Pam Anderson Loves the Monkeys - You Should Too
Pam Anderson's op-ed in the WSJ on why we should stop using chimps as movie performers is actually pretty great. A lot of people disdain PETA on the grounds that with all the man-on-man (and girl-on-girl) cruelty these days, anyone who's worried about man-on-dog cruelty is just a fluffhead. This is kind of a silly objection, really. It's not as though this is a zero-sum game, where torturing more animals is likely to lead to less human suffering. Obviously, societies that are cruel to animals are cruel to people, too, and societies that are kind to animals are more likely to be kind to people. The relationship isn't one-to-one -- there's certainly plenty of human suffering in vegetarian parts of India -- but it's certainly broadly correlated: the antislavery, human rights and women's rights movements can be traced from their births in Georgian and Victorian England right along with societies for prevention of cruelty to animals. People who are for ethical treatment, in general, should have only encouragement and fellow-feeling for those who concentrate on the ethical treatment of animals in particular.
People disdain PETA because it decries eating meat as evil and because it tries to suggest that animals are nearly the equivalent of people (and so animal research is evil, etc.). I think that very few people are actually disdain them because they aren't focusing enough on human torture. They disdain them because they feel that their definitions of what constitutes animal abuse are far too broad.
"You say I'm a dreamer. We're two of a kind. Looking for some perfect world that we both know that we'll never find." - Thompson Twins, "Hold Me Now"
May 1, 2006 6:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
So why stop at chimps how about dogs cats dolphins
birds, We will continue using babies after all poor animals. I love animals and I have two dogs and I trained them to do tricks just like I trained my babies to potty in the toilet and to talk and to walk and what ever else needed. If they are being mistreated than by all means stop using them.
May 4, 2006 11:08 AM | Reply | Permalink