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
2 Comments
2 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.
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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