More on the PETA Non Apology "Apology"
I wrote a piece about it at NRO. Here is the actual statement from Ingrid Newkirk. Know this: PETA literally believes that eating meat is equivalent to participating in death camps, and that cattle farming is the same morally as the old slave plantations. PETA is not about animal welfare, which seeks to improve the proper and humane use of animals by people. That can be a noble and often, thankless, cause. In contrast, PETA's goal is ending all human use of animals, no matter the harm it causes to human welfare.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 11:35 AM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
I just read your article about PETA's apology. I noticed you quoted the foreword to Charles Patterson's Eternal Treblinka and implied that the book's points were ludicrous. I was curious to see whether you've read the book beyond its foreword. As Ingrid Newkirk pointed out in her note, the book has received overwhelmingly positive reviews in much of the Jewish press.
Unquestionably, PETA's analogy is a touchy subject. I think it didn't bode well as an in-your-face campaign for shock value. But having read Patterson's book, and some works of Nobel Prize Laureates Isaac Bashevis Singer and J.M. Coetzee, I believe the message that what we're doing to animals is morally abominable is one that needs to be heard. To me, an "analogy" doesn't mean that the Holocaust and animal agriculture are morally equivalent." If we're ever going to take the words "Never again" to heart, then we must look at other instances of mass suffering even if they are not 100% "equivalent" to the Holocaust.
And once again, I'd like to highly recommend Patterson's ground-breaking book. I relied on it heavily for a course I taught at Carnegie Mellon last year.
How "equivalent"? You speak of mass suffering. I object to the word mass, which conveys again the idea(?) that one mass is like another and reminds me of the degrading jargon of communists and others when they go on about the masses.
The crucial thing is that one unjust act of violence against a human being is more than a 100% worse morally than one million unjust acts of violence against animals. They just don´t belong on the same moral level.
How "equivalent"? You speak of mass suffering. I object to the word mass, which conveys again the idea(?) that one mass is like another and reminds me of the degrading jargon of communists and others when they go on about the masses.
The crucial thing is that one unjust act of violence against a human being is more than a 100% worse morally than one million unjust acts of violence against animals. They just don´t belong on the same moral level.
I really have to wonder about what PETA's goals are. I am a cat lover who has long been advocating for cat policy that errs on the side of life. Newkirk has been a strident opponent of non-lethal cat control(TNR): In the 90s, she would try to derail discussion on internet message boards. And recently, I got a link from a cousin who is a journalist is Dublin to this article on excessive killing in the PETA animal shelter in Norlfolk: http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_44226
From where I sit, the group looks to operate-as much as anything else-to divert the energies of those who are truly interested in humane institutional reform for cats and dogs. I don't know how widely known it is that Newkirk once ran one of the largest pounds in DC; in this regard, she is strictly old church: kill, kill, kill.
I wanted to comment on this entry when it first appeared, but was busy rescuing my cat, Simba Psuedosiamese, from the well established death culture in veterinary medicine. He is diabetic and developed a treatable gastric ulcer. I had to go to a specialist before I could get a clear recommendation other than euthanasia. Now he has been treated and is doing fine. There seems to be an interesting analogy to human medicine. I have been monitoring a Portland animal use group, the National Animal Interest Alliance for sometime. Through its email list, I learned about the practice of veterinary organ harvesting. The shelter in my hometown, Palo Alto, CA, has admitted to a limited amount at the animal shelter there: see Doggie Organ Donors: A Philosophical Mindbender at http://www.dogsinthenews.com/issues/0104/articles/01041a.htm
I hear persistent rumors about a five state business run out of shelters, and from what I have seen of a preference for killing at mainline shelters in my area, I suspect it is more than a rumor. 30 years ago, when my sister was a biology major at a state college, she had a job removing organs from pound dogs in Jackson County Oregon. Imho, Newkirk and her lawless ilk keep us from having serious discussion about these issues.
CCE
I noticed the adress for the article on PETA in my last comment didn't come through correctly. I may have screwed up. It is http://worldnetdaily.com/news/
article.asp?ARTICLE_=44226.
Sorry.
Just noticed I did the same thing with the Doggie Organ Donor article. I guess I have trouble walking and chewing gum; can't seem to do more than one thing at a time. The correct cite is:
http://www.dogsinthenews.com/
issues/0104/articles/010411a.htm
If anyone believes that human suffering is more important than animal suffering, I do respect that view. But cruelty to animals is certainly still a grave wrong, a violation of dominion. We cannot discount animal suffering entirely.
To say, as fieldsjohn did, that "one unjust act of violence against a human being is more than a [sic] 100% worse morally than one million unjust acts of violence against animals" is a such a horrid devaluing of the lives of G-d's creatures that I find it appalling.
For example: Would one instance of unprovoked assault against 1 human being be "100% worse morally" than inflicting the same amount of suffering on 1,000,000 dogs? you can't be serious! I don't know any scale to precisely measure how much one is "worse morally," but let's at least view animals as G-d's creatures who feel pain that they are.
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