Are Animals Having “Their Day”?
It’s been a long time coming, but around the world animals are gaining in political strength. The endangered species list is growing both in the number of species listed (more than 12,000) and in public awareness. Animal rights activists are making animal researchers miserable with protests ranging from letters to the editor to organized boycotts of “animal-based” products to acts of violence against laboratories and even researchers’ families. Large animals like mountain lions and bears are making a comeback in western states, attacking a few individuals each year while legally protected from hunters. PETA advocates (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), long known for their opposition to fur coats and the like, are now lobbying against fishing.
I’ve always been a little suspicious of people who don’t like animals—unless they have an allergy they can’t help. Nature without animals would be as uninteresting as pizza without tomato sauce. Think about it? No lightning bugs on summer evenings. No birds at the seashore. No old dog to come home to who doesn’t care what kind of day you’ve had. Without animals we could not live and we certainly would not live well.
Animals are a gift, part of our human responsibility for stewarding the environment. So cruelty of any kind is by definition needless and inappropriate. Wanton destruction, like shooting bison for fun from the train in the Old West, is immoral. Slaughtering animals to near extinction like the African elephant or rhinoceros for purposes of commercial greed is a form of robbing our children.
But animals are animals. They are not human beings. They deserve to be nurtured, protected, and preserved, but a given animal’s ultimate value is not on the same level as either the new baby in the family or of Grandma. Animals are capable of remarkable commitment and heroics based on instinct, but they do not participate in good and evil, do not worship in a church of their choice, do not develop civilization, and do not worry about retirement.
Without animals, animal husbanding and farming, animal hunting, and animal research, human history would conceivably not have developed. Because of animal products, we are better clothed, eat better meals, possess medicines thwarting disease, and in some cases have our lives extended. Animal products made possible geographic exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and they make possible biomedical exploration today.
So I say to our friends in the animal rights movement, I respect your love of animals and your support for conservation. I acknowledge the fact that you’ve made us all more aware of the moral imperative to consider carefully the future of the animal kingdom. But I cannot accept your philosophy equating animals with human beings. I cannot endorse your opposition to animal research, hunting, zoos, or even husbandry. I oppose the violence against persons and property perpetrated by an increasing number of animal advocates.
Let’s treat animals humanely but not humanly. Let’s conserve animals for human civilization not in spite of it. Then “their day” and “our day” will not be incompatible.
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© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved
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