PeTA is spinning, and has evidently tried to justify further it's actions in a Press Release that is now circulating around the net. Their case is fundamentally unchanged from what it originally was: They kill animals for a "greater good" — it is kinder to kill them than it is not to.
My critique of their initial response applies equally well to their latest effort.
Worse for PeTA, it looks like I'm not the only one who has noticed that PeTA's killing of animals is a violation of a core AR principle. Now, the rival AR group Friends of Animals is piling on, with this:
In Ahoskie, North Carolina, two employees of a high-profile animal protection organization currently face numerous counts of felony animal cruelty, and several misdemeanor counts of illegally disposing of dead animals. Police relate the charges to an alleged pattern of killing healthy dogs and puppies and tossing their bodies into a refuse bin.
An Associated Press report quoted veterinarian Patrick Proctor of Ahoskie Animal Hospital as further stating that authorities found a female cat and her two "very adoptable" kittens among the dead animals, and that "these were just kittens we were trying to find homes for."
In the wake of this appalling series of reports, we at Friends of Animals would like to state that the Ahoskie killings described in the recent press reports are not euthanasia, and that they are a serious affront to animal rights.
Animal advocates have no business in the killing of healthy sheltered animals. People who engage in such conduct -- regardless of killing or disposal methods -- convey the message that they and their supporters have accepted a reprehensible practice. [My emphasis . . . ed]
(This would be the same FoA that — like PeTA — hasn't lifted a finger to protect rats from extermination by humans . . .)
FoA treads very gently here, avoiding the use of the word "rights:" they carefully avoided stating the obvious — AR "ideology" (really, more an attitude than an ideology . . .) regards killing animals for any reason (with the exception of immediate self-protection) to be a violation of an animal's "right to life."
I suspect there's a reason FoA doesn't want its readership thinking too much about the nature of animal "rights" at this point . . . (see below).
In any event, I'd argue that if you believe that animals have rights the fact that the animals are un-adoptable, or ill, is no excuse for offing them. To kill such animals is to take the path of least resistance, to select the path of greatest convenience, rather than the one of greatest ideological purity, one which preserves an animal's right to life. In this, FoA and I would agree that PeTA killing animals is a violation of a core AR belief.
I think FoA and I would further agree that PeTA's violation of a core AR principle was especially egregious: they snuffed a far higher percentage of the animals it took in than did some other shelters in its region, even though PeTA rolls in wealth and could easily be a "no-kill shelter" — at least according to PeTA President Ingrid Newkirk. And as I've pointed out before, PeTA's financial commitment to actually caring for animals, as opposed to PR and supporting unsavory people and groups, is miniscule in the extreme (they apparently spend approximately 0.002962% — or, rounding up, $3 of every $1,000 of their budget "making improvements for animals").
I have argued that the un-adoptable animals, the sick ones, the halt, the lame, the ones with behavior problems — these are the ones which are in greatest need of the protection of the Animal Rights community — and PeTA, being the flagship AR group, should take the lead in protecting the most needy.
But the animals in greatest need are the very ones that PeTA turned their ideological back on, even as they held the animals tenderly, whispered sweet words to them, found the vein, inserted a needle into it and snuffed them. According to President Newkirk, it was a gesture of kindness.
And the issue is not a choice between killing or doing nothing.
True! PeTA could be a no-kill shelter in a (dare I say it . . .) heartbeat.
And now, we are about to see what FoA really has in mind: They want to push for their own agenda, which happens to be a plea for avoiding violating the animals' right to their lives by violating the animals' rights to reproduction!
When you read what FoA, keep in mind the profound difference between AR and AW. In AR-speak, you have "human persons" and "non-human persons," and the two kinds of "persons" are of equal moral value. In short, if you wouldn't do something to a "human person" because it is immoral or unethical, you wouldn't do it to a "non-human person" for the same reason: so, in the world of AR, it is immoral to hunt animals, raise them for food, eat them, use them in biomedical research, to use them for entertainment or for their value as workers (seeing eye dogs, for example). The list is endless, but you get the point.
To make it easier for you to understand the ideological incoherence of the AR position — viz. how egregious a violation of AR ideology it is to advocate spaying and neutering — just consider how immoral it would be to force unconsenting humans to have their organs of reproduction surgically removed. Not only does that deprive the person of his reproductive rights, but subjects him to "unnecessary surgery", alters his behavior (making him more compliant and docile), and deprives him of the pleasures of sexual intercourse.
(An equally ugly, darker extension of the AR logic can be read here.)
Alternatives to the cycle of breeding and killing do exist. For example, Friends of Animals has successfully co-ordinated a national project responsible for sterilizing over two million dogs and cats since 1957. This Spay and Neuter Project effectively intervenes in the tragic cycle of reproduction, and has spared tens of millions at the very least.
In September of 2002, Friends of Animals' president Priscilla Feral invited animal protection groups nationwide to join this project. If groups across the country were to accept Feral's proposal and put resources into such a campaign, the amount of animal suffering would decrease beyond the animal advocacy community's wildest dreams.
Through a concerted effort to stop the breeding of pets, we stem the tide of animals who wind up in shelters in the first place. Only in that radical way -- radical meaning at its root -- can the problem be resolved.
Excellent examples are also set by shelters and rehabilitators with no-kill policies. No one in the animal advocacy community should be undermining these shelters. By supporting no-kill zones, we press municipalities to face facts: There's no room in town for breeders.
Moreover, local and state officials will place a high priority on no-kill when their constituents demand it.
Animal advocates must delve deeper than the level of symptoms, and unearth the root causes of suffering. Victory will not come overnight, but with wide support and a serious understanding of our role, we can interrupt the cycle of breeding and killing domestic animals -- a cycle which, after all, we human beings put into motion.
FoA is an Animal Rights group, not an AW group, but its position on spaying and neutering is an Animal Welfare position, not an Animal Rights position: when FoA advocates spaying and neutering animals, FoA is advocating a position that's antithetical to AR "ideology" ("ideology" is a misnomer — it is an attitude).
Indeed, FoA's position on spaying and neutering is really no different from that adopted by most, if not all, Animal Rights groups and activists.
However unanimous the AR position towards spaying and neutering is, it simply does not square with the central tenet of AR "ideology", which demands-requires-dictates that each life is equally valuable, be it human or animal. The logic of moral equivalence is very simple, and I repeat: if it is immoral to do something to a human, it is immoral to do it to an animal. A "human person" and a "non-human person" are equally valuable in the world of Animal Rights . . .
If you wouldn't kill a human out of convenience, don't kill an animal. If you wouldn't spay or neuter a human, don't do it to an animal.
For all his faults, Jerry Vlasak, MD merely follows the logic of AR "ideology" to its endpoint when he does the arithmetic and concludes that snuffing a few human lives would be morally acceptable to save a greater number of animal lives, and then openly advocates the practice of assassination itself.
An animal life and a human life are equally valuable.
In his own way, Professor Steven Best, too, follows the AR logic to its conclusion when he volunteers that he'd save his dog from a burning building before he'd save a human stranger, perhaps your child, spouse or parent. (I've termed this to be Professor Best's "Me First" ethic.)
An animal life and a human life are equally valuable.
And finally, AR luminary Karen Davis follows the AR logic to her special end when she likens chicken farming to the holocaust in which 6 million Jews were done to death by the Nazis for precisely the same reason. (PeTA makes the same odious holocaust comparison.)
An animal life and a human life are equally valuable.
My point is fairly simple: just as PeTA kills for a greater good, so FoA spays and neuters for a greater good. Both are blatant violations of the rights they claim animals have, and of the morality they condemn the rest of us for not embracing.
More significantly, both — spaying and neutering, and killing excess animals out of convenience — are exercises in pragmatics, an explicit recognition of the supremacy of the morality of "greater good."
This "greater good" morality is identical in concept to the "greater good" (of curing disease) argument that scientists use to justify animal-based experiments, and the "greater good" argument (of preserving habitat and preventing starvation) that wildlife managers use to justify deer hunting. Animal Rights activists reject both "greater good" arguments on the grounds that both are immoral (Ingrid Newkirk herself articulated the AR position most clearly: "Even if animal tests produced a cure [for AIDS], 'we'd be against it'").
So: why should FoA's "greater good" argument for spaying and neutering be morally acceptable, but PeTA's "greater good" argument, the "greater good" argument of the scientist and the "greater good" argument of the wildlife manager all be unacceptable?
Brian
