing wrong with having safe havens for wildlife. They are generally good things. But if our devotion to animals risks human life, we have gone way overboard. And that appears to be behind the so far unsuccessful efforts to limit the goose population in a wildlife preserve near JKF Airport in the wake of bird strike last year that landed a jet in the Hudson River. From the story:

A year and a half after Canada geese forced an airliner to splash down in the Hudson River, officials are rounding them up in almost every part of the city — but flocks are still free to take off around John F. Kennedy International Airport. The wild birds were at the center of a government vs. government battle on Tuesday. A National Park Service official told The Associated Press that, for now, his agency won’t touch the hundreds of birds living in a refuge near Kennedy airport’s runways. “Our mission is to protect and preserve wildlife — that’s a law — and it isn’t a given that the removal of the geese is necessary to protect the flying public,” said Dave Avrin, the official at the Park Service’s Gateway National Recreation Area, which includes the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

Are you kidding me? Hundreds of people were almost killed by these geese. Indeed, but for a valiant captain, that plane might have crashed in the middle of the city! If the owner of private property won’t let the government in to kill the geese, the apparent excuse here, get a court order! Good grief.

Priorities, people! Those geese are beautiful animals–but in this context they are just birds. The entire gaggle is not worth one human life. They have already taken down one plane. Can you imagine the uproar if they take down another?

A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy Lauded in Review

2010-06-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

Well, this is a nice way to start the day. Someone sent me a good review on MercatorNet (Australia) of A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy. And how refreshing: The reviewer really got where I am coming from. Here are a few excerpts:

Our society rests upon the unspoken acceptance of a number of truths, like the rule of law, the authority of reason, or solidarity with our neighbours. One of these is so obvious that it used to need no defenders: human exceptionalism, the notion that humans are special and unique amongst living things. But today, animal rights activists are holding a big question mark over this hitherto undisputed truth.

Radical animal rights activists deny that there is anything special about human beings. Their campaign to grant animals rights is ultimately a campaign to revise Shakespeare’s assessment – “in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals” — and disrobe him of any unique significance. That is the argument of this important book. Wesley J. Smith distinguishes between animal welfare and the animal rights movement. The humane treatment of animals is something all of us should support. But animal rights is a worrying development. What looks like a noble and worthwhile crusade is at bottom really an anti-human ideology. It is in fact “a belief system, an ideology, even a quasi religion, which both implicitly and explicitly seeks to create a moral equivalence between the value of human lives and those of animals,” says Smith.

The review discusses some of the ideological bases I report on and notes:

Smith warns us of what sort of world we would live in if these radicals had their way: “Medical research would be materially impeded. There would be no more fishing fleets, cattle ranches, leather shoes, steak barbecues, animal parks, bomb-sniffing or Seeing Eye dogs, wool coats, fish farms, horseback riding, pet stores… Millions of people would be thrown out of work, our enjoyment of life would be substantially diminished. Our welfare and prosperity reduced.” Indeed, all domestication of animals would be taboo. There goes the family pet.

The review discusses some of the examples of animal rights activism in my book, such as Holocaust on Your Plate,” and PETA’s scurilous “comic books” depicting parents as animal killers:

It is not just intellectuals and academics who are pushing all this. Activist groups are targeting children and schools. They seek to convince young children that all domestication of animals is evil, and they must rise up and act now. There are even PETA comics. One produced in 2003 for its anti-fur campaign, “Your Mommy KILLS Animals!”, depicts an evil-looking mother knifing a rabbit to death, with gore splattered all over the page. These fear campaigns and propaganda exercises are found in schools all around North America.

The ultimate point of the book, as SHSers know, is defending human exceptionalism:

Rights can apply only to humans, because only humans possess moral autonomy. Seeking to include animals in the area of rights “would degrade the importance of rights altogether, just as wild inflation devalues money”. Given that Switzerland is now talking about “plant rights” it is time that we started thinking clearly and soberly about what rights really mean, and why humans are unique. At the same time we can and should ensure proper animal welfare. Smith gets this balance right. With so much irrationality and emotion being generated on this issue, his cool logic and common sense come as a welcome relief.

I tried. Thanks very much to Bill Muehlenberg, a lecturer in ethics and philosophy at several Melbourne theological colleges and a PhD candidate at Deakin University, for his obvious careful reading of my book and his thoughtful analysis.

Ban Whaling Based on Animal Welfare, Not Personhood

2010-06-27T15:19:00.000-07:00

The anti human exceptionalists are–rather desperately, it seems to me–ever pretending that animals are like “us,” even as they say there is nothing special about being human anyway. And now, the effort to stop whaling has scientists in high anthropomorphic gear about pods of whales being “tribes” and alleged cetacean personhood. Latest example, New York Times science writer Natalie Angier, who argues that we should “Save a Whale, Save a Soul:”

After two years of transcontinental haggling, the commission had been expected to replace today’s hunting ban with limited hunting quotas. Supporters of the policy change had argued that by specifying how many whales of a given species could be sustainably harvested over a 10-year period, and by tightening or eliminating current loopholes through which whaling nations like Japan and Norway kill the marine mammals for “scientific” purposes, the new measure would effectively reduce the number of whales slaughtered each year.

Yet many biologists who study whales and dolphins view such a compromise as deeply flawed, and instead urge that negotiators redouble efforts to abolish commercial whaling and dolphin hunting entirely. As these scientists see it, the evidence is high and mounting that the cetacean order includes species second only to humans in mental, social and behavioral complexity, and that maybe we shouldn’t talk about what we’re harvesting or harpooning, but whom.

To show you where Angier is coming from, I blogged about her writing over at Secondhand Smoke after she ridiculously opined that plants are the most ethical life form on the planet because they live without killing. I guess she forgot that ethics requires rational analysis and the intentional creation of moral codes, activities in which only humans are capable of engaging. Oh, and what about those cruel venus flytraps? They digest their prey alive!

Here’s the thing: We don’t need to go through the mental contortion of making whales people too in order to support an international treaty banning commercial whaling. Human exceptionalism supports it based on our duty not to treat animals cruelly or cause animal suffering for little human benefit. The need for whale meat is very low and the cruelty of the killing method very high. That being so, it doesn’t matter that a pod of killer whales once seemed to play with dead salmon (discussed in Angier’s piece). As a matter of applying basic animal welfare principles, the arguments in favor of a commercial ban are clear and convincing.

Creating Sick Pigs to Help Make Humans Well

2010-06-17T09:18:00.001-07:00

Animal research is crucial to the quest to find treatments for the worst human illnesses. Toward this end, UK scientists are genetically altering pigs so that they will be born with currently incurable human diseases so that they can be used in drug research looking for effective treatments. From the story:

SCOTTISH scientists are creating pigs that are genetically modified to suffer from incurable human diseases – so they can be used by drug companies to test new therapies. The team of researchers is trying to produce pigs which are diseased with the lethal lung condition cystic fibrosis and an eye disease that leads to blindness in humans, The Scotsman has learned. The highly controversial research is being carried out at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, famous for creating Dolly the cloned sheep. If the team is successful, the diseased animals would be used by drug companies to test potential new gene therapies for the conditions…In a frank interview with The Scotsman, Dr Bruce Whitelaw, head of developmental biology at the Roslin Institute, admitted he had struggled with the idea of creating diseased animals purely to try to benefit humans. “We are saying we will make these animals sick purely for our benefit,” he admitted. However, he believes his team has a “moral right” to give the technique a try.

It might even rise to the level of a duty. This is potentially important work that could–not will, but could–tremendously benefit humankind. But animal rights activists think it is immoral and, indeed, evil. And note the nuanced ethical analysis that went into the decision to create the sick pigs:

“I don’t think we should use this technology for something we can currently treat just so we can make the treatment slightly better, but we should use it for diseases that we don’t have treatments for,” he said…He continued to justify the work by adding: “If we believe we need to have therapies for these diseases – and currently society en masse believes that – then we surely have to have that tested in the best way we can before it goes into that patient. “Then the better the animal model – the more likely it’s going to tell you something about going into a human patient – the better. “And basically mice are mediocre at best and the majority of studies are done on mice.”

That seems the right approach to me, and I say it without joy or relish. But the potential benefit to find ways to treat incurable human diseases justifies the harm caused by manufacturing sick pigs–which would never be justified doing to human beings because of our higher moral value than animals and the mutually equal moral worth to each other.

I’ll let you read the usual animal rights nonsense spouted by opponents about how animal research is pointless because animals and humans would not react identically to the experimental treatments, for yourselves. That isn’t the point of basic research, which needs living human organisms for testing, and as the story points out, in this situation the pigs are closer to us than mice.

Here is the conundrum: New medicines at some point have to be tested on a living organism. That can be dangerous and, indeed, may fail. But if we don’t do it, medical advancements will slow to a crawl, at best. Thus, it is either risk mice–or as in this case, pigs–or endanger humans. So which matters more, us or animals? I vote, us.

Animal Rights Protestors Meet Their Match

2010-06-16T21:40:00.001-07:00

This undoubtedly isn’t true, nor do I really want it to be because it would involve assault. But still, the premise has definite appeal. From the “story:”

Johnstown, PA (GlossyNews) – Local and state police scoured the hills outside rural Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after reports of three animal rights activists going missing after attempting to protest the wearing of leather at a large motorcycle gang rally this weekend. Two others, previously reported missing, were discovered by fast food workers “duct taped inside several fast food restaurant dumpsters,” according to police officials.

“Something just went wrong,” said a still visibly shaken organizer of the protest. “Something just went horribly, horribly, wrong.” The organizer said a group of concerned animal rights activist groups, “growing tired of throwing fake blood and shouting profanities at older women wearing leather or fur coats,” decided to protest the annual motorcycle club event “in a hope to show them our outrage at their wanton use of leather in their clothing and motor bike seats.” “In fact,” said the organizer, “motorcycle gangs are one of the biggest abusers of wearing leather, and we decided it was high time that we let them know that we disagree with them using it…ergo, they should stop.”

Right. Fat chance.

This is clearly a satire. Not even animal rights activists are dumb enough to harass a motorcycle gang! But protesters who throw paint and engage in other such activities are bullies, so who can blame people for smiling at such a revenge fantasy?

A Seal Sues

2010-06-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest–yet little known–agenda items of the animal rights movement is what is known as animal standing, that is, granting animals the right to bring lawsuits (discussed in detail in my book and in this article on NRO). (Of course, the real litigants would be animal rights and environmental extremists looking to shut down human enterprise and animal industries in support of their ideology.)

It keeps being tried by animal rights and environmental radical lawyers, and keeps being turned down. But there is no downside. Bringers of these claims are never punished or sanctioned, and moreover, they know that all they need is one court, and these days, anything is possible in court.

There is now another of these animal standing cases now pending seeking a ruling that would grant a seal the right to sue. From the column by Christopher Stone, who claims to “represent” the seal:

It is not uncommon for a law professor to have a client on death row. Mine is a sea lion. He goes by C657, an identity branded into his flesh by the Army Corps of Engineers. C657 got onto the wrong side of the law by, allegedly, eating salmon at the base of the Bonneville Dam spillway in the Pacific Northwest. That, the National Marine Fisheries Service says, is a federal offense, punishable by rifle fire. We lost in the lower court, which ruled that sea lions had no standing. His case is before an Oregon appeals court. C657’s case involves much more than the fate of a single sea lion, and not merely because six similarly situated sea lions were shot in March when a stay of execution expired. The larger principle is the right of nonhumans to sue in their own names, with lawyers as their guardians. I believe the facts of C657’s case illustrate the merits of permitting some such suits.

The words we use matter. The seals weren’t “executed.” Execution under color of law is punishment for a crime. The seals did not commit a crime, and indeed are incapable of such because they are amoral. They were destroyed–that’s the proper term–to save the salmon run as part of ecological management. To state otherwise is to try to turn seals into persons and the equivalent of humans. Of course, that’s the reason Stone used the term.

Stone next tries to downplay the importance of the whole thing by stating that lawsuits brought by animals and nature–which he also supports–will rarely happen, so no big deal:

Granted, the idea of rights for nature invites many objections. Among them I would not the include that: The courts, besieged on every hand. Will crowd with suits by chunks of land. Lawyers value their time, and brooks have shallow pockets. Lawsuits on behalf of nonhumans are therefore unlikely to be frivolous.

Who is he kidding? HSUS has more than $200 million in assets and is chewing at the bit (pardon the pun) to bring animal lawsuits. PETA is rolling in dough. Rich bank rollers like Paul McCartney will happily donate to animal lawsuits. Such suits could quickly become an easy way of raising big money from regular donors and could become a racket with animal industries paying protection settlement money to keep out of court. Then there is the pro bono bar at the big corporate firms that induce liberal young lawyers to work for big corporations, in part by agreeing to let them assuage their consciences by bringing “cause” lawsuits. No, with more than 100 law schools churning out lawyers trained in animal law, there would be an atomic explosion of such cases, and with, it the destruction of many animal industries.

But the real purpose of the suit isn’t just to save the seal, but to destroy human exceptionalism. Stone concludes:

C657 (currently reprieved in a Texas aquarium) wants his day in court. More than that, C657 wants to contest humankind’s self-appointed place atop the planet.

Please. C657 wants to do no such things. It is oblivious. No, Christopher Stone wants his ilk wish to “contest humankind’s self-appointed place atop the planet.” The seal is just the front for the real agenda.

When you think about it, this is all very odd. We dominate all other life forms. We manage species and environments. We are unquestionably atop the planet, to the point we are accused by the radical environmentalist crowd that we must sacrifice ourselves to save the planet from ourselves.

Stone may wish to pretend otherwise, but in his very attempt to destroy human exceptionalism, ironically, he is engaging in it. By urging self sacrifice for the sake of other species as a moral imperative, he seeks to force us to adopt a radical forbearance of which humans are uniquely capable. I mean our salmon industry is in real trouble, and one cause is the seals who eat countless millions of the fish before we can catch them. If we were like other species, we would try to kill our competitors or drive them away. But we protect them. Name one other known creature in the known universe that has ever done that but us.

Animal Rights Terrorists--Not Religion--to Blame for Outsourcing Animal Research

2010-06-08T11:24:00.001-07:00

I don’t mean for this to be pick on Peter Singer week, but blame him for being so wrong at every opportunity. Singer has a piece in the Guardian decrying the outsourcing of animal research to countries with weak welfare rules. Great! We are, for once, on the same page.

But Singer isn’t really after the outsourcing, but religion. From his piece:

Last week, the chief minister of Malacca, Mohamad Ali Rustam, was quoted in the Guardian as saying that God created monkeys and rats for experiments to benefit humans. Activists had been protesting against his approval of an Indian company’s proposal to build an animal research laboratory in his state. They said that Malaysia has no regulations to protect animals in laboratories. His answer was the reference to God’s purpose in creating animals. If it were not for the dire consequences for the animals who will suffer in the laboratory, the chief minister’s remark would be hilarious. Here is the head of a Malaysian state justifying the establishment of a scientific enterprise with a comment that flies in the face of everything science tells us. The belief that the animals exist because God created them – and that he created them so we can better meet our needs – is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all.

Okay, but what about animal welfare? Not yet:

The chief minister’s comment is yet another illustration of the generally regressive influence that religion has on ethical issues – whether they are concerned with the status of women, with sexuality, with end-of-life decisions in medicine, with the environment, or with animals. Although religions do change, they change slowly, and tend to preserve attitudes that have become obsolete and often are positively harmful.

Yada, yada, yada. But what about the animals? Finally, at the very end:

Independently of the problems of reactionary religious belief, the trend to establish animal testing facilities in countries with weak or no regulations is an extremely worrying one. As regulations improve in Europe, North America, Australia and other countries, it seems that unscrupulous entrepreneurs are engaged in a race to the bottom. If we are concerned about the exploitation of human workers in countries with low standards of worker protection, we should also be concerned about the treatment of even more defenceless non-human animals. At present, the only hope of reversing this trend seems to be pressure on companies not to test their products in countries without good animal welfare regulations, and pressure on research institutions not to have links with such countries. But to unravel the connections and make them clear to consumers is, unfortunately, going to be a difficult task.

I agree with him on that, but what he fails to mention is one of the most important causes of this outsourcing of ethics (in Bill Hurlbut’s provocative turn of phrase) is the fear generated by animal rights terrorism. Singer has spoken against violence in the past, but not very robustly. This piece would have been a good time to bring that crucial point up with ringing clarity. Too bad he preferred instead to use most of his column as a jeremiad against religion. Indeed, I think it tells us clearly where is priorities lie.A

Terrorists Blow Up Donkey–PETA’s Past Protest

2010-05-26T08:44:00.000-07:00

Terrorists have unsuccessfully attempted to kill innocent people by detonating an explosive packed on a donkey cart. From the story:

A small Syrian-backed terrorist group in Gaza said its activists blew up a donkey cart laden with explosives close to the border with Israel on Tuesday, killing the animal but causing no human casualties. Abu Ghassan, spokesman for the terrorist group, said more than 200 kilograms of dynamite were heaped on the animal-drawn cart. He added that the explosives were detonated 60 meters from the concrete security barrier that separates the territory from Israel.

Why do I think some people will care more about the dead animal--which was a terrible thing to do--than they would have the people who could have been killed? Oh, that's right. This has happened once before, after which PETA wrote an angry letter of protest to Yassar Arafat, not about the intifada that was killing a lot of people at the time, but the dead donkey. Here it is:

February 3, 2003

Yasser Arafat, President...

Your Excellency:

I am writing from an organization dedicated to fighting animal abuse around the world. We have received many calls and letters from people shocked at the bombing in Jerusalem on January 26 in which a donkey, laden with explosives, was intentionally blown up.

All nations behave abominably in many ways when they are fighting their enemies, and animals are always caught in the crossfire. The U.S. Army abandoned thousands of loyal service dogs in Vietnam. Al-Qaeda and the British government have both used animals in hideously cruel biological weaponry tests. We watched on television as stray cats in your own compound fled as best they could from the Israeli bulldozers.

Animals claim no nation. They are in perpetual involuntary servitude to all humankind, and although they pose no threat and own no weapons, human beings always win in the undeclared war against them. For animals, there is no Geneva Convention and no peace treaty—just our mercy.

If you have the opportunity, will you please add to your burdens my request that you appeal to all those who listen to you to leave the animals out of this conflict?

We send you sincere wishes of peace.

Very truly yours,

Ingrid Newkirk
President, PETA

Of course, the letter was not intended to touch the heart of Arafat. It was a typical publicity stunt by Newkirk, who is adept at taking any news item and wrangling it to gain publicity for PETA--as in the recent Octomom neuter the doggies stunt.

No statement so far from PETA on the latest donkey casualty.

PETA and Octomom: Publicity Hounds Made For Each Other

2010-05-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought the culture couldn't become more demeaned. From the story:

It's official. Octomom Nadya Suleman doesn't want your dog or cat following in her footsteps. As a front yard full of paparazzi cheered her on, Suleman unveiled a 3-foot-by-4-foot plastic sign Wednesday that reads: "Don't Let Your Dog or Cat Become an Octomom. Always Spay or Neuter." "Turn left. Pose. Smile, Nadya," photographers jockeying for position shouted as Suleman stood in front of the sign.

A few curious onlookers stopped to watch as a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals mascot (a person in a dog suit) gave her a hug. PETA is paying Suleman $5,000 to keep the sign on her front door until June 9, the deadline when city officials say it must be removed. The organization is also throwing in a month's supply of veggie hot dogs and burgers for her and her 14 children. Suleman, 34, acknowledged she put the sign on her door partly for the money but added her support of PETA is sincere. "I love animals and I do believe they should be spayed or neutered," she said. "Humans of course are much different."

Not to the anti humanists at PETA. But talk about a made for each other moment. Good Grief.

The Intractable Problem

2010-05-18T07:30:00.001-07:00

Honest Abe Wasn't for Animal Rights: Honest

2010-05-12T19:38:00.000-07:00

Animal rights activists often like to tout a purported quote from our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. Here’s the alleged quote:

I am in favour of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of the whole human being.

I read at least one Lincoln biography a year, and I have never come across that line–and believe me, it would have caught my attention! So, I did a little on-line research. And guess what? It’s fake. I checked many sites for this, but this seems to sum it up:

An examination of such website claims led to a single quotation, the earliest source of which I’ve found is a book by Jon Wynne-Tyson, British publisher and author of books on vegetarianism and animal rights. He claims that Lincoln said or wrote (unclear which): “I am in favour of animal rights as well as human rights.

Lincoln certainly had a soft heart for animals. He didn’t hunt big game and may not have hunted at all. He owned a dog named Fido in Springfield (pictured, above), and a lapdog named Jip in the White House, as well as assorted cats. He saved a chick that had fallen out of its nest and once while riding with a friend, he doubled back to save a pig stuck in the mud, even though it meant he would be covered too. He gave what was probably the first presidential pardon to a turkey being fattened for Christmas dinner. But that wasn’t because he was worried about the life of the bird: His son Tad had named the turkey and made it his pet, and so Lincoln didn’t want to hurt his son.

But animal rights? No. He wore leather shoes and boots. He rode horses. He ate meat with relish. Besides, the core belief of “animal rights”–that humans and animals have equivalent moral worth–did not exist in the 19th Century in America, and indeed, would have been astounding and beyond the pale to Honest Abe–particularly given the difficulties of the time concerning the intrinsic equality of all humans. Heck, they are astounding and beyond the pale to me in 2010.

Chimps Don't "Do" Art

2010-05-07T08:35:00.000-07:00

The problem is, this is what many animal rightists--and Piraro is one--really believe. I remember, after writing an anti animal rights column for the San Francisco Chronicle, I received an e-mail (or perhaps it was a letter to the editor), claiming that even if a chimp wrote a symphony, I wouldn't want it to have rights!

My Speech to Animal Ag Alliance Covered by Washngton Times

2010-04-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

I gave a speech to the Animal Ag Alliance in Arlington yesterday. It was covered by the Washington Times. From the story:

The agriculture industry is under attack from a powerful, popular and well-funded lobby - animal rights groups, which want to see it die completely, said two speakers at the Animal Agriculture Alliance 9th Anual Stakeholders Summit in Arlington, Va., Wednesday. "You are not dealing with people who want to reach acommodation with the agricultural industry about what is proper animal husbandry," Wesley Smith, author of the 2010 book "A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement," told the audience, which comprised primarily members of the animal agriculture industry. "Their intent is that you have no pigs, that you have no chickens ... in fact the agenda is to do away with all animal domesticity, which they see as a multi-generational project."

He noted the irony inherent in veganism, a practice in which one consumes no animal products, because of the large number of rodents and snakes that die in grain silos and in grain fields during harvest. "Nobody on this planet ... eats unless animals die," he said. "Veganism is just as much "murder" as eating meat is."

Smith distinguished between the terms 'animal rights' and 'animal welfare' and said groups that claim to be involved in the former are not concerned about the treatment of animals, but rather in furthering ther agenda of equating animal and human worth via the proponence of legal rights for animals. "They do not believe we should look at the human benefit" of using animals for drug testing, food or clothing, Smith said, adding that foremost on American animal rights' groups agenda at the moment is to allow animals to sue humans directly. He told the story of a Swiss court case in which a lawyer represented a fish that had been caught and consumed in an animal abuse case. The fisherman had been accused of taking too long to reel in the fish.

That part about veganism is murder, too always riles the animal rights activists. But there is no denying that vegan diets also result in the killing of countless animals--with what might be called reckless disregard for their safety--which if done to humans would be just as much murder as intentionally killing specific people. If animal rightists were consistent, they would protest combines and demand hand harvesting to save the field mice and snakes.

Now Animals Have a Right to Privacy?

2010-04-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

It all gets to be too much: Animals don't have the same sense of privacy or modesty that we have. But a university professor--of course!--claims that nature documentaries violate animals' putative "right to privacy." From the story:

Dr Brett Mills from the University of East Anglia argues that while wildlife programmes can play a vital role in engaging citizens in environmental debates, in order to 'do good' they must inevitably deny many species the right to privacy. Published in the current issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Dr Mills' study analyses the 'making of' documentaries that accompanied the BBC wildlife series Nature's Great Events (2009). Exploring the debates on ethics, animal welfare and rights and human rights, Dr Mills suggests that animals have a right to privacy but this is turned into a challenge for the production teams, who use newer forms of technology to overcome species' desire not to be seen.

Right. They're naked! And notice the blatant anthropomorphizing:

Dr Mills said: "It might at first seem odd to claim that animals might have a right to privacy. Privacy, as it is commonly understood, is a culturally human concept. The key idea is to think about animals in terms of the public/private distinction. We can never really know if animals are giving consent, but they often do engage in forms of behaviour which suggest they'd rather not encounter humans, and we might want to think about equating this with a desire for privacy. "When confronted with such 'secretive' behaviour the response of the wildlife documentary is to read it as a challenge to be overcome with the technologies of television. The question constantly posed by wildlife documentaries is how animals should be filmed: they never ask whether animals should be filmed at all."

A justification could be made for filming animals as they roam plains and deserts and engage in hunting activities because these are 'public' events, which take place in locations which include many other animals, and in which the animal being filmed makes no explicit attempt to not be seen. Yet animal activities which might equate with human notions of the private are treated in a way which suggests the public/private distinction does not hold. For example, many species could be read as desiring not to be seen -- animals in burrows and nests have constructed a living space which equates with the human concept of the home, and commonly do this in locations which are, by their very nature, explicitly hidden, often for practical purposes. "Human notions of privacy which rest on ideas of location or activity are ignored in terms of animals. It doesn't matter what an animal does, or where it does it, it will be deemed fair game for the documentary," said Dr Mills.

Animals aren't people! "Consent" is a foreign concept to them in this context, and there is no such thing as private and public spheres in the natural world. They act secretly because they instinctively are trying to avoid being eaten, not because they want personal privacy. Good grief.

2010-04-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

As I pound the drum against animal rights in my book and on the media--most recently today on Wisconsin Public Radio, Kathleen Dunn, an interview that I found to be interesting and thorough (available by following this link)--I have repeatedly distinguished between animal rights and animal welfare, the latter about improving our treatment of animals, the former about ending all animal domestication. I have also repeatedly noted that animal rights, unlike animal welfare, creates an explicit moral equivalence between the value of human life and that of animals.

Some have criticized me for this assertion, accusing me of overstating the case. Oh really? Well hearken to the words of animal rights leader Steven Best, who defined animal rights in a radio interview. From the transcript:

FB: I want to come back to that, but, first of all I wanted both of you to define the term animal rights or animal liberation, depending on which one you prefer, in your own view.

SB: Well, animal rights is saying animals are equal to us, after all, we are animals, we’re just talking about other animals, and that we all have an interest in living a life of freedom and free from pain and torture and death and free to be with members of our family. To be in the natural world. to fulfill our wishes and desires. When you have these interests taken seriously and an equal value, and you have a legal system, such as in capitalist society, that backs those rights as guaranteed, they cannot be for-fitted, they are inalienable rights, they protect these basic freedoms that you have as defined in this society. That is what a right does. So if humans have rights, animals have rights for the same reasons. It’s the exact same reasons. You must be consistent in applying this concept of rights. But liberation takes us a step further because liberation is not waiting for a legal change. It’s not waiting for the legislature to bring these rights to animals. Liberation is more involved with direct action and directly taking a role in freeing animals yourselves from these conditions of oppression and opening up and smashing every damn cage and door that you can that is oppressing an animal. That is animal liberation.

Or to put it another way, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. It doesn't get any more explicit than that.

It's also anti human, often symbiotically connected with misanthropic radical environmentalism. Again, from Best:

We have to actively oppose these and we have to intervene at increasingly radical levels. Why? Because the oppression, the destruction of life and of this earth, is becoming increasingly radical. We need to do more and we need stronger and fiercer tactics to resist this. And so, I found myself also evolving more and always fearing that I wasn’t doing enough. And recognizing that I had to be more involved and I had to get more involved in protests, and then I realized the protests were also a form of control and I had to find other ways of interfering with the systems of power and domination. I started going direct action. And I started recognizing that we have to be more involved not just as individuals, as lifestyle vegans, but as political beings involved in social movements and resistance movements, and actively trying to transform this entire planet, this madhouse that we live in, into something sustainable and sane, and something that we could be proud to call a human creation or a community that we belong to. You see, that’s the key thing, what I call the Moral Copernican Revolution, when we recognize that the world does not belong to us, we belong to the world. And we live in a larger community that we belong to. And if you ask, what roles have we played in this community? And have we been good citizens in this equal community? This planetary community? My God, we’ve been barbarians. We’ve been invaders. We’ve been plunderers. We’ve been evil fascists playing with life on bayonets. We have to pull back from this planet. We have to reduce our numbers, our impact, and we have to allow other species to regain their foothold, and the diversity of this beautiful planet to flourish.

As I detail at greater length in my new book, animal rights is radical. It is anti human (sometimes, as here explicitly, sometimes implicitly or in outcomes), if implemented would be very destructive to human welfare, and for some, is an excuse for violence. Animal rights is subversive and should be rejected outright, as we continue the important work of creating ever improving and rational animal welfare standards.

More Evidence That Humane Society of US is a Stealth Animal Rights Organization

2010-04-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

HSUS–no connection with your local humane society–is the richest animal rights organization in the world, with assets north of $200 million. It doesn’t pitch the animal rights dogma, but works assiduously to attack and undermine animal industries. Sometimes HSUS finds genuine abuses, which should be corrected no matter how they are uncovered, and sometimes its charges are specious. But it seems to me that it’s ultimate goal is not “welfare,” e.g. using animals for human benefit of i humanely, but “rights,” e.g. an eventual end to animal domestication. With its head honcho, Wayne Pacelle, and other HSUS leaders coming out of explicitly animal rights backgrounds, its stated opposition to the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and its role in putting pregnant pigs into the Florida Constitution, its “animal protection” veneer seems more a tactical approach than an explicit commitment to animal welfare philosophy.

An opinion article in the Des Moines Register provides further evidence to validate my theory. From the column, “It’s not all about saving puppies at the activist Humane Society” by David Mastio:

Humane Society funds People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, according to its most recent IRS disclosure forms posted on the group’s Web site. PETA openly campaigns to stop the consumption of meat. “Meat is Murder,” you know.

And let us not forget PETA’s odious Holocaust on Your Plate campaign that equated meat eating with Nazi death camps. PETA is unequivocally an anti human organization (Ingrid Newkirk stated she wishes humans had never appeared on the planet) that promotes animal rights dogma far and wide. Funding PETA, unless based in ignorance, means one is pro animal rights. Pacelle and his crew are not ignorant. Hence, he and HSUS can only be described as pro animal rights.

The group raises money implying it runs pet shelters by showing abused cats and dogs. But as Mastio shows that this is far less than it seems. HSUS doesn’t own a single pet shelter and gives very little of its budget to fund bonafide shelters. Mastio gives this example from Iowa:

Even the money that gets sent to local animal shelters is dubious. For instance, the largest grant from the Humane Society of the United States in Iowa, disclosed in the latest IRS forms, is $9,044 to a shelter in Fairfield. According to the shelter’s Web site, the money was used to give Humane Society-produced propaganda to grade school teachers for use in classrooms. Among other things it asks children to pressure their schools to use only cage-free eggs and write to their congressional representatives. Turning kids into little lobbyists isn’t direct animal care. Paying a local animal shelter to distribute literature encouraging political activism isn’t supporting the shelter. And that’s the Humane Society of the United States – politics hiding behind precious little actual charity.

And that political advocacy is based on ideology, and that ideology is not animal welfare, but animal rights.

Using Less Animal Antibiotics Not a Matter of Animal Rights

2010-04-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

There was a thoughtful opionion article in the New York Times Sunday about industrial farming and the potential over use of antibiotics to keep the animals from becoming infected. I found myself in complete agreement with the approach and, as a consequence, very open to the proposed solution. From the column by Stanford professor emeritus Donald Kennedy:

Agribusiness argues — as it has for 30 years — that livestock need to be given antibiotics to help them grow properly and keep them free of disease. But consider what has happened in Denmark since the late 1990s, when that country banned the use of antibiotics in farm animals except for therapeutic purposes. The reservoir of resistant bacteria in Danish livestock shrank considerably, a World Health Organization report found. And although some animals lost weight, and some developed infections that needed to be treated with antimicrobial drugs, the benefits of the rule exceeded those costs.

It’s 30 years late, but Congress should now pass the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which would ban industrial farms from using seven classes of antibiotics that are important to human health unless animals or herds are ill, or pharmaceutical companies can prove the drugs’ use in livestock does not harm human health. The pharmaceutical industry and agribusiness face the difficult challenge of developing antimicrobials that work specifically against animal infections without undermining the fight against bacteria that cause disease in humans. But we don’t have the luxury of waiting any longer to protect those at risk of increasing antibiotic resistance.

I don’t know that it has been proven that antibiotic use in animals helps promote resistant bacteria in humans. But be that as it may, Kennedy’s approach is the right way to debate issues involving the industrial farming of animals–one that deals in evidence rather than rants, and which considers both the important matter of animal welfare–as opposed to rights–as well as the overriding concern of human well-being and thriving. Or to put it another way, more reason, less diatribe: Yup, that’s the ticket.

Bestiality: Besmirching Intrinsic Human Dignity

2010-04-18T19:50:00.000-07:00

As the coup de culture progresses, hedonism increases, leading to some decadent behaviors that are destructive to intrinsic human dignity. Bestiality is one such behavior, and in Washington State, a man has been arrested for, in effect, pimping his animals for sex. From the disgusting story:

Douglas Spink, 39, a one-time dot.com millionaire, convicted drug smuggler and horse trainer, was quietly living on rural property south of Sumas when he connected with James Tait, who was in a Tennessee jail on a bestiality charge... The two men's communications set in motion an investigation that resulted in Spink's arrest Wednesday at the Sumas farm for suspicion of violating his federal probation for drug smuggling. Federal prosecutors and Whatcom County sheriff's officials say Spink also allowed people to come to the farm and have sex with animals. He was "promoting tourism of this nature for bestiality," Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo said Friday. When county deputies and federal investigators searched the property they found videotapes that included images of a man, who was visiting the property, having sex with several large-breed dogs.

I bring this up only because whenever bestiality hits the news, some people have trouble defining precisely what is wrong with having sex with animals--and some don't seem to think it is wrong at all. Peter Singer, for example, notoriously defended bestiality in a book review ("Heavy Petting," warning crude language), essentially shrugging off bestiality as merely two animals rubbing body parts. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post's resident bioethicist, Jacob Appel, wrote that he didn't see it as significantly different from tossing a dog a Frisbee, ignoring the powerful intimacy and profound symbolism of sexuality in human culture. This is why rape, even when it doesn't cause physical injury, is a profound personal violation and will be punished far more severely than punching and breaking somebody's nose.

Of course, most people still object to bestiality, but many seem to have a difficult time expressing why they believe it is wrong. Some speak of the animals not consenting, for example. But that isn't it. After all, steers don't consent to become steak and sheep don't consent to let us have their wool for clothing.

Rather, by definition, bestiality is abuse. Animals did not evolve, were not created, and/or were not intelligently designed--take your pick--to be mere outlets for our lust, and using them in this way denigrates the respect we owe them as living beings with intrinsic value. And yes, it is not disrespectful to eat a food animal--food chains, after all, being part of the normal cycle of life--but it would be to use it as a sexual vessel or outlet.

Connected to this, but even more importantly, bestiality undermines and besmirches human exceptionalism. As I wrote in the wake of a man who died after sexual intercourse with a stallion, and in the wake of resistance in some quarters in Washington to legislation to outlaw the practice, bestiality is a frontal assault against human dignity. From my Weekly Standard article on the issue, "Horse Sense:"

Bestiality is so very wrong not only because using animals sexually is abusive, but because such behavior is profoundly degrading and utterly subversive to the crucial understanding that human beings are unique, special, and of the highest moral worth in the known universe--a concept known as "human exceptionalism."...

Nothing would more graphically demonstrate our unexceptionalism than countenancing human/animal sex. Thus, when Roach's legislation[to criminalize bestiality] passes [it eventually did], the law's preamble should explicitly state that one of the reasons bestiality is condemned through law is that such degrading conduct unacceptably subverts standards of basic human dignity and is an affront to humankind's inestimable importance and intrinsic moral worth.

Some things are not defensible. It seems to me that abusing animals sexually, which simultaneously debasing one's own humanity, comes within that category.

Wesley J. Smith on C-Span About A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy

2010-04-15T14:23:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, I traveled to Seattle to give a speech at the Discovery Institute about my new book, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement. The event was covered by C-Span and is now available for viewing by hitting this link.

Trying to Turn Whales Into "Persons"

2010-04-09T11:40:00.000-07:00

Paloa Cavalieri is the co-editor and author, with Peter Singer, of The Great Ape Project, which seeks to create a “moral community of equals” among human beings, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos. The point is to “break the species barrier” and bring the entire animal kingdom into the moral community based on “quality of life” utilitarianism of the kind pitched ubiquitously by singer.

Cavalieri is opposed to whaling, and claims their “personhood” justifies a ban. From his article:

We have discovered that whales “sing.” Scientists have explained that whale societies display complex and stable vocal and behavioral cultures previously suggested only for humans. More impressively still, research into whale behavior points to an ability to look to the past, present and future — functions on which consciousness of oneself as a distinct entity existing in time are mounted.

A relevant backward-looking attitude is revealed, for instance, when hordes of whales, returning to their original territory after long-distance trips, first sing the old songs of the previous year, and then the new songs; the existence of a conscious self in the present, with the attendant ability to attribute mental states to others, is apparent in cases of whales doing acrobatic maneuvers to warn approaching vessels of their presence; and female killer whales’ tutoring of their offspring in the dangerous activity of shallow-water hunting offers evidence of the capacity for formulating and carrying out plans.

Since, according to current ethical reflection, the concept of being a person is the concept not of belonging to a certain species but of being endowed with certain mental properties — particularly, self-consciousness — whales turn out to be nonhuman persons, thus confirming the moral soundness of both the trend in international law and the intuitive popular view.

No. Whales are not persons. They may be intelligent, but they are not moral beings as humans are, and hence as a species, none have rights or duties–whether toward and from each other, us, or any species with which they come into contact.

There certainly are cogent and important animal welfare principles that could justify a ban on whaling. Unlike a few hundred years ago, the human need to harvest whales is quite low, and moreover, the method of killing is painful and cruel. But whales are not persons, and if they are ever so deemed, human exceptionalism will destroyed. But of course, that’s the point.

A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: Setting the Table, Part 2

2010-04-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

This is the third post devoted to the content of my new book. In the first post, I quoted from novelist Dean Koontz's preface, and about six weeks ago, I excerpted the opening section of the Introduction. Today, we conclude our look at the Introduction, in which I wrote:

Perhaps we should not be surprised at the growth of the animal rights movement. Americans love animals. We coo over and coddle our cats and dogs as if they were human children. We paste “Save the Whales” bumper stickers on our cars. We flock to national parks to catch fleeting glimpses of bear, elk, and antelope, remnants of the wild America that once was and yet, still is. We fictionalize and anthropomorphize the animal world with movies like Bambi and Babe. We want our cheese to come from “happy cows.” At the same time, as primarily urbanites, we disassociate ourselves emotionally from the fact that meat comes from killing animals and that our stylish leather jackets were first worn by cows or sheep as their skin.

This love affair with animals can often be charming, if a bit loopy. It is also a potent indicator of our prosperity and cultural success. Most in the West have become so removed from the struggle for daily survival that we now have the luxury of caring deeply about animals and their suffering—which is a good thing. Moreover, our care for animals reflects our empathy, one of the great human virtues.

I then discuss an incident that I think illustrates how we project our own emotional attributes onto animals:

Our deep affinity with animals begins very early in life. I was reminded of this a few years ago whilst on a family vacation to Ireland. In the west coastal town of Dingle there is a unique tourist attraction: “Fungi” the lone dolphin. Tourist boats advertise trips into the harbor to see Fungi, with no fee charged unless he makes an appearance. Liking dolphins and wanting to see one up close, my wife Debra, niece Jennifer, and I eagerly bought tickets, and along with about 20 other tourists, were soon on a boat slowly cruising toward the mouth of Dingle’s small picturesque harbor.

As if on cue, Fungi arrived, swimming almost within reach on the starboard side. We all pressed eagerly up against the railing to get a good look. I was standing behind a very excited little boy—who couldn’t have been older than four—ecstatic at being so close to the magnificent animal. Suddenly, he sighed in ecstasy, held his arms out as wide as he could, and with all of the love in his innocent heart, crooned, “Ah, Fungi!”

It was a touching moment. Fungi was utterly indifferent to the child, no doubt swimming alongside the boat knowing he would be fed by a deck hand as his usual cut of the day’s profits for making an “appearance.” But to the little boy, Fungi epitomized the joy and hope of life itself.

I segue from there to Debra, during the same vacation, reading an awful passage to us from a biography of the French novelist Alexandre Dumas, in which he killed a dolphin--simply because he never had:

“Why did you read us that?” Jennifer and I moaned in unison, our splendid moods of the moment ruined at the thought of such gratuitous cruelty against an innocent animal. The fact that the incident had occurred more than one hundred years previously did nothing to diminish our upset.

And yet: Killing animals has always been and remains inextricably bound with human thriving. We do so for food and leather, in medical research, in sport, and when necessary, to ensure a proper environmental balance. More to the point, there is a lot at stake in this debate. Indeed, pause a moment and consider the impact if we were prevented—as animal rights/liberationists advocate—from domesticating animals. Medical research would be materially impeded. There would be no more fishing fleets, cattle ranches, leather shoes, steak barbecues, animal parks, bomb-sniffing and Seeing-Eye dogs, wool coats, fish farms, horseback riding, pet stores, Indeed, in the end, perhaps not even attractions like Fungi. Millions would be thrown out of work, our enjoyment of life would be profoundly diminished, our welfare and prosperity materially reduced.

From there, I lay out the structure of the book, and then bring the Introduction to a close:

The stakes in the animal rights are larger than the sum of its parts. It is my hope that after reading this book, readers will agree that it is a distinctly human and noble calling to continually implement ever-improving methods for raising and caring for animals. But this must not and cannot include granting rights to animals as if they were people. Indeed, I hope this book will convincingly demonstrate that the very concept of animal rights should be rejected because by seeking to destroy the principle of human exceptionalism the movement subverts human rights as it undermines our ability to promote human health, prosperity, and well-being.

In coming weeks, I will be doing some well known nationally syndicated radio programs about all this, both in a debate format and as a sole guest. Once the final details are set, I will let y'all know in case you want to tune in.

Human Exceptionalism: Stopping Ivory Poaching and Culling Elephant Herds Part of the Same Project

2010-03-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

Animal rights advocates and their emotionalist allies often wail, "They're killing the elephants!" when castigating needed culling in the African wild animal parks. They are wrong about that. Failing to cull would result in destroyed environments and possible elephant starvation, not to mention harm to other species.

But there is a form of elephant hunting that is wrong--ivory poaching. And that needs to be prevented--which was the laudable purpose of the legally enforceable international ivory trade ban.

Tanzania and Zambia tried to weaken the existing ban--for understandable reasons--but the UN decided to maintain existing law. From the story:

Conservationists scored a rare victory at a U.N. wildlife meeting Monday when governments voted to reject contentious proposals by Tanzania and Zambia to weaken the 21-year-old ban on ivory sales over concerns it would further contribute to poaching. The heated debate over the proposed sale of the two countries' ivory stocks divided Africa, as it has in years past, at the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Nearly two dozen central and east African countries came out against the proposals on the grounds that they would hurt already declining African elephant populations. Southern African countries, in contrast, argued the two nations should be rewarded for the conservation efforts undertaken and should have to right to manage their herds as they see fit. "People born in 100 years, they should be able to see an elephant," said Kenya's Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife Noah Wekesa, whose country opposed the sales and had called at one point for a 20-year moratorium on such auctions.

Elephants don't have a "right" not to be killed. Only human beings possess such rights. But with our unique rights come concomitant duties, such as properly managing the environment--we are the only species so capable--and protecting endangered or threatened species, as we also promote human thriving. It's all a huge balancing act, which as the story illustrates, is rarely easy.

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, with regard to African elephants, both culls--which kill some--and poaching bans--which save some--serve the same overarching purpose.

Ex Vegan Hit With Pie–Says Others Should be Attacked Instead

2010-03-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

Animal rights activists would never stop screaming if the actions they take were directed against them. They demand the right to free speech–which some activists expand beyond recognition to include threats, intimidation, and even bombings–but have little problem with denying it to those with whom they disagree. Thus PETA refuses to condemn ALF, even when it plants pipe bombs under animal researchers’ cars–equating the terrorists with the Underground Railroad and the French Resistance on its Web site. This is particularly true of the “direct action” types, the ALFs, SHACs, who are closely allied with anarchists. I call this the “tear down” arm of the animal rights movement, because it certainly is not interested in building up.

A good illustration of the double standard happened here in San Francisco when an ex vegan was pied at an anarchist book store reading of her book. From the story:

An ex-vegan who was hit with chili pepper-laced pies at an anarchist event in San Francisco said Tuesday that her assailants were cowards who should direct their herbivorous rage at the powerful – not at a fellow radical for writing a book denouncing animal-free diets. Lierre Keith, a 45-year-old Arcata resident, was attacked at 2:15 p.m. Saturday at the 15th annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair while discussing her 2009 book, “The Vegetarian Myth.” A 20-year vegan, Keith now argues that the diet is unhealthy and that agriculture is destroying the world. As Keith stood at a lectern at the Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, three people in masks and black hooded sweatshirts ran from backstage, shouted, “Go vegan!” and threw pies in her face. While they fled, some in the audience cheered or handed out leaflets.

That was an assault and battery. Alas, being victimized did not teach Keith that it is wrong to engage in lawlessness against people with whom one disagrees:

Keith said her values are similar in most ways to those of her attackers. She believes in militant action, even property destruction, if it can lead to change. In her book, she said, she railed against factory farming and promoted the restoration of prairies and forests. “It’s insane. My entire book is about how the world is being destroyed,” Keith said. She said the first pie hit her just after she uttered the sentence, “You should not eat factory-farmed meat.” Among those rejoicing in the pie attack was the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, which often prints communiques from activists taking credit for attacks on animal researchers. The group said Keith was wrong about veganism, referred to her as an “animal holocaust denier,” and scolded her for calling the “agents of state oppression” – the police.

This is as much the face of animal rights as pretty models posing nude to protest fur. Rather than being distinct, I am convinced that the movement is one organism, like an octopus, with PETA’s edginess one arm, ALF’s violence another arm, and HSUS’s lawsuits and legitimate political advocacy, a third arm, etc.. That point aside, Keith’s nihilism is so thick that even after becoming a victim, she doesn’t have it in her to condemn lawless tactics against people based on differences of opinion. She just wants these tactics directed at someone else. Typical.

Hunters to Kill Amoral Human-Killing Wolves

2010-03-12T11:41:00.000-08:00

An Alaskan wolf pack apparently hunted and killed a jogger. Hunters are now out to kill the pack. From the story:

Alaska authorities have dispatched teams of hunters to the Chignik Lake area of the Alaska Peninsular to hunt down the wolves they have concluded stalked and killed a special education teacher who apparently was taking a left afternoon run. Candice Berner, 32, appeared to have been killed Monday evening during a run along a remote road outside the Alaska Peninsula community, according to troopers.

The state medical examiner concluded, following an autopsy Thursday morning, that the cause of death was “multiple injuries due to animal mauling.” Based on interviews with biologists and villagers in Chignik Lake, troopers concluded wolves were the animals most likely responsible, troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters said in a statement. The state Department of Fish and Game still wants to conduct DNA testing to help study the incident, but troopers are convinced it was a wolf attack, troopers director Col. Audie Holloway said. “We are as close to 100 percent certain as you can be,” Holloway said. Troopers investigating the scene found many wolf paw prints around the body, which had been partially eaten, and bloody drag marks in the snow, he said. Investigators were able to conclude after the autopsy that the animal injuries caused the death and were not inflicted post-mortem, he said.

The wolved did nothing “wrong” in killing this poor woman. They are incapable of right and wrong, which is to say, they are amoral beings. Hence, hunting them down isn’t punishment. Rather, the lethal action is being taken to protect public safety.

If history is any guide, expect some howling from animal rights activists and others to save the wolves, despite the lethal threat they pose to people. On the other hand, Alaskans are closer to the land. Urbanites usually are the ones who object to killing cougars, wolves, and other animals that pose a risk to the public safety. Those who see nature as it really is generally understand that it isn’t really Eden.

How PETA Gets its Dough

2010-03-11T10:16:00.001-08:00

I am frequently asked in interviews how a radical and misanthropic organization like PETA gets so much money. The answer is simple. Many average people think the group is about just being nicer to animals, when it is actually about ending all animal domestication.

Then there are the shallow celebrities, who provide a cornucopia of cash. Take Paul McCartney. After his wife Linda died of breast cancer, he gave millions to cancer research (applause), but then counter-donated with millions to PETA–even though PETA’s hostility to animal research serves to impede cancer research. Moreover, PETA loathes horseback riding, and yet, Linda was a great horse woman. Talk about clueless!

Now, Bob Barker has forked over $2.5 million. From the story:

Former “Price is Right” host Bob Barker is lending his name, and a considerable amount of his cash, to the construction of a new Los Angeles home for PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Barker and a bevy of game show caliber beauties joined PETA President Ingrid Newkirk Wednesday for a groundbreaking at what will become the new PETA office on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. The 86 year old daytime TV legend donated $2.5 million to make the project happen. It’s no coincidence that the office will be named The Bob Barker Building. Barker was a longtime advocate for spaying and neutering, as well as other animal rights issues, during his Price is Right tenure.

No, PETA isn’t about spaying. It is about ending all uses of animals: Another example of the media conflating animal welfare and animal rights. But with celebrities with money to burn like Bob Barker and Paul McCartney, the price for PETA is always right.

In Defense of A Rat, is a Pig, etc., Part 2

2010-03-08T19:00:00.000-08:00

As posted about previously, the National Review gave me an opportunity to respond to Matthew Scully’s diatribe against my book. (Scully, who is a conservative speech writer, is–to understate the matter–extremely emotional about animal issues). In part 1, I responded to his continuing canard that I supported breaking the limbs of chimps in experiments. In this post, I will excerpt some of my more general comments, which describe the book in a nutshell.

First, I remarked on the hyper emotionality of Scully’s review (here’s a link):

But let us ponder: What would drive a deeply talented writer like Scully to engage in such blatant falsehood? Like Zeus throwing his destructive lightning bolts, radical animal advocates often deploy the rant in order to drive rationality and reason off the field. In the face of such fury, we are tempted to cower under our desks, thereby allowing animal-rights activists to stand alone as righteous “defenders” of those who “can’t speak for themselves.”

Such demagoguery stifles our deeply pondering this important moral issue. Thus, I hope the book will help restore balance to the discussion of these matters.

In the rest of my response, I describe the book (since Scully didn’t), beginning with making a crucial distinction between animal rights and animal welfare:

So what’s the book really about? With A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy, I hope to clear up the confusion in the public mind between promoting “animal welfare”—a noble cause, which I endorse—and “animal rights,” which I oppose. The former acknowledges the ethical propriety of using animals for human benefit, while vigorously insisting on concomitant duties to treat animals humanely. In direct contrast, animal-rights ideology disdains the welfarist approach as “speciesism”—i.e., “discrimination” against animals—and dogmatically insists we have no right to consume meat, to wear leather, to conduct animal research, and, for some, even to own dogs. In other words, the ultimate goal of animal rights—which believers understand to be a multi-generational project—is ending all animal domestication no matter how beneficial to humans.

I describe the various ideological assertions of animal rights dogma, and then describe the consequences of such belief:

Regardless of the approach, to the animal-rights true believer, that which is done to an animal is judged as if the same action were done to a human being. Hence, many animal rightists believe cattle ranching is as odious as slavery and research on lab rats an equivalent evil to Mengele’s experiments in the camps.

This leads some to engage in violence and terrorism, which I won’t belabor here. I then describe the second purpose of my book:

The hyperemotionality of animal-rights campaigners too often hides the tremendous benefits we receive from the proper and humane use of animals. For this reason, I devote an entire section of the book to a judicious discussion of animal research, the use of animals as food, and the more volatile issues of fur and hunting. I don’t pretend to identify proper husbandry techniques in every case. But I believe it is important both to expose the false assertions made by animal rightists—for example, that humans do not benefit from animal research and that fur trappers still use archaic metal traps that break animals’ legs—and to allow people engaged in these industries a forum to express their usually drowned-out perspectives.

And, of course, human exceptionalism is the core component:

The ideal I wish to advance—indeed, to conserve—is “human exceptionalism,” that is, the unique moral status of human life. It is remarkable that our exceptional natures require defense. After all, what other species in the known history of life has attained the wondrous capacities of human beings? What other species has transcended the tooth-and-claw world of naked natural selection to the point that, at least to some degree, we now control nature instead of being controlled by it? What other species builds civilizations, records history, creates art, makes music, thinks abstractly, envisions and fabricates machinery, improves life through science and engineering, or explores the deeper truths found in philosophy and religion? What other species rescues injured animals instead of ignoring or eating them? What other species has true freedom? Perhaps most crucially, what other species can be held to moral account?

Human exceptionalism increasingly is criticized as arrogant and hubristic, spurring us to mistreat animals and despoil the planet. I believe the contrary is true. Indeed, if being human isn’t what gives us the duty to treat animals properly, what in the world does?

It is worth noting that Scully has now failed twice to mention–as ethics would seem to require–that I criticized (and complimented) his book Dominion in A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy. Moreover, it would have been nice if he had actually dealt substantially with what I wrote, rather than just venting his anger about the uses to which animals are put. But in an era in which feelings count more than thoughts, I am not surprised.

In Defense of A Rat, is a Pig, etc., Part 1

2010-03-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

After Matthew Scully's screed against A Rat is a Pig, etc., discussed here, National Review gave me the opportunity to write an extended reply. Let me deal with his continuing mendacity first, and then I will write a second post excerpting some of my more general comments.

In his review, Scully claimed falsely that I supported an experiment that broke chimps' arms. Here's is my comment to that point, and then his response (no link):

ANIMAL RIGHTS began as an issue, became a movement, and has morphed into an ideology. Usually, animal rights is allied with the Left; but not always. Thus, when I decided to write a book criticizing the animal-rights movement, I expected to be attacked as being somehow indifferent to the suffering of animals and, moreover, that Matthew Scully—the animal-rights movement’s favorite conservative—would lead the charge. What I didn’t expect was for Scully to illustrate my supposed heartlessness with a false anecdote, the by-product of his own furious imagination. And to that, I strenuously object. In criticizing my explanation of the need for using animals in scientific research, Scully accused me of offering “soothing descriptions of violent experiments (chimps are ‘seated quietly, not struggling’ as their limbs are about to be broken.)” False. I never wrote about a chimp experiment that involved breaking limbs. Indeed, I have never heard of such an experiment. Scully can rail all he wants against my book. But he has no right to resort to cheap demagoguery to score an easy emotional point.

Scully doesn't back off:

The experiment Smith has “never heard of” is described on pages 74 and 75 of his own book, and his words are just as I quoted them in my review. The chimpanzees were strapped down (“held motionless,” as he puts it), and as experimenters prepared to slice their limbs and sever their nerves, Smith insists that they were still “seated quietly, not struggling.” The violence of the scene, until the primates were finally killed and discarded, is quickly passed over, with Smith’s usual assurances that humanity was served and the details are no concern of ours.

This is jaw dropping: The experiment he is referencing did not involve chimps. The now notorious "Silver Spring Monkey Case--infamous because of what an animal rights activist did to an ethical researcher, not because of his experiments--involved monkeys--a different animal entirely. Second, I wrote about the particular experiment because Alex Pacheco, PETA's co founder, attempted to destroy the life of the celebrated researcher, Dr. Edward Taub, by creating a materially false image of what was happening in the lab and the quality of the animals' care, while Taub was on vacation. (Described fully at NRO in February 2004.) Third, the experiment did not involve "breaking limbs" but a surgical procedure performed under proper anesthesia. Fourth, Taub was engaged in NIH-approved research that led to a tremendous breakthrough in the rehabilitation of stroke patients--Constrained Induced Movement Therapy--now benefiting tens of thousands of stroke patients around the world, and most recently, children with cerebral palsy.

That Scully can't identify the right animal--twice--refused to accurately describe what was done, and utterly ignored the tremendous human benefit that resulted from the research is both disturbing and telling.

Animals Not to Have Constitutional Right to Lawyers in Switzerland

2010-03-07T15:40:00.001-08:00

As I have noted on more than one occasion, animal rights activists want animals to be granted "standing" to bring lawsuits. This radical change would serve two convergent purposes: It would allow liberationists to bring case after case against animal industries--since they would be the real litigants--as it powerfully promoted animal "personhood," obliterating human exceptionalism by creating a moral human/animal legal equivalence.

Today, in good news on the animal lawyers front, Switzerland rejected granting animals the constitutional right to legal representation when animal abuse is charged. From the story:

The result was emphatic: Swiss voters don't think abused animals need to have their own lawyers. It's a proposal that would never even come near a referendum in other countries, but the measure's defeat Sunday disappointed animal rights advocates, who say Switzerland's elaborate animal welfare laws aren't being enforced. Opponents of the proposal, including key farmers' groups and the government, had argued that existing laws are sufficient and appointing special lawyers to act on behalf of animals would be unnecessarily expensive for taxpayers. "The Swiss people have clearly said our animal protection laws are so good we don't need animal lawyers," Jakob Buechler, a lawmaker for the centrist Christian People's Party, told Swiss television SF1. Official results showed that 70.5 percent of voters cast their ballot against the proposal to extend nationwide a system that has been in place in Zurich since 1992. Some 29.5 percent of voters backed the proposal, with turnout at just over 45 percent.

It's alarming that nearly 30% voted for the notion. Animals shouldn't have lawyers or be granted constitutional rights under any circumstances. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal did a report on Switzerland's only animal lawyer recently, and it tells a warning tale. From the story:

Last month, Antoine Goetschel went to court here in defense of an unusual client: a 22-pound pike that had fought a fisherman for 10 minutes before surrendering. Mr. Goetschel is the official animal lawyer for the Swiss canton of Zurich, a sort of public defender who represents the interests of pets, farm animals and wildlife. He wound up with the pike as a client when animal-welfare groups filed a complaint alleging animal cruelty in the fish's epic battle with an amateur angler...

The majority of Mr. Goetschel's cases relate to abuse of household pets. He secured a 1,050-franc fine for a woman who abandoned two kittens in the street soon after buying them. In one 2008 case, he represented some fish that had been placed in a pool during a game show during which contestants tried to catch them by hand, allegedly violating Swiss law requiring that animals be treated with dignity. "If you treat fish like objects in a computer game, their dignity is hurt," Mr. Goetschel argued. A court, however, ruled that Zurich was the wrong jurisdiction for the case, and the defendants were subsequently cleared.

But opponents have seized on another fish tale—Mr. Goetschel's defense of the big pike— to argue that a mandatory public defender could make for absurd results. The case revolved around the idea that the pike suffered excessively because of how long it took for the angler to reel it in. Mr. Goetschel lost the case last month, but is considering an appeal. Any further court action would come too late for the pike, which has been eaten.

It would be much worse here than representing dead fish. "Animal standing" would give liberationists the right to sue directly. And with that power, they would wreak havoc on all animal industries, as I pointed out in this article at NRO.

Nice Review of A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy

2010-03-04T12:36:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, I did an extended interview with Colleen Carroll Campbell for EWTN about my book. It will air in a few months. But what a nice surprise today that she devoted her column to a review. And she gets it. From her column:

Wesley J. Smith is a speciesist. And he thinks you should be, too. An attorney and author of a new expose on the animal-rights movement, Smith promotes what was once an uncontroversial idea: the belief that “human beings stand at the pinnacle of the moral hierarchy of life.” He thinks humans have a duty to treat animals humanely. He also thinks we have a right to use animals to promote human flourishing and alleviate human suffering. In short, Smith loves animals but values humans more.

According to animal-rights activists, that makes him guilty of “speciesism:” a form of discrimination as arbitrary and pernicious as racism, and one that some believe must be eradicated by any means necessary. After all, “animals are people and people are animals,” as self-described “eco-anarcha-feminist animal” Pattrice Jones puts it. Or, to quote People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals president Ingrid Newkirk, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They are all mammals.”

She points out one of my major themes:

Even more troubling, animal-rights activists have succeeded in confusing the public about the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. The latter is a noble cause supported by the vast majority of Americans who want to protect animals from cruelty, even though they do not consider animals their moral equals — a caveat that runs counter to animal-rights ideology. Despite this distinction, “animal rights” has “become the catchall term for virtually any effort to protect animals,” Smith says, and the resulting confusion has allowed the animal-rights movement to gain legitimacy it does not deserve.

And she hits on a crucial distinction between humans and animals:

Animals do not have rights or the moral responsibilities that accompany rights. That’s why we prosecuted Michael Vick, not his pit bulls, for dog-fighting. That’s why executives at Sea World, not its orcas, are facing public scrutiny for a whale trainer’s death last week. And that’s why we ponder our moral obligations to animals — who are, after all, the ultimate speciesists — even though animals do not do the same for us. We do so because we are human, endowed with exceptional dignity that deserves singular defense.

It sure is pleasing that after years of hard work to receive a good review by someone who understands exactly what I am saying. Thanks Colleen. Your support is very appreciated.

When Animals Sue

2010-03-03T08:05:00.000-08:00

I have a piece in today's NRO that tees off on Switzerland's upcoming vote to give animals a legal right to a lawyer in abuse cases. But as I point out in A Rat is a Pig,etc., granting animals standing may be the most desired goal of the animal rights movement. From my column:

But animals suing? For most people, the very idea is a surreal fantasy out of a Far Side cartoon. But from the viewpoint of animal-rights ideologues, nothing could be more logical. The dogma of animal liberation demands the obliteration of all animal industries and, eventually, the eradication by attrition of all domesticated animals...

What could further the eradication goal more dramatically than allowing domesticated animals to sue their owners in court? The real litigants, of course, would be animal-rights activists — committed true believers who would use the raw power of litigation to force animal industries to their knees. Imagine the chaos: hundreds of animal lawyers, filing thousands of lawsuits, leading to hundreds of thousands of depositions, forcing industries to spend tens of millions of dollars on lawyers and legal costs defending their husbandry. No animal industry would be safe, and many would not survive.

Beyond the chaos that animal standing would cause, lies an ideological purpose:

Animal standing also has a philosophical purpose. The ultimate goal of animal rights is not merely the improved treatment of animals; that effort is properly called animal welfare. Animal-rights dogma holds that there is no moral One way to achieve societal acquiescence in this view would be to transform at least some animals into legal “persons.” As animal-rights-crusading law professor Stephen Wise wrote in Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights, convincing the courts to grant “practical personhood” to chimps and other higher mammals would open the courtroom door to animals, a move he described as “the first and most crucial step toward unlocking the cage” to all animals generally distinction to be made between animals and humans, and therefore what is done to an animal should be viewed as if it were done to a human.

I point out the friends in high places this cause enjoys--Cass Sunstein, Laurence Tribe, etc.--meaning it could happen. I conclude:

Of all the ubiquitous advocacy thrusts by animal-rights advocates, successfully obtaining legal standing for animals could prove the most significant. First, it would accomplish a major animal-rights goal of profoundly undermining the status of animals as property. Second, it would create utter chaos in animal industries, which would also badly damage the general economy, much of which depends on the use of animals and animal byproducts. Most significantly, on an existential level, the perceived exceptional nature of human life would suffer a body blow through the erasure of one of the clear definitional lines that distinguish people from animals — the belief in human exceptionalism.

This is the future for which animal liberationists devoutly yearn. Considering our crazy cultural history of the last 50 years, and given the energetic commitment of animal-rights activists, their abundant resources, and the intellectual support they have received already from some of society’s most influential thinkers, it would be complacent folly to blithely assume, “It can’t happen here.”

Animal rights advocates are intensely committed to making this happen. Those of us who think animals should not be deemed akin to people have to be just as committed to making sure it doesn't ever happen.

Humane Watch Really Likes A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy

2010-02-27T23:18:00.000-08:00

Humane Watch has raved about my new book. Not surprising, you might say, since a blog dedicated to being a watchdog over the stealth animal rights organization, the Humane Society of the United States, is hardly likely to turn thumbs down. But still: If I had gotten it wrong, the writers of the blog would know. So, since I like good reviews much better than bad, here's a sampling from "Rats, Pigs and Dogs: Oh Boy!":

A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy is a winner. (I hope he doesn't have to pay Ingrid Newkirk a royalty for that book title.) It's meticulously footnoted, full of thoughtfully told stories, and uncompromising in defense of the premise that the "boy" in its title is exceptional—that is, unlike those other three species in the ways that matter most. This book also makes a compelling case—the best I have read anywhere— for the idea that "animal rights" is a system of ideological belief as rigid (and vulnerable to unreasoning abuse) as any religion.

Since this blog is principally concerned with the Humane Society of the United States, I'll share (with his permission) some of what Wesley writes about that organization; but know that A Rat Is a Pig is a near-encyclopedic examination of the 95 percent or so of the animal rights movement industry that Americans encounter on a regular basis. It's a must-own volume for farmers, ranchers, dairymen, chefs, sportsmen, pet breeders, reptile hobbyists, biomedical researchers, college students, and well-meaning donors to all kinds of animal charities.

Wow. Thank you very much.

Hey! If Matthew Scully--the animal rights movement's favorite conservative--can hysterically shred me (What next? Ingrid Newkirk reviewing my book in the New York Times?), Humane Watch can laud me. Which reminds me: I will soon have a, shall we say, robust response to Scully's diatribe published for your consideration. Stay tuned.

Killer Whale Tragedy Illustrates Human Exceptionalism

2010-02-27T08:57:00.000-08:00

When an orca drowned one of his trainers at Orlando's Sea World, nobody discussed "punishing" or otherwise holding him morally accountable. Indeed, the very notion is nonsensical, as a consequence of which, the question about "what to do" has properly revolved around how to best promote animal welfare and protect human safety. From the story:

Brancheau's death has reignited calls for Tillikum and other captive killer whales to be released or put in ocean pens where they could communicate in normal whale fashion, something that's impossible in a concrete tank. However, SeaWorld officials say Tillikum could not manage in the wild and even advocates for whale freedom believe it would be difficult to return him to Iceland. "We don't know who his family is and it would be far too expensive to retire him to Iceland," said Michael Harris, president of Seattle-based Orca Conservancy.

However, it could be possible to retire him to a sea pen at Neah Bay, Wash., and then partner with academic institutions to create long-term study opportunities, Harris said. "He would still be a huge safety concern for his caretakers," he said. "Then again, perhaps he'd become far less dangerous if introduced to the natural seawater and ocean walks."

Imagine if a human had done the same thing: Arrests, trials, perhaps life in prison or the death penalty would be the outcome for the murderer. But animals are not moral agents, and therefore, they cannot commit murder.

That is a distinction between us and animals that makes a real difference. Regardless of the grandeur of any animal--and killer whales, actually dolphins, are both awesome and intelligent--human exceptionalism can't be denied. Our moral agency distinguishes us from all other known life forms in the history of the universe. That matters from an ethical standpoint, both justifying uniquely human rights and imposing distinct duties that only can be required of human beings.

Matt Scully's Mendacity About A Rat is a Pig, etc.

2010-02-23T18:18:00.000-08:00

I knew Matthew Scully, the animal rights movement's favorite conservative, would attack A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy. When he did, I expected him to respect readers sufficiently to disclose that I criticized (and praised) his book Dominion. He didn't. I didn't expect that he would mount his attack in the National Review. He did. Oh well, that's public advocacy.

In due time, I will be responding at length to Scully's harsh criticisms (about which I alluded the other day), so I won't belabor the matter now. But there is a nasty canard in Scully's review that is so unhinged and provocative that I can't let it lie on the table until my full reply is prepared. From his review, "The Cause of Humanity" (no link):

Smith keeps going on about [human 'moral distinctiveness'], and the euphemisms only get worse in his treatment of animal experimentation. He offers soothing descriptions of violent experiments (chimps are 'seated quietly, not struggling' as their limbs are about to be broken).

That is wholly and outrageously false. I never wrote about a chimp experiment that involved breaking their limbs. Indeed, I have never heard of such an experiment. Scully can rail all he wants against my book. But he has no right to fictionalize what I wrote to score cheap emotional points. It lacks integrity.

Temple Grandin: Animal Welfare Exceptionalist

2010-02-20T12:05:00.001-08:00

In my now (finally!) out new book, I have an admiring chapter on the work of Dr. Temple Grandin, whose insights have greatly improved methods of animal husbandry--including the slaughtering process. Grandin is autistic, and she believes that the wiring of her brain (if you will) gives her the ability to "see" things in the way animals do, visually as opposed to intellectually. This talent allows her to design improved methods of raising animals from their perspective, rather than anthropomorphizing these techniques to conform to the way we might react in the same circumstances.

Grandin was interviewed yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, mostly about autism issues. But I thought it would be good to share some of what she said about her animal welfare work here. From the interview:

These days, Ms. Grandin is known as much for her professional work—she revolutionized livestock handling equipment—as for her expertise on autism. "I've always thought of myself as a cattle handling specialist, a college professor first; autism is secondary," she says. But she does credit her autism for her unique ability to relate to cattle. Ms. Grandin wondered what made the animals moo and balk. Kneeling down to see things from a cow's eye view, she took pictures from within the chutes.

She found cattle were highly sensitive to the same sensory stimulants that might set off a person with autism, but were inconsequential to the average handler. They were shockingly simple revelations: light and shadow would stress the animals, as would grated metal drains. Prodding and hollering from cowboys, intended to move cattle along, only alarmed them further.

Her designs reflected these insights. A curved, single-file chute mimicked the cattle's natural tendency to follow each other. She replaced slated walls with solid ones to prevent cattle from seeing the handlers and cut down on light and shadow. Today, half of the cattle in this country pass through the slaughter systems that Ms. Grandin invented. She's a consultant to companies like McDonalds and Burger King. Yet—and she might well be the only person with these two associations—she's also been honored as a "visionary" by PETA for making slaughterhouses more humane.

Well, good for PETA, although I am sure Gary Francione's head is exploding. He believes that supporting animal welfarism of any kind only legitimizes animal husbandry in the public's mind, making it more difficult to eradicate all animal domestication, the ultimate goal of the animal rights movement (including PETA).

At the end of the interview, Grandin is asked an interesting question by the WSJ interviewer that only a human being could formulate--or answer:

How about meaning, I ask. What's the picture for that word? "Ok, now I'm seeing a mother saying your book helped my kid go to college—that's meaning. Or my kid got a job because of one of your lectures—that's meaning. Or a rancher comes up and says that piece of equipment works really well—that's meaning. Concrete, real stuff. On. The. Ground."

Temple Grandin: Human exceptionalism in action.

Dolphins Have Much to Teach us About Type 2 Diabetes

2010-02-19T15:58:00.000-08:00

Once again a story breaks indicating the tremendous value that can be derived from animal research. It turns out that dolphins contract Type 2 diabetes, and that they have the capacity to turn it on and off at will. From the story:

Dolphins are the only animals apart from humans to develop a natural form of type 2 diabetes, according to new research. The discovery offers important insights into a disease that is linked to one in 20 deaths.

American scientists have discovered that bottlenosed dolphins show a form of insulin resistance very similar to that seen in human diabetes. Unlike patients with the condition, the marine mammals can turn this state on and off when appropriate, so it is not normally harmful. The findings indicate that dolphins could provide a valuable animal model for investigating type 2 diabetes, which promises to advance research into new therapies. If researchers can learn how the animals switch off their insulin resistance before it becomes damaging, it could be possible to develop a cure.

So, do we pursue this knowledge? That's an ethical issue that I think depends on what it would take to obtain it. Ah, that has been considered already by those "heartless" scientists.

She emphasised that the research did not mean that dolphins should be used as laboratory animals, as their large brains and high intelligence would make this unethical. Studies of their genetic code and physiology, revealed by blood and urine samples, could nevertheless provide important clues to the biology of diabetes.

That's a classic form of animal welfare analysis of the kind I support in A Rat is a Pig, etc. In this case, scientists will desist from an all out pursuit of knowledge for ethical reasons (as opposed to naked science without moral parameters around it). But pursuing the research does mean using captive dolphins, which animal rights types think is intrinsicly evil.

So, is the information these dolphins can provide worth pursuing? The usual animal rights scripts says no, all animal research is wrong. Moreover, many will argue, because the information won't be 100% the same as in people, it is thus of no human benefit. But total applicability isn't at all necessary to obtain very important and valuable information in basic biology that can then be applied in researching human disease. I say we have a duty to those patients with diabetes (now and in the future), to obtain this information in the humane ways described.

Humane Watch Launches to Keep "Eye" on HSUS

2010-02-16T12:29:00.000-08:00

HSUS--Humane Society of the United States--is an interesting organization, what I call a "stealth" animal rights group. Unlike PETA, it doesn't pitch the animal rights dogma of human/animal moral equality, nor does it explicitly call for an end to all animal domestication. Its leaders talk instead about animal "protection," not animal "rights."

Nonetheless, it is an animal rights group--as distinct from animal welfare, which accepts the humane use of animals by people. Here is how I put it in A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy (citations omitted):

Still, there is abundant cause to believe that, as least in the hearts of its leaders, animal rights rather than protection or welfare, is the real name of the game. HSUS president, the always professional Wayne Pacelle, has stated—quite aptly—that HSUS is "the NRA [National Rifle Association] of the animal rights movement," meaning that its public advocacy on behalf of animals is on a par with the NRA’s support of gun rights. Sounding very much like the abolitionist Gary Francione, Pacelle, who like Francione is a vegan, once told a publication called Animal People, "We have no ethical obligation to preserve different breeds of livestock produced through selective breeding…One generation and out. We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals. They are creations of human selective breeding." J.P. Goodwin, once the executive director of the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade and a self-described (as reported by the Dallas Morning News) former member of the terrorist Animal Liberation Front (ALF), is now HSUS's grass roots coordinator. He has stated, "My goal is to abolish all animal agriculture." Adding fire to this plume of smoke, in the published proceeds of a 1980 conference in which HSUS apparently determined to pursue a more radical course than theretofore, HSUS stated, "There is no rational basis for maintaining the moral distinction between the treatment of humans and other animals."

In other words, HSUS is not to be confused with local humane societies or SPCAs, that generally follow animal welfare models.

So far, HSUS has had a pretty free ride. But now, Humane Watch has launched, aimed at reporting about the activities of HSUS, from a pro animal industry perspective. If you are interested in a take on this powerful organization from the critical side, check it out.

Animal Research Helps Find Cause of Aging

2010-02-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

I keep bringing stories like this up because the animal rights movement's propaganda has seriously eroded the public's support for animal research--not to the point that a majority oppose it--but the numbers should be limited to strict animal rightists, and it's not. In any event, using genetically altered mice, scientists think they have found the cause of aging. From the story:

The Newcastle team, working with the University of Ulm in Germany, used a comprehensive "systems biology" approach, involving computer modelling and experiments with cell cultures and genetically modified mice, to investigate why cells become senescent. In this aged state, cells stop dividing and the tissues they make up show physical signs of deterioration, from wrinkling skin to a failing heart.

The research, published by the journal Molecular Systems Biology, shows that when an ageing cell detects serious damage to its DNA – caused by the wear and tear of life – it sends out specific internal signals. These distress signals trigger the cell's mitochondria, its tiny energy-producing power packs, to make oxidising "free radical" molecules, which in turn tell the cell either to destroy itself or to stop dividing. The aim is to avoid the damaged DNA that causes cancer.

Huh, I thought this stuff never had an "aim." But I digress. It seems from this story that aging is a by product of a fail safe process by which cells destroy themselves in order to prevent cancer, and eventually the "cure" produces the same result as the avoided disease--only much later.

Without animal research as part of the usual integrated scientific approach, this potentially crucial information just could not have been found, nor the beneficial medical products likely to flow from this basic life science discovery, ever developed.

Olympian Threatened by Animal Rights Fanatics Over Wearing a Little Fur

2010-02-15T17:15:00.000-08:00

Animal rights is such a peaceable movement--at least that is what its adherents insist. Yet, personal threats by animal rights fanatics have so unnerved an American Olympian, he is afraid to stay at a hotel. From the story:

U.S. figure skater Johnny Weir says he received threats from anti-fur activists that made him fear for his safety, causing him to scrub any plans to stay at a hotel while in Vancouver for the Olympics. "I felt very threatened," he said Saturday. "I'm not allowed to say how everything got through, but my agent got letters and faxes and e-mails. I got letters at the ice rink, somebody found my phone number. "All these crazy fur people. Security-wise, to stay in a hotel would be very difficult. There have been threats against me. I didn't want to get hurt."

Weir almost acquiesced to the threat but then realized there was no reason for him to yield to their values rather than follow his own:

Weir was criticized by animal-rights activists after he donned a costume in nationals with white fox fur on the shoulder. He said after the event that he would wear faux fur in the Games, but has since changed his mind. "It was not because I was pressured to change it, but because I don't like faux fur," Weir explained. "I didn't change the costume, I'm just switching back to another costume."

A nice bit of courage that. Giving in to intimidation would only increase the brown shirtism that too often is a hallmark of animal rights advocacy.

What could drive people to threaten safety of a human being over fur? A belief in the moral equality between animals and humans, to the point that rightists believe that wearing fur is as evil as wearing human skin. For more details, see my about to be released book--shipping to stores as I write this--A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement.

Tofu Worse Than Meat for UK Environment

2010-02-12T10:05:00.000-08:00

Oh, the animal rightists are not going to like this. Seizing on the claim that meat eating causes global warming, rightists have pushed vegetarianism as an environmental fix. Now, a study has concluded, that eating meat might actually be better for the environment--at least in the UK. From the story:

Becoming a vegetarian can do more harm to the environment than continuing to eat red meat, according to a study of the impacts of meat substitutes such as tofu. The findings undermine claims by vegetarians that giving up meat automatically results in lower emissions and that less land is needed to produce food. The study by Cranfield University, commissioned by the environmental group WWF, found that many meat substitutes were produced from soy, chickpeas and lentils that were grown overseas and imported into Britain. It found that switching from beef and lamb reared in Britain to meat substitutes would result in more foreign land being cultivated and raise the risk of forests being destroyed to create farmland. Meat substitutes also tended to be highly processed and involved energy-intensive production methods.

Besides, a vegan diet is "murder" too, as I have discussed before:

Plant agriculture results each year in the mass slaughter of countless animals, including rabbits, gophers, mice, birds, snakes, and other field creatures. These animals are killed during harvesting, and in the various mechanized farming processes that produce wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and other staples of vegan diets. And that doesn't include the countless rats and mice poisoned in grain elevators, or the animals that die from loss of habitat cleared for agricultural use.

Animal-rights activists certainly don’t mention this inconvenient fact in their advocacy materials. But if the matter comes up in debate, they have a problem: They believe it is "speciesist" to grant some sentient animals — including humans — greater value than others; as PETA's Ingrid Newkirk so famously put it, "a rat, is a fish, is a dog, is a boy." [Hey, that's a great title for a book!] Thus, they cannot contend that it is more wrong to kill a pig than a rabbit. Nor can they argue that field animals experience less-agonizing deaths from plant agriculture than food animals do from food-animal slaughtering. Field animals may flee in panic as the great rumbling harvest combines approach, only to be shredded to bits within their merciless blades; they may be burned to death when field leavings are burned; they may be poisoned by pesticides; they may die from predation when their plant cover has been removed.

This is all nonsense. What you eat will not cause warming, whether it is meat or tofu. Veganism is fine for those who want it, but it still comes at the cost of mass animal killing. Let's lighten up.

More Proof We're Omnivores

2010-02-10T08:49:00.001-08:00

A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: Dean Koontz Preface

2010-02-05T16:28:00.000-08:00

I received an advance copy of my new book by mail today. This is my 12th, and it never ceases to be a thrill to hold in your hands the product of countless hours of research, thinking, and writing. Thanks to all who helped bring years of effort to this fruition.

The issue of our relationship to animals is extremely emotional and important. I obviously hope that everyone will read the whole book. But I know some can't or won't. So, from time to time, I will post some short excerpts here, to give a nutshell overview of what I write and advocate over 249 pages of text. Let's start with the writing of someone else--the conclusion to the brilliant, almost mystical preface, by novelist Dean Koontz:

When we self-blind ourselves to the Truth of the world's magnificent complexity and mystery--of which we are a fundamental part --we do not only cut a thin wedge from the roundness of existence and convince ourselves that this one theory or ideology is the whole Truth. In our narcissism, we also insist that those who refuse to wear our blinders are villainous and depraved and corrupt. In this regard, an ideologue is no different from a member of a religious cult who has carved a sliver off the body of Christian theology and has made it his end-all and be-all. But the entire truth of a vast forest is not embodied in a single leaf.

A recognition of the world's complexity requires an acceptance of the truth that intentions and nuance matter. Puppy mills are an outrage and should be shut down because they horribly abuse breeder dogs for no purpose but profit. This isn't the same as a scientist, following merciful protocols (as most do), using lab rats in search of cures for disabling diseases. A sound argument might be made for the cruelty of denying a wide-ranging and undomesticable animal like an elephant the freedom to roam, keeping it chained to a stake for no purpose but to entertain us with clever tricks in the circus; though a well-designed zoo park might not be cruel at all. Training a dog to do tricks is not cruel, because dogs are pack animals and consider us members of their pack, because they would rather be with us than elsewhere, and because their natural inclination to play makes learning tricks a joy for them.

Among other things, this book is a rational, reasonable argument for the need to accept the nuanced complexity of the world and to resist the dangerous simplifications of antihuman ideologies. Wesley J. Smith knows too well that if the activists ever succeeded in their goals, if they established through culture or law that human beings have no intrinsic dignity greater than that of any animal, the world would not be a better place for either humankind or animals. Instead, it would be a utilitarian nightmare in which the strong would destroy the weak, in which power-crazed leaders would destroy everyone who loved peace, in which the wealth of the world would be concentrated in the hands of a murderous few, in which mercy would be unknown and the only virtue would be the ability to survive, in which the only right would be the right to die.

Yes, animal rights is inextricably connected to the importance of human exceptionalism, and with it, human freedom and dignity. Grazie mille di cuore to Dean for his contribution, friendship, and support.

2010-02-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is the richest animal rights organization, I think, in the world, with assets of more than $200 million. Unlike the SPCAs around the country and other humane societies that have no connection to HSUS, it is not an animal welfare organization that merely seeks to improve the treatment of animals. It is animal rights all the way.

But it is also very cleverly hides its true goals. HSUS's leader, Wayne Pacelle, is very professional. He wears suits, he speaks softly, and unlike PETA's alpha wolf Ingrid Newkirk, he doesn't openly spout the animal rights dogma. But he is a true believer, and HSUS--which owns no shelters--is in a cold war of attrition against all animal industries, albeit one that employs legitimate tools of democracy, such as the lawsuit and public democratic initiative, to make life difficult for animal industries. (This isn't to say HSUS is always wrong. Sometimes, it is right, such as when it exposed the abuse of "down" cattle by a stockyard, although even then, it may have allowed its animal rights agenda to interfere with its duty to protect public safety. Businesses that don't meet the highest standards of legal treatment for their animals, not only act in a morally odious manner, but play into the hands of implacable enemies who seek their destruction.)

HSUS representatives don't spout advocacy terms such as, "A rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy"--the title of my about to be released book, which I took from a famous Newkirk quote--striving to appear as benign as the local SPCA. But its raison d'etre is ultimately animal rights. And here's some evidence. HSUS is producing dog food with no meat products, allowing owners to turn carnivores into vegans. From the story:

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has entered the pet food market with the launch of its Humane Choice dog food. The non-profit organization is marketing the product as a cruelty-free, all-natural dog food that does not contain animal-based proteins or support the factory farming industry. "Americans are concerned about the food we eat, and it just makes sense that we’d be concerned about the food we provide to our pets," said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the HSUS. "Humane Choice is a nutritious, environmentally friendly and ethically responsible food for our best friends. Every bag of Humane Choice helps us celebrate the pets we love, and provides us with additional resources to help animals through our programs."

Here's the thing: Dogs are natural carnivores and, were they capable of choice, would never choose a meat free diet. Unlike cats however, they can survive on specially blended vegetarian fare--cats go blind--but it isn't natural to them. And it strikes me: HSUS providing a product to help make dogs vegans has nothing to do with the welfare of canines, which thrive on dog food containing meat. Rather, the product reveals Pacelle and company's true inner Newkirk. Ironically, since animal rights ideology holds that there should be no domesticated animals, if HSUS, PETA, and their fellow travelers ultimately prevailed in remaking society, there would be no dogs left to be made into vegans.

Pig Lungs May Soon Save Human Lives

2010-02-03T17:18:00.000-08:00

Here's some news about which only animal rights believers will be upset: Scientists have developed a technique for maintaining pig lungs that could permit them to be used in human transplantation within five years. From the story:

Scientists in Melbourne, Australia, used a ventilator and pump to keep the animal lungs alive and "breathing" while human blood flowed in them. Experts estimated the work could lead to the first animal-human transplants within five years. Dr Glenn Westall, who helped conduct the experiment, said: “The blood went into the lungs without oxygen and came out with oxygen, which is the exact function of the lungs. "It showed that these lungs were working perfectly well and doing as we were expecting them to do. “This is a significant advance compared to experiments that have been performed over the past 20 years." The breakthrough came after scientists were able to remove a section of pig DNA, which had made the pig organs incompatible with human blood.

Obviously, there is much work left to do. But if this works, it will save many lives. Question, what about the worry of porcine viruses crossing the species barrier?

That point aside, yet again we see the tremendous value of animal research. While one can make the moral argument that it is wrong to sacrifice pigs for humans--I disagree but respect the argument--I don't think one can say with intellectual integrity that such experiments do not provide significant real and potential human benefit.

2010-02-02T10:10:00.000-08:00

Oscar the nursing home cat apparently knows who is about to die. More remarkably, he stays with them as they reach their end. From the story:

A cat with an uncanny ability to detect when nursing home patients are about to die has proven itself in around 50 cases by curling up with them in their final hours, according to a new book. Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, said that five years of records showed Oscar rarely erring, sometimes proving medical staff at the New England nursing home wrong in their predictions over which patients were close to death…

The tortoiseshell and white cat spends its days pacing from room to room, rarely spending any time with patients except those with just hours to live. If kept outside the room of a dying patient, Oscar will scratch on the door trying to get in. When nurses once placed the cat on the bed of a patient they thought close to death, Oscar "charged out" and went to sit beside someone in another room. The cat's judgment was better than that of the nurses: the second patient died that evening, while the first lived for two more days. Dr Dosa and other staff are so confident in Oscar's accuracy that they will alert family members when the cat jumps on to a bed and stretches out beside its occupant. "It's not like he dawdles. He'll slip out for two minutes, grab some kibble and then he’s back at the patient's side. It’s like he's literally on a vigil," Dr Dosa wrote.

I have no doubt that animals can smell or otherwise sense impending death. Several years ago, my now late cat went outside to meet his good friend, the kitty next door. Usually, they hung out together happily. That day, he walked up to her in his usual friendly way, but then, suddenly hissed, swiped at her face, and ran back into the house. I was very perplexed. First, he was a very docile cat. And second, he had just turned on his best pal for no apparent reason. Two hours later I went outside and discovered that she had crawled underneath a car and died. That raised an eyebrow, I will tell you. It would appear that my cat had smelled or sensed her impending demise and found whatever it was to be extremely unpleasant.

I bring this up because some might say that Oscar’s wonderful story undercuts human exceptionalism. There is no doubt that Oscar appears to be showing empathy. If so, the reason it might be morally relevant is that empathy is a distinctly human attribute, the lack of which in us is a symptom of mental illness, such as in sociopathology. But that could be because domesticated cats–who run us, we don’t run them–have been changed as a species by their intense and continual contact with us. Not as much as the wolves we turned into dogs, but still changed nonetheless. More to the point, Oscar is remarkable because he is acting in a way that is not inherent in the feline species. Note in the story that the five other cats in the nursing home don’t exhibit the same tendency. Moreover, Oscar is not duty bound to hang with the dying or treat humans or other cats well at all. This is because as an animal, he is not a moral being and cannot have any enforceable moral or ethical duties imposed upon him.

So what we have is a remarkable individual cat. This does not raise the species to the level of moral exceptionalism possessed by all human beings. Indeed, the fact that we might be chagrined that Oscar treats nursing home residents better than a lot of people do tells us that we have a right to expect moral actions from people that we never would from any animal.

Swiss to Vote on Giving Animals Lawyers

2010-01-31T18:16:00.000-08:00

Don't tell me I am an alarmist about human exceptionalism. The Swiss--who have already declared the intrinsic dignity of individual plants--are now going to vote whether to permit animals to sue in court. From the story:

Switzerland will hold a referendum next month on whether domesticated animals should have the right to be represented by lawyers in court. The country recently changed its constitution to ensure the protection of the "dignity" of plant life and passed a law last year guaranteeing rights for all creatures - from guinea pigs to goldfish. If Swiss voters approve the referendum in March, every canton in the country will be obliged to appoint a lawyer to act on behalf of pets and barnyard animals in order to protect them from abuse.

Of course, the real litigants will be animal rights activists--who put this initiative on the ballot. They will use lawsuits to oppress animal using industries by bringing cases fair and foul. As I point out in my upcoming book, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy, gaining legal standing for animals to bring cases in court is one of the top agenda items of the animal rights movement.

We'll see if the Swiss are really so far gone that they will allow their animal using industries to be ruined by animal rights lawyers. If the Swiss pass this nonsense, their agriculture will be turned into Swiss cheese and they will have only themselves to blame.

Prosecute Animal Rights Pie Thrower to Full Extent of Law

2010-01-27T08:06:00.000-08:00

To protest the seal hunt, and animal rights activist put a pie in the face of a Canadian government minister. From the story:

An incident in which the federal fisheries minister was hit with a pie by a seal hunt protester should be seen as a terrorist act, says a Liberal MP. Gerry Byrne made the comment to Newfoundland radio station VOCM after Gail Shea was hit in the face Monday by an American animal-rights activist, unhappy with Canada's seal hunt.

New York City resident Emily McCoy, 37, a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is charged with assault. Byrne told VOCM the government should investigate the incident based on the definition of a terrorist act under the law in Canada. McCoy was arrested after the incident in Burlington, Ont. Shea was not injured, and said she has not changed her support for the hunt. In a statement following the incident, PETA executive vice-president Tracy Reiman said: "A little tofu pie on her face is hardly comparable to the blood on Ms. Shea's hands."

No, this isn't terrorism--although terrorism is engaged in by some animal rights extremists--but it is a violence, literally an assault and battery on a government official. That is dangerous breach of the public peace. And it should mean serious jail for the perpetrator.

Moreover, I am really sick of PETA's and other animal rights extremists' self righteous claims of entitlement to humiliate and threaten people "in the name of those who can't speak for themselves." That is not free speech. It is not "civil disobedience." It is not "Ghandi" or "King." At best, it is tantrum throwing. At worse, a threat to the public peace and civility needed for free societies to function.

A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy On the Air

2010-01-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

I was interviewed a few weeks ago by NRO's John Miller about my forthcoming book, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy. We discuss the difference between animal rights and animal welfare, human exceptionalism, the ongoing devaluation of human life, and about my friendship with novelist Dean Koontz, who very kindly wrote the preface. Check it out.

The book was supposed to be out today, but--as frequently happens in publishing--was delayed a few weeks. But if you are of a mind, you can pre-order here, with delivery to your mailbox circa Feb 15.

Martin Luther King--Human Exceptionalist

2010-01-18T12:23:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King was one of the three primary inspirations in my formative years (the other two being Ralph Nader and JKF). He was all about expanding inclusion in the human community, and alas, we now see many in bioethics and in other disciplines seeking actively to shrink it by rejecting human exceptionalism.

We we will never know for sure, of course, but I have little doubt that King would have rejected such dangerous reductionism. Indeed, he embraced the importance of simply being human, stating:

Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy.

Martin Luther King, Jr., The Measures of Man, 1959

Indeed. We are the only moral species, a crucial intrinsic attribute that is unique to our natures as a species:

Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait, 1963

I will never understand the desire to deny our exceptionalism. It doesn't lead to hubris, as the unexceptionalists claim, but to benevolence and duty.

Bizarro Stumbles Into Truth

2010-01-18T11:47:00.000-08:00

The tremendously talented cartoonist--and animal rights zealot-- Dan Piraro, stumbled into truth in this cartoon. Meat provides good and nutritious food for people at a very reasonable price. That is a tremendous benefit for society that animal rights believers will never talk people out of.

A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy Soon Available

2010-01-12T12:05:00.001-08:00

My new book, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement is at the printer and will be available in early February (with a good discount at Amazon), a few weeks later than expected, but what else is new in publishing? This is the final cover.

I admit to being pretty jazzed. This is my 12th book and it never gets old. More importantly, I hope A Rat is a Pig, etc. adds substantially to the debate and particularly helps clarify the crucial difference between animal rights and animal welfare, as it focuses us on the importance of human exceptionalism.

Special thanks to the novelist Dean Koontz for his splendid preface. Here's an excerpt:

Like every antidemocratic ideology, this one [animal rights] is by definition antihuman, and like any antihuman ideology, it ultimately deteriorates into a nihilistic bitterness that is anti-life. . . . Wesley J. Smith knows too well that if the activists ever succeeded in their goals, if they established through culture or law that human beings have no intrinsic dignity greater than that of any animal, the world would not be a better place for either humankind or animals.

Here are some other endorsements:

Clearly written and authoritatively referenced, Smith’s book is a real eye-opener. The book exposes animal extremism for what it really is: a threat to both animal and human well-being. Long on fact and logic, A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy will frustrate those animal rightists who use fallacious logic and erroneous ‘facts’ to buoy their arguments.
—P. Michael Conn, scientist and co-author of The Animal Research War

A rat is a pig is a dog is NOT a boy, is Wesley Smith’s powerful message. He argues fervently that human exceptionalism with due attention to humane treatment of animals is a moral imperative if our society is to survive. And he magnificently defends his view that at its core the term animal rights ‘actually denotes a belief system, an ideology, even a quasi religion, which both implicitly and explicitly seeks to create a moral equivalence between the value of human lives and those of animals.’ The book is a chilling, authoritative account of the danger that animal rights extremism poses to medical progress and is one that I highly recommend to a general audience.
—Adrian R. Morrison, author of An Odyssey With Animals: A Veterinarian’s Reflections on the Animal Rights & Welfare Debate

Thank you Drs. Conn and Morrison for your kind words--and your efforts on behalf of human wellbeing.

No reviews yet. I expect some to conflate animal rights with being nicer to animals, meaning that I am for animal abuse. Of course, neither is true. And that is one of the important points I make in the book. Publicity plans are still being formed. More when I know more.

The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement

2009-12-08T10:50:00.000-08:00

The subtitle of my upcoming book, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy (taken from PETA's Ingrid Newkirk's most famous quote), is The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement. That cost is both real and harmful, as evidenced by a story of important research on anthrax not being conducted for fear of animal rights terrorism. From the story:

Last week a commotion erupted over a canceled anthrax project at Oklahoma State University (OSU), Stillwater. The National Institutes of Health had agreed to fund the study, which involved creating an animal model of anthrax infection in baboons, and the university's animal use and care committee had given it the green light. But OSU President Burns Hargis decided that the project would not be allowed on campus, for reasons that weren't immediately clear.

Hargis made the decision based on several factors, OSU's vice president for research and technology transfer, Stephen McKeever, told ScienceInsider on Friday. "The issue he was mostly concerned about was that he really did not want to attract controversy from the violent elements of various animal rights groups. He did not want to put OSU in that spotlight and so unnecessarily distract from or interfere with current research." Although McKeever says no specific attacks or threats against OSU factored in the decision, attacks by animal rights extremists have been on the rise in the United States in recent years.

That's the point of terrorism, to use fear as a cudgel to affect policy. This is just one example of the harm being done by animal rights terrorism, about which the general movement--with notable exceptions, such as Gary Francione--remains mostly silent or tacitly in support. That is why I no longer think of animal rights as a peaceable movement.

The Threat of Lawyers to Animal Research

2009-12-02T10:10:00.000-08:00

P. Michael Conn, co-author of The Animal Research War, warns about the plan to use the law to undermine--and eventually destroy--animal research in a column in The Scientist. This isn't alarmism. These law clinics at universities like Harvard and Rutgers hope to set lawyers in motion to do just that. From his column:

Under current US law, things are either property or persons. Legal rights for animals require the establishment of personhood; property cannot have rights. US welfare laws view animals as property, but emphasize our responsibility to care for them humanely. The effort to ascribe "personhood" to animals is a central focus of animal rights supporters, since changing public perception of animals is one way to stop their use in food, clothing, entertainment, and research. In some jurisdictions, "pet owner" has been replaced by "animal guardian," ascribing a different status for the animal. References to animal researchers as "vivisectors" who "exploit" "sentient beings" and practice "torture" and "cruelty" (applied generally to research), also impact the public. In a poll earlier this year (May 7–10), only 57% felt that animal research was morally acceptable, down from 62% in 2004.

The future may see an attempt to recognize Aristotle's three categories: things, animals, and persons. Animals may not ultimately enjoy the rights of persons, but the law may become increasingly specific about our obligation to care for them. If, on the other hand, "personhood" for animals is achieved, this status is likely to be in conflict with animal research. Failure to address developments in the education of law students is likely to have a long-ranging impact on the ability to develop new treatments needed for human and animal well-being.

I discuss this matter at some length in my upcoming book A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy. The threat is real, ranging from obtaining the right for animals to sue--supported by Obama Regulations "Czar" Cass Sunstein and Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe--to having them declared "persons," a current such case involvling a chimp now in front of the European Court of Human Rights. We ignore Conn's warning at great peril to scientific advancement and the alleviation of human suffering.

Rats Die That Premature Babies Might Live

2009-11-27T08:32:00.000-08:00

There are two themes in animal rights activism involving medical research. One has integrity. It states that even though we receive clear benefits from animal experimentation it shouldn't be done for ethical reasons. I disagree with that, but it is a moral argument that can be respectfully engaged.

Then there is the mendacity--that not only do humans receive no benefit from animal research, but it actually causes us harm. Unless one is totally blinded by ideological zeal, this meme is untenable from a factual perspective. And now, here's another story illustrating the benefit we receive from animal experimentation. Rats have shown that adult stem cell research may be able to save the lives of prematurely born babies. From the story in Science Daily:

An international team of scientists led by Dr. Thébaud has demonstrated for the first time that stem cells protect and repair the lungs of newborn rats. "The really exciting thing that we discovered was that stem cells are like little factories, pumping out healing factors," says Dr. Thébaud, an Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research Clinical Scholar. "That healing liquid seems to boost the power of the healthy lung cells and helps them to repair the lungs." In this study, Thébaud's team simulated the conditions of prematurity -- giving the newborn rats oxygen. The scientists then took stem cells, derived from bone marrow, and injected them into the rats' airways. Two weeks later, the rats treated with stem cells were able to run twice as far, and had better survival rates. When Thébaud's team looked at the lungs, they found the stem cells had repaired the lungs, and prevented further damage.

Rats died that premature babies might one day live. That's a fair trade any way you look at it.

NASA Wrong to Irradiate Monkeys

2009-11-03T10:46:00.000-08:00

I support necessary medical and scientific experimentation on animals. But I don't think this experiment is necessary. From the story:

NASA is to expose squirrel monkeys to daily radiation doses to help them understand the effects of long space trips on humans. It will be Nasa's first experiment on primates in decades.

If a manned mission to Mars ever takes place, the human pilots will be outside Earth’s protective magnetic field for several months, unprotected from solar radiation. Little research has been done on this sort of long-term exposure to low doses of radiation. Rats and mice have been exposed to this sort of radiation before, but that gives only a hint of what the effects would be on humans. Eleanor Blakely, a biophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said: "Obviously, the closer we get to man, the better."

The researchers are to pay particular attention to the effects on the monkeys’ central nervous systems and behaviour. The monkeys, previously trained to perform a variety of tasks, will be tested to see how the exposure affects their performance. Jack Bergman, a behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital in Boston, said: "We realized there was a need for this kind of work. There's a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep space travel and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts. That's not been well assessed."

This experiment seems wildly premature to me. We are probably decades from being able to technologically support--much less afford--manned trips to Mars. Indeed, we may not conduct such missions in our lifetimes. If and when we get closer to actually doing these missions, these experiments might be necessary, and they can be conducted with a better understanding of the actual conditions the astronauts would face based on the technology of the time.

True: We have had people in space for months at a time in the space station. Surely, they were exposed to continual radiation and their health should be monitored over the coming years. But until and unless extended space missions become plausible, I see no reason to put these monkey through the potentially painful consequences of being exposed to radiation. There may be a time, as I said, to conduct such studies. But that time is not now.

HSUS: Preaching That Old Time Animal Rights Religion

2009-10-16T08:50:00.001-07:00

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is the smartest and richest animal rights group around. Unlike PETA, it doesn't openly proselytize that old animal rights religion, e.g., sentience gives moral value, "a rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy," the quote from Ingrid Newkirk and title of a certain author's soon to be published book. This strategy has been very effective, allowing HSUS a level of mainstream respectability that other animal rights groups can't match.

But make no mistake, HSUS is about animal rights--eventually ending all animal husbandry and human hegemony over fauna--and its head, Wayne Pacelle, is a hard core evangelist. He has a piece on Michael Vick today, that, I think, unconsciously reflects the explicit religious nature of animal rights advocacy. It is about fall, repentance, redemption, and altar calls--indeed, it is permeated with a subtle, but distinctly Christian, narrative. From his piece:

A person who committed an awful crime against animals is found out. Prosecutors take the case seriously, and the perpetrator eventually pleads guilty. The judge metes out a stern penalty, given the sentencing guidelines at the time.

Man falls. Of course, Vick acted abominably, but follow me on this. He is convicted of his wrongdoing, confesses, and suffers just punishment. But there is redemption and a public confession of faith:

And then, upon release from prison, the perpetrator comes knocking on the door of the largest animal protection group and says he wants to sign up to do community service for the anti-cruelty team. He makes the pledge public so there is accountability.

You think I am reading too much into this? Then, get the ending:

In a civil society, there must be accountability for grievous actions. But there also must be an embrace of people who are willing and ready to change - even in tough cases, like Michael Vick. We are all sinners when it comes to animals, and we can all do better.

We have all sinned against animals? Substitute God for animals in this piece, and you have a classic Christian message. Yup. animal rights is religion and Wayne Pacelle a high priest of the faith. Hallelujah!

An Animal Researcher Worries About Murder

2009-09-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

Dario Ringach, formerly of UCLA, usedmonkeys to research whether an optical implant in the brain and attached to glasses could help the blind to see. But he was driven out of his work by terrorists who cared more for the monkeys than the blind, and were willing to terrify a family of law abiding citizens to get their way. Based on my research for A Rat, is a Pig, is a Dog, is a Boy, I know some of the details of what he experienced, and there is no question in my mind that Ringach had abundant reason to fear for the safety of his family.

After years of silence, Ringach is now speaking out, urging society to defend animal researchers. Why? For the most important of reasons. From an interview in Nature News:

After being quiet for so long, what made you speak up?

What's changed is I think we're getting awfully close to the situation where somebody may be killed. There is a general trend toward polarization in our society, from the debates on health care to abortion; we had an abortion doctor killed not too long ago. I think all these events are catalyzing the possibility that a scientist might be killed. The situation has changed a lot since my decision. At the time, it was me and a handful of investigators facing these groups alone. Things have changed, and universities such as UCLA are doing more to make sure these investigators are safe.

The take-home message from my own personal experience is: don't leave people alone to confront these issues. They need the support of their institutions and their colleagues. I hope that nobody else will have to face this decision. That's why I have decided to speak up. I thought I had to start speaking up in the hope that first, these attacks will stop, and second, that the public will understand we are open to dialogue but we can only do so in an environment where we know that we will not be attacked when we go back home.

Murder is the Rubicon, and some, like Jerry Vlasak, have all but called for it. Steven Best declares that animal rightists are at war with animal industries. PETA winks, and in the past, some of its leaders have had more than a passing acquaintance with animal rights criminals. Ringach has every reason to be worried that the river will be crossed. I am, too.

Research on Rats May Result in Paralyzed People Walking

2009-09-20T15:17:00.000-07:00

Another example of the need to research on animals. Rats, whose spinal cords had been severed, were able to walk again with the use of an experimental medical procedure. From the story:

Consistent electrical stimulation and drugs enabled the rats to walk on their hind legs on a treadmill -- bearing the full weight of the body -- within a week of being paralysed. With the addition of physical therapy, the rodents were able after several weeks to walk and run without stumbling for up to 30 minutes, reported the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Paralysed rats whose spinal cords had been severed from their brains were made to run again using a technique that scientists say can work for people, according to a study released Sunday.

This is an experiment that could not be done on humans because it would paralyze able bodied people. So once again the choice is clear: Use able bodied people, animals, or don't try to develop the technology. The choice is that simple and that stark.

Grave Robbing in the Name of "Animal Rights"

2009-08-06T16:57:00.000-07:00

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This is the kind of action that PETA and many other "mainstream" animal rights groups refuse to condemn. The vacation home of a drug company executive was torched and his mother's ashes stolen. From the story:

British animal rights activists have been accused of burning down a holiday home of one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical bosses and stealing his mother's ashes. Daniel Vasella, the CEO of Novartis, has been targeted by militants because of the Swiss company's ties with the controversial British animal testing company, Huntington Life Sciences (HLS).

Police have launched an investigation after his Austrian holiday villa in the small Tyrolean village of Bach was set on fire on Monday..."It was a criminal act," a Novartis spokesman said, adding there was "no doubt" that the notorious activist group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) was behind the arson.

The alleged attack came a week after the grave of Dr Vasella's parents was targeted. An urn containing the ashes of his mother, who died in 2001, was stolen in the eastern Swiss city of Chur. A message was spray-painted on the gravestone in red letters saying: "Drop HLS Now."

This is an example of "tertiary targeting," that is, attacking businesses that do business with HLS. Moreover, it isn't the first time that animal rights activists have caused intense emotional distress to people they dislike by grave robbing. Readers of SHS and my other work on this issue will recall that the owner of a farm in the UK, targeted by terrorists for raising guinea pigs--faced the heartbreak of having a loved one's body stolen out of her grave and buried in a forest.

Will animal rights activists generally, and the movement's leaders specifically, condemn this action, both the arson and the stealing of loved one's remains? Don't hold your breath or you will turn very blue.

Animals are Property: Veterinarian Negligence Not Grounds for Damages for Emotional Distress

2009-08-04T12:57:00.001-07:00

The California Court of Appeals has ruled that a veterinarian is not liable for the emotional distress caused when professional negligence leads to the loss of a beloved pet. From the story:

A veterinarian whose malpractice causes the loss of a beloved dog doesn't have to pay damages to the owner for emotional distress or loss of companionship because the law considers pets to be property, says a state appeals court. In a ruling Friday on a San Francisco attorney's suit against an Orange County veterinarian, the Fourth District Court of Appeal acknowledged that "the love and loyalty a dog provides creates a strong emotional bond between the owner and his or her dog."

But the court noted that a parent whose child is killed by medical negligence can't sue the doctor for emotional distress or loss of the child's companionship. By the same token, California law allows a pet owner, in some cases, to seek compensation for loss of the animal's "unique economic value" but not for its "sentimental or emotional value," the court said.

This is right, I think. Otherwise, the status of animals would be raised in an unwarranted way, and the flood of emotional distress lawsuits would overwhelm the court system.

Please note that I am not denigrating or dismissing the intense emotional ties we develop with our pets. Nor am I in any way suggesting that the death of a beloved pet isn't traumatic. Moreover, I am certainly not stating that if someone intentionally kills or injures a pet in order to cause emotional distress to the owner, that liability for intentional infliction of emotional distress should not fully apply. It should, and in spades, as should criminal sanctions for such a terrible wrong.

More Proof of Need to Research on Primates in Limited Cases

2009-08-04T12:54:00.001-07:00

So we have the Great Ape Project, passed in Spain, that says humans and gorillas are part of a "community of equals," and that none can be "tortured," e.g., used in medical experiments. In this country, we have legislati0n pending that would outlaw all medical experiments on apes and chimps. But what are supporters of such bans to do with this news? A new strain of deadly HIV has apparently passed from gorillas to humans in Africa. From the story:

A new strain of the virus that causes AIDS has been discovered in a woman from the African nation of Cameroon. It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday's edition of the journal Nature Medicine. The finding "highlights the continuing need to watch closely for the emergence for new HIV variants, particularly in western central Africa," said the researchers, led by Jean-Christophe Plantier of the University of Rouen, France.

The three previously known HIV strains are related to the simian virus that occurs in chimpanzees. The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier's team said. But they added they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans.

If we are going to understand this new strain, if we are going to be able to fight it, if we are going--hopefully--to one day find a vaccine, it seems to me we have to be able to conduct properly planned and humanely conducted experiments using gorillas and other animals--of at least the option needs to be available to scientists. No one like it. But it is either that or not do our best to save human lives from this terrible scourge.

Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights and Vegetarianism at The Corner

2009-07-31T23:03:00.001-07:00

I participated in a conversation on animal rights over at The Corner about vegetarianism. Here was my point.

Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights [Wesley J. Smith]

Eating meat is a natural human activity — that is, we are biologically omnivorous. In my view, this makes it entirely moral for human beings to eat meat. How that meat is obtained is important. Human exceptionalism — a concept denied in animal-rights ideology — holds that we have a duty to treat animals humanely. Arguments can certainly be made that factory farms are not humane, although they do provide important human benefits of inexpensive and nutritious food. Many opponents of factory farms don’t have to worry about food prices when feeding their families. Still, there is “humane meat,” advocated by Matthew Scully in Dominion, which is more expensive but is raised on Old McDonald–type farms with humane methods of slaughter.

I consider vegetarianism for moral reasons akin to a vow of chastity by monastics: It eschews a normal human activity for higher moral purposes. That is to be admired. But no monastic would or should say that his vow of chastity makes him morally superior to married married people who have sex. Similarly, vegetarians’ decision to refrain from eating meat does not make them morally superior to people who do eat meat.

In Dominion, Scully does indeed come at his advocacy from an animal-welfare (as opposed to an animal-rights) perspective. But he is barely on the right side of the line because he is indifferent to the human good derived from animal industries and animal use.

He also claims that the ideology doesn’t matter in this debate. That is absolutely wrong. Animal-welfare philosophy supports human exceptionalism; animal-rights philosophy disdains that approach and rejects human exceptionalism as “speciesist.” There is a huge difference between the two. Whether we believe human beings have a unique moral status in the world has tremendous implications for human rights and human flourishing. Indeed, it could be the most important ethical and moral issue of the 21st century.

Draft Book Cover

2009-07-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

A book is put together like a puzzle. The first piece is the proposal that gets you the gig. Then the research. Writing 80.000 words comes next. Then editing. My upcoming book has passed these hurdles.

We now have a rough of the book cover, reproduced on your left. This is not necessarily the final look, but I think it fairly represents where we will be taking it.

Pub date: January 19, 2010. Or, you can pre order at Amazon.

Animal Research Update: Malaria Vaccine 100% Effective in Mice

2009-07-26T17:18:00.000-07:00

A vaccine has been found that is 100 percent effective in preventing malaria in mice. From the story:

A new malaria vaccine has been shown to provide 100% protection in mice. If it can approach that level in people, it could slash the toll from one of the world's worst scourges, according to Stefan Kappe of Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI). "We're shooting for 90%-plus protection," said Kappe, who is the leader of the international collaboration behind the vaccine. "I am extremely optimistic this will work. The initial trials on Kappe's vaccine are tentatively scheduled to start in January at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval is required.

Many experimental drugs falter in the leap from mouse to human. And even if all goes well, it will be nearly 10 years before the new vaccine would be ready to roll out, Kappe estimated. The $17-million project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured more than $1 billion into the fight against malaria in the developing world.

If potentially saving millions of children's lives isn't worth the sacrifice of these mice, than the sun doesn't rise in the East. We have duties to treat animal humanely. And they are important. But sometimes our duties to suffering humanity must come first. This is one of those times.

We Still Need Chimps in Medical Research

2009-07-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

A bill in Congress would outlaw invasive medical research on chimpanzees. This is folly. Chimps are highly intelligent and social creatures, and we should not use them in research blithely. But chimps are the closest genetically to humans in the natural world, meaning that in limited circumstances where the potential human benefit is most pronounced, we still need to be able to use them in research.

A story today illustrates the point. It turns out that, contrary to what was previously thought, chimps do die from HIV infections. From the story:

A team of scientists, including two from Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, have discovered chimpanzees in Tanzania falling ill and dying from an AIDS-like disease, a surprising finding that researchers hope could lead to new insights into the disease process and ultimately to a vaccine. The team's study, to be published in Thursday's edition of the British research journal Nature, showed that chimps infected by certain strains of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, a precursor to HIV, died 10 to 16 times more frequently than uninfected chimps during a 9-year study.

Could there be a more urgent cause in reducing human suffering and death than finding a vaccine or cure for AIDS?

PETA's alpha wolf Ingrid Newkirk once said that she would rather see AIDS remain uncured than see animals used in research. Ponder that when you think you might support animal rights because those really are the stakes in the research debate. And it turns out, we still need to use chimps in the most urgent areas of medical research. Unless, we prefer to permit millions suffer and die from AIDS rather than use chimps in medical research.

More Animal Research News

2009-07-20T22:46:00.000-07:00

Boy, let us hope this works out! Scientists have discovered that adult stem cells may be able to help restore memory lost to Alzheimer's dementia. From the story:

Researchers have shown for the first time that neural stem cells can rescue memory destroyed by advanced Alzheimer's disease, leading to hopes for a treatment for the condition.

American scientists at the University of California have shown for the first time that stem cells injected into the brain can rescue memory in mice, rebuilding neurons and memory. "Essentially, the cells were producing fertiliser for the brain," said Professor Frank LaFerla, director of the university's Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders. They examined the mouse brains after the injection and found six per cent of the stem cells had turned into neurons with the majority becoming other types of brain cells which aided growth. The stem cells were found to have secreted a protein called brain-derived neurotropic factor, or BDNF which caused existing tissue to sprout new neuritis – the connections between neurons.

More proof of the utter need for animals in medical research.

A Good Example of the Need for Animal Research

2009-07-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

Most animal rights activists insist that humans receive no benefit from animal research. I make a big point of rebutting this in my upcoming book, which I think convincingly demonstrates that biological science would be materially impeded if animals could no longer be used. One such area is basic research in which scientists learn about biological processes or are able to test hypotheses regarding potential areas of future research. Sometimes, this work can be done with computer models, cell lines, or other non animal studies. But sometimes you need an intact, operating biological organism, which either means animals or humans.

Here's a good example: Scientists have learned a way to interfere with the workings of the gene that causes muscular dystrophy in mouse studies. From the story:

U.S. researchers have found a way to block the genetic flaw that causes a common form of muscular dystrophy, the team reported on Thursday. Mice injected with a compound that neutralizes faulty gene activity regained the use of muscles frozen by myotonic dystrophy, the researchers said. "We haven't corrected the underlying gene abnormality," said Dr. Charles Thornton of the University of Rochester in New York, whose study appears in the journal Science. "What we've done is made it behave in a more mannerly fashion," Thornton said in a telephone interview.

Will this turn into a treatment for the human disease? There is no way to tell at this point. But the success of these experiments--which involved the taking of the lives of many mice--pointed scientists into a potentially fecund area of research into this and other genetic-caused diseases.

It is too bad that a defense of animal research needs to be mounted--but it does. This is how science moves forward. Animal rights activists would stifle such activities and choke off many efficacious approaches to alleviating human suffering.

PETA Will Save Beach if Named "Sea Kitten State Park"

2009-07-16T07:36:00.000-07:00

PETA is a publicity junky. Whether negative, positive, or just plain loopy, if it will get them in the news, PETA is there.

Latest example, PETA seeks to take advantage of California's financial implosion, in which our state parks might have to close for lack of maintenance funds. From the story:

PETA sent a letter to California State Parks Director Ruth Coleman on Wednesday offering to pay to keep Pescadero State Beach open, but only if it is renamed Sea Kitten State Beach. Pescadero State Beach is among the 219 state parks slated for closure under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to close a $26.3 billion deficit.

The term "sea kitten" is an effort to evoke the same sympathy for fish that people feel for cats and dogs, according to PETA Manager of Campaigns Lindsay Rajt. "Pescadero means 'the place to fish,' so we thought by renaming it 'Sea Kitten State Beach' we could make it the place for fish instead of fishing," she said.

PETA clearly doesn't care about keeping the open space available for the people of California. It is just using our misery to get itself in the news. How compassionate.

Smith on Vicki McKenna

2009-07-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

Vicki McKenna is one of my favorite radio hosts. A political conservative, she plies her trade over the airwaves of Madison and Milwuakee. Vicki has energy, vivaciousness, a great radio voice--and she likes me! I was on her show "Upfront With Vicki McKenna" yesterday on WIBA Newstalk 1310 about Cass Sunstein wanting animals to have the right to sue their owners. I think you will enjoy the show. We also get into GE partnering with Geron to create embryonic stem cell lines to avoid using animals in research and the Great Ape Project. Here's the link.

PETA's "Kentucky Fried Chicken Campaign" Seem to be Faltering

2009-07-14T07:46:00.000-07:00

Whales Are Not Trying to "Tell" Us Anything

2009-07-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

This isn't explicitly an animal rights post, but it is closely related.

Popular science writers have fallen in love with their subjects, leading to blatant anthropomorphizing of animals--to the detriment of their work and credibility. Barely a week goes by these days without some writer pushing the meme that animals are really people too.

Latest example, "Watching Whales Watching Us," by Charles Siebert in the New York Times Magazine. From the article:

Somehow the more we learn about whales, the more we're coming to appreciate the sublimely discomfiting reality that a kind of parallel "us" has long been out there roaming the oceans' depths, succumbing to our assaults. Indeed, when that baby gray calf bobbed up out of the sea and held there that first morning, staring at me with his huge, slow-blinking eye, it felt to me as if he were taking one impossibly long and quizzical look in the mirror.

Oh, please: When a writer rockets that far over the top, I lose trust in the entire article. Siebert is clearly smitten. It's a romance. And when one is emotionally involved with the subject, yearning for something to be true, one will tend to interpret events to make them appear to be for which one hopes. (Just ask any man who has fallen in love with the wrong woman.)

And I hate to tell Siebert, but that whale who gave him the eye was unquestionably a magnificent animal who may have been curious. But the writer's deeply romantic yearning to transform whales into huge versions of us notwithstanding, was quite indifferent to his existence.

What are whales trying to tell us? Not a blessed thing.

Why "The Lawyers" Support Animals Being Allowed to Sue

2009-07-12T19:08:00.000-07:00

You just knew "the lawyers" would jump right on the animals-being-allowed-to-sue bandwagon.

When Animals Sue

2009-07-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

As promised last week, my extended piece on Cass Sunstein supporting granting animals "standing" to sue in their own names, is now out in the Weekly Standard. From the column:

Imagine you are a cattle rancher looking for liability insurance. You meet with your broker, who, as expected, asks a series of questions to gauge your suitability for coverage:
Have you ever been sued by your cattle?

If the answer is yes, what was the outcome of that suit?

Have you received any correspondence or other communication from your herd's legal representatives threatening suit or seeking to redress any legal grievance?

If you think that's a ridiculous scenario, that animals suing their owners could never happen, think again. For years, the animal rights movement has quietly agitated to enact laws, convince the government to promulgate regulations, or obtain a court ruling granting animals the "legal standing" to drag their owners (and others) into court.

Animals suing is often laughed at as one of those things that "can't happen here." (Anyone who says that line just hasn't been paying attention for the last 20 years.)

Of course, the real litigants would be animal rights ideologues who would use the courtroom to destroy animal industries:

Animals are not (yet) legal persons or rights-bearing beings, hence, they lack standing to go to court to seek legal redress. That procedural impediment prevents animal rights activists from attacking animal industries "from within," as, for example, by representing lab rats in class action lawsuits against research labs. This lack of legal standing forces attorneys in the burgeoning field of animal law--who are dedicated to impeding, and eventually destroying, all animal industries--to find other legal pretexts by which to bring their targets directly into court.

With Cass Sunstein--a high Friend of Obama and on board for "animal standing," and others of that visibility and prestige backing the project, this issue is could unquestionably be implemented:

In a 2004 book which he edited, Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, Sunstein wrote:

It seems possible . . . that before long, Congress will grant standing to animals to protect their own rights and interests. . . . Congress might grant standing to animals in their own right, partly to increase the number of private monitors of illegality, and partly to bypass complex inquiries into whether prospective human plaintiffs have injuries in fact [required to attain standing]. Indeed, I believe that in some circumstances, Congress should do exactly that, to provide a supplement to limited public enforcement efforts.

Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe has also supported the concept--and I provide the quote.

Senator Saxby Chambliss( R-GA) has put a hold on Sunstein's nomination over the issue because of harm it would do to family farms and ranches. (No kidding!) But that isn't all: Animal standing would be profoundly subversive to human exceptionalism:

But animal standing would do more than just plunge the entire animal industry sector into chaos. In one fell swoop, it would both undermine the status of animals as property and elevate them with the force of law toward legal personhood. On an existential level, the perceived exceptional importance of human life would suffer a staggering body blow by erasing one of the clear legal boundaries that distinguishes people from animals. This is precisely the future for which animal rights/liberationists devoutly yearn.

This stuff could not be more seroius. I even quote a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision stating that animal standing would be constitutional.

An Explicit Illustration of the Anti-Humanism of "Animal RIghts"

2009-07-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

Animal rights is both explicitly and implicitly anti human. The movement often tries to obfuscate this view, but occasionally, a liberationist makes the agenda explicit. Such is the case of a screed by an associate of the the violence promoting Jerry Vlasak named Jason Miller. From his column:

Despite the nearly unanimous anthropocentric belief that we human animals are superior to nonhuman animals, we are equal-AT BEST. In fact, our collective malevolence, greed, apathy, belligerence, arrogance, selfishness and tendency to dominate, exploit, and mutilate the Earth and its other inhabitants, have me convinced that we are inferior to other animals, both morally and, in a perverse way, intellectually...
Nonhuman animals are sentient, and an increasingly impressive body of peer-reviewed research scientifically legitimizes the empirical, common sense observations that many other animals are also 'subjects of a life' in that they lead relatively rich and complex intellectual, emotional, and social lives. Intentionally killing them is as much murder as it is to kill a human being.

No it's not, and anyone who thinks it is has no business preaching morality to anyone. But it gets worse:

[I]f our cravings for flesh consumption, our desires to wear the skin of another, our cowardly compulsions to stalk defenseless creatures and riddle them with bullets or pierce them with arrows, or our perceived need to subject other animals to heinous torture to "advance our science and medicine" are too strong to overcome, we need to put human flesh on the menu, stock the store shelves with shoes and coats fashioned of human skin, turn our hunting rifles on human targets, and fill our research laboratories with human subjects. After all, if we're going to use, abuse, and slaughter sentient beings to please our palates, enhance our lives, and vivisect, in order to restore justice and to put an end to abject hypocrisy, we need to include our own species in these activities.

And then comes the thinly veiled threat of murder:

If the corporatists and their faithful flock can shoot, trap, slash, cage, enslave, cut, gut, slit, slaughter, butcher, burn, shock, inject, beat, stomp, rape, wear, eat, and brutally murder voiceless sentient beings, how can we anti-speciesists, in good conscience, allow them to operate unchallenged and with impunity?...We needn't worry about maintaining the moral high ground. Dante wrote an unpublished addendum to the Inferno that includes a Tenth Circle–just for our opposition.
In the corporatist state's legal system, which principally serves to protect profit and property, an activist who killed a factory "farmer," a vivisector or a hunter would be punished as a murderer. Yet in the court of nature's higher laws, those who didn't engage in some form of activism (be it direct or indirect, violent or non-violent) to defend nonhuman animals would be tried as accomplices to murder. Apathy is complicity. With whom do you want to ally? Thanatos or Gaia?

Understand this: These people mean what they say. They are anti human and appear to be coming closer to lethally lashing out. The only people who can stop the pot from boiling over are other animal rights believers. But they are quite as church mice.

Ingrid Newkirk Lies to Laura Ingraham

2009-07-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

I am listening to the Laura Ingraham radio show and PETA alpha wolf Ingrid Newkirk is the guest. Ingraham asked her if having a leather belt or leather shoes meant that one was engaging in cruelty. Newkirk said, and this is close to a quote, “No! That is not what we claim.” Like heck it isn’t!

Recall the “Holocaust on Your Plate Campaign?” that PETA ran for about two years all over the world. Here’s a quote:

Like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps

If a couch is akin to the Holocaust, so too are leather belts and shoes.

Newkirk later apologized for a “insensitive” comparison, a classic non apology, apology, as I reported here.

Newkirk and PETA’s ability to obfuscate and game play is extraordinary. They are master propagandists, perhaps the best around. The one thing we do know is that Newkirk is not a candid truth teller.

Obama Appointee Wants Animals to Be Able To Sue Owners in Court

2009-07-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R=GA) has put a "hold" on the nomination of Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein to be what is sometimes called the "regulations czar." And for a very good reason: Sunstein wants animals to have the right to sue their owners in court. From the story:

Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) has blocked President Obama’s candidate for regulation czar, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, because Sunstein has argued that animals should have the right to sue humans in court. Obama has picked Sunstein, his adviser and longtime friend, to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an office that has power to review and assess all draft regulations proposed within the administration.

But Chambliss worries that Sunstein's innovative legal views may someday lead to a farmer having to defend himself in court against a lawsuit filed on behalf of his chickens or pigs. Chambliss told The Hill that he has blocked Sunstein’s nomination because the law professor "has said that animals ought to have the right to sue folks." Indeed, in his 2004 book, Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, Sunstein wrote: "I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law." More specifically, he wrote: "Laws designed to protect animals against cruelty and abuse should be amended or interpreted to give a private cause of action against those who violate them, so as to allow private people to supplement the efforts of public prosecutors."

As I explain in my forthcoming book, this issue is known as "animal standing," and it could not be more important--or more alarming that a high Obama appointee believes in it--because if it were ever to be implemented, it could destroy animal industries. That, of course, is the point

The animal standing controversy is rarely discussed outside of animal rights and animal law literature. We'll soon change that. I will have a more extensive exposition about this most important matter soon.

Animal Rights Terrorism Drives Research Lab Underground

2009-06-19T20:45:00.001-07:00

This is what it is coming to; having to build an animal research lab underground as a security measure: From the story:

The University of Iowa has gotten the green light to build a subterranean vivarium that will house experimental animals to be used in biomedical research and offer an extra measure of protection from animal rights extremists.

The Iowa Board of Regents approved $11.2 million for the roughly 35,000 square foot facility -- which will lie under a grassy courtyard bordered by three research buildings -- last week. "Security is a huge issue with regard to biomedical research," the university's vice president for research, Jordan Cohen, told the regents, according to the Des Moines Register.

Paul Cooper, director of the university's Office of Animal Resources, told The Scientist that while protecting the facility against attacks from animal rights groups wasn't the primary impetus for putting the lab underground, its underground location "is an extra measure of security." In 2004, animal rights activists broke into animal research laboratories on the University of Iowa campus, destroying computers and laboratory equipment and stealing experimental animals. Damages
sustained during the attack, for which the Animal Liberation Front claimed responsibility, cost the university about $425,000.

This should be a bigger story. We still don't take the threat to the scientific enterprise from animal rights terrorists with sufficient seriousness.

Another PETA Eye-Roller: Flies are "Curious"

2009-06-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

The President made news by swatting a fly during an interivew recently, and ever the publicity hogs, PETA, decided to horn in on the act. True to form, it criticized Obama for killing the fly, but note how Bruce Friedrick, a PETA general, anthropomorphized the insect. From the story:

"We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals," PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said Wednesday. "We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals."

The fly wasn't curious. It wasn't saying to itself, "Hmm, I'll see what this new president is all about" only to be cruelly killed. It was attracted by a scent or whatever it is that attracts flies. It wasn't a thought-out act.

Making A Hero Out of an Animal Rights Criminal

2009-06-13T16:13:00.000-07:00

Rodney Coronado, now in a penitentiary for teaching people how to make an explosive devise with the intent that someone commit a violent crime–and convicted previously of torching an animal research lab–a terrorist who admits he committed other crimes for which he was not caught, is the subject of a new biography. And the “Trade” reviews are almost as atwitter for Coronado as the MSM are for President Obama. From Kirkus “starred review” reprinted on Amazon.com:

Kuipers delivers a searing narrative on the fringe animal-activist movement. Despite his decades of experience covering the radical environmental movement, the author is careful to remain an objective narrator, presenting much contextual detail and allowing Coronado and his peers’ brimming passion to tell the story. A provocative and careful testament to the ever-changing definition of activism.

And here’s the Book List’s even more breathless “starred review”:

Passions run high when it comes to environmentalism, yet few condone the extreme tactics of such groups as the Animal Liberation Front. Los Angeles Times editor Kuipers, author of the counterculture saga Burning Rainbow Farm, focuses on eco warrior, some would say ecoterrorist, Ron Coronado as a key to the incendiary side of green activism. A Californian of Yaqui descent, Coronado began demonstrating in support of animal rights while still in grade school. He joined Sea Shepherd, a direct action anti-whaling group, instead of going to college, thus launching a life of illegal protest that turned him into a saboteur, arsonist, and fugitive; landed him in jail; and embroiled him in an infamous legal case that fuses freedom-of-speech issues with ramped-up domestic-terrorist laws. Coronado’s outlaw adventures for the cause are electrifying, from his covert videotaping of crimes against animals to his fiery destruction of fur farms and research labs, and his spiritual and moral struggles are equally compelling and genuinely instructive. As Kuipers meticulously tracks Coronado’s intense commitment to animals and eventual rejection of violence, he illuminates the tenets of deep ecology and animal rights and provides an invaluable history of radical environmentalism, a force that may gain momentum as mainstream society fails to respond to looming crises.”

Here’s a thought experiment: Replace the word “pro life” in each spot in which these reviewers used the term animal rights or referred to environmental activism: As in, “As Kuipers meticulously tracks Coronado’s intense commitment to unborn children…he illuminates the tenets of pro life ethics and provides an invaluable history of anti abortion advocacy, a force that may gain momentum as mainstream society fails to respond to the abortion Holocaust.”

Does anyone think these reviews would have so glowingly reviewed a biography of an equivalent pro life “warrior?” Of course not–nor should they. But if it is wrong–and it is–to engage in vandalism, arson, and personal attack in the name of stopping abortion, if a biography romanticizing the exploits of a pro life Ron Coronado would have been searingly condemned–and it would be–it is just as wrong to do it in causes of the Left like animal rights. But don’t expect our ideologically corrupted intellectual institutions to figure that out.

PETA Believes Even Dead Fish Have Rights

2009-06-10T19:55:00.000-07:00

Whenever I get up to Seattle, I try and visit Pike Place Market. One of the attractions there is the fish stand, where the workers "throw" salmon to each other to the delight of the crowd.

Well, when a veterinary group wanted to have a demonstration at a convention, PETA yelled that something was fishy. From the story:

In a letter sent to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), PETA says fish are intelligent, sensitive animals. PETA writes: "You should know that people who care about animals are appalled that a veterinary organization, whose purpose is to represent the interests of those whose jobs involve protecting the well-being of animals, would promote an event in which animals are treated so disrespectfully and are handled as if they were toys." PETA says that according to studies, fish not only feel pain, but they learn tasks, have long-term memories and show affection.

The fish are dead! They aren't feeling any pain! And yes, of course the group caved.

I'll believe PETA really believes in animal rights when they start picketing seals.

Using Human Tissues to Reduce Need for Animal Research

2009-06-05T16:50:00.000-07:00

After researching one chapter in Culture of Death and a whole book for A Rat Is A Pig Is A Dog Is A Boy, I am utterly convinced of the need for animal research in the quest to find treatments for disease and otherwise ameliorate human (and animal) suffering. But that doesn’t mean it is an activity we should relish. When and if we can obtain the needed information or knowledge without using animals, we should–so long as we don’t replace animal research with unethical investigations on human subjects--a potential problem I discussed regarding this story today over at Secondhand Smoke. Indeed, that is the point of the bioethical concept “The Three Rs,” an abbreviation for, “reduce, replace, refine.”

Now, biotechnology may be finding ways to replace animal research with experiments on human tissues, thereby also promoting the reduce and refine aspects of the Three Rs. From the story:

The use of animal experiments could be replaced by research on “virtual human beings” and tests on banks of living cells within a generation, scientists say. Computer modelling and advances in cell biology will allow researchers to assess new drugs far more precisely and without the involvement of animals. One innovation is the development of “micro-lungs” — lung cells extracted from transplant tissue, grown in a laboratory culture and then tested with drops of toxicants such as cosmetics to assess the response. return false;

I doubt that we will ever be able to totally end animal research because sometimes, you need to study the impact on the entire organism, not just discreet parts of the animal. For example, animal research discovered that embryonic stem cells cause tumors when injected into the body. Merely injecting the cells into a mini lung might not have developed the same information.

Still, the Three Rs are important, an ongoing example of the moral duties that flow from human exceptionalism.

Animal Rights Terrorism on the Rise

2009-06-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Alas, threats, intimidation, violence and other terroristic actions continue to rise "in the name of those who can't speak for themselves." From the story:

In what law enforcement officials are calling a wave of militancy, groups like the Animal Liberation Front and another called The Justice Department are going after scientists personally, both at work and at home, and threatening the safety of their families. "There is an upswing," said Laura Eimiller, a FBI spokeswoman in Los Angeles. "What's really concerning is the tactics that are being used. Previously it was non-violent, mostly harassment or vandalism. Now we're seeing the increased use of incendiary devices to target individuals."

Over the past 18 months, there have been at least 39 criminal actions undertaken in the name of animal rights, according to data compiled by the Foundation for Biomedical Research, an advocacy group for researchers. That represents a significant rise from 2006 and 2007, when there were only 25 incidents.

A huge part of the problem, it seems to me, is that the breadth and scope of the animal rights/liberation movement does little or nothing to rein in their crazier colleagues. As I have often written, PETA refuses to condemn criminality in the name of animal rights, and indeed, some leaders have actually extolled it. Until and unless the animal rights movement as a whole rises up to unequivocally oppose these actions--and cooperates with bringing the perpetrators to justice--animal rights cannot be deemed a peaceable movement.

Why A Rat Is A Pig Is A Dog Is A Boy?

2009-06-03T19:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new blog: A Rat Is A Pig Is A Dog Is A Boy--or Rat Pig Dog Boy, for short, or to be even shorter, RPDB.

Why this blog? Clearly, I hope it will supplement, compliment, and boost my upcoming book carrying the same title currently set for release in January 2010.

Of course, that begs the question: Why the book? The answer to that is literally a book-length tale, but here is a brief section of the introduction that will give you an idea of why I am engaged in the animal rights debate:

It is not my purpose in this book to act as a defender of of animal industries. Rather, my goals are primarily to expose the anti-human ideology of animal rights/liberation, expose the movement's many deceptions, and warn against the sometimes violent tactics of the animal rights/liberation movement. I will also defend the propriety of using animals as necessary and proper to promoting human welfare, prosperity, and happiness. Finally, I will mount an unequivocal defense of the belief that human beings uniquely stand at the pinnacle of moral worth–a concept sometimes called human exceptionalism.

I am very well aware that these positions--once nearly universally accepted—have, in recent years, become intensely controversial. Indeed, few issues generate such intense emotionalism or fervent support by its adherents as does "animal rights." Thus, I want to make it very clear at the outset--as I will throughout the book--that I love animals and like most people, I wince when I see them in pain. Moreover, I believe strongly that as enlightened people, we have a profound moral and ethical obligation to treat animals humanely and with proper respect--a core obligation of human exceptionalism--and by all means, to never cause them to suffer for frivolous reasons. I also strongly support laws against cruelty to animals and support strengthening them when appropriate. Indeed, I believe that animal abuse is a terrible wrong, not only because it causes the victimized animal to suffer, but also because cruelty to animals diminishes our own humanity.

Now, consider why I felt it necessary to make such an unusual disclaimer: Over the past thirty years, the concept of "animal rights" has seeped deeply into the bone marrow of Western culture. (This is especially true among the young.) Part of this support is based on a very loose use of the term "animal rights" as about being nicer to animals. It isn't--although sometimes animal rights groups engage in animal welfare-type activism. Rather, animal rights is actually a belief system, an ideology, and for some even a quasi-religion that both implicitly and explicitly seeks to create a moral equivalency between the value of human lives and those of animals.

So what will we be doing between now and the release of the book? The same thing we will be doing afterward; thinking about, discussing, and from my perspective--exposing--the philosophy, foibles, fables, and anti-human agenda of animal rights/liberation. In fact, the human use of animals, its propriety, its controversy, and stories in the news about the animal rights and animal welfare will be the only subjects this blog will consider.

One final note: I believe very strongly in the open exchange of ideas. I do not censor comments--especially those that are critical of my views and work. But I do insist on decorum. So, no cussing, no name calling, no threats, no spamming. Other than that, let's have at it.

Oh, if you are also interested in other issues impacting on human exceptionalism such as assisted suicide, human cloning, bioethics, radical environmentalism, and all that jazz, be sure to check out my other blog: Secondhand Smoke: Your 24/7 Seminar on Bioethics and the Importance of Being Human.