Fur as a "Green Fabric:": Animal Rights Versus Environmentalism?
I have been noticing a slight trend, or perhaps better stated, the hint of a breeze that could become a slight trend: Animal rights versus environmentalism. Animal rights, very generally stated, fervently promotes the equal moral worth of animals with people based on the capacity to feel pain or otherwise suffer. This leads to devotion to the "rights" of every single animal as individuals.
Environmentalism isn't so much interested in individuals--people or animals as I see it--but the protection of macro systems, with the goal of preserving and promoting the breadth and depth of life on the planet. Sometimes animal rights can conflict with environmentalism, as in the call by environmentalists for Australians to eat kangaroo as a method of reducing green house gasses.
Perhaps sensing this trend, the fur industry is promoting fur as a green fabric. From the story in the Times of London:
Fur trade groups claim that the stigma associated with wearing fur no longer exists, with Britain one of the fastest-growing markets in the world. Some furriers claim that the apparent success of the fur sales is because fur is a green commodity.Clever pitch: The animal rightists won't buy it, of course, but apparently the public is buying fur. According to the story, prices are at a record high.
Keith Kaplan, at the Fur Information Council of America, said: "Fur is the grand-daddy of green. It comes from a renewable, sustainable resource. There is very little pollution involved in the production of it and it is biodegradeable."
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:36 AM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
I get this story fourth-hand. I do NOT vouch for the factuality of it, since I get it fourth-hand and the guy who told it to me makes up fables and stories for a living. Take the story itself with a grain of salt. I post it 'cause it made me think, and I think it ties in nicely.
One of my distant cousins, by marriage, is a Cherokee story teller. He told this story -
At a tourist attraction where my cousin was telling stories, another Cherokee was holding some kind of performance (I'm not Native American so I have no idea what he was talking about, so I'm not going to elaborate).
Well, apparently the other guy was wearing traditional garb and that included some animal skins. A tourist started condemning him for murdering animals.
The other guy looked the tourist over and asked how a man wearing Nike shoes made by child labor in a foreign country, wearing an iPod that has poisonous mercury in it, and water in a bottle made through a chemically polluting process, could look down on an honest man who hunted, blessed, ate and skinned animals with his own two hands.
The guy then added to the tourist, "We see the earth as one great living thing and try to take care of all of it, animals, rocks, and people alike. You hate yourself so much for all your excesses and riches that you'd rather pretend to sacrifice yourself for the animals than to change your ways and actually become a productive human being." Needless to say the tourist left in a huff.
The story is suspect, naturally, because my cousin is biased and because he's a story teller anyway, but it does raise an interesting point.
You never see poor people joining animal rights groups. It's always folks with lots of money and lots of material goods, who neve question how they got their goods and where their money came from. And I bet they do feel guilty, which is probably why they support the militant crazies in their groups. They want to somehow pay back for their excess without having to give up or change anything, which is why they throw money into anarchy groups that are anti-human. After all, they know their own sins, so they figure everyone else on earth has the same sins. It's a lot easier to give up eating meat and wearing fur than it is to give up a personal computer, 1000+ video games, CDs, DVDs, all the little convinences that waste our time and distract us in pleasant ways. They have the satisfaction of feeling like they're sacrificing something, expunge their guilt by making other people guilty, and not have to change their lifestyle radically.
TE, your description in the last paragraph (with a few tweaks) sounds a lot like many elected officials....or government in general. They're only trying to "help".
Mort
Mort:
Please feel free to call me Tabs. As for me sounding like an elected official, believe me, I couldn't get elected dog-catcher in a twenty-person population town with fifty stray dogs. I speak from personal experience - I've got a list of sins ten miles long and sometimes I get overwhelmed by how good I've got it, and I still do bad things. There are times when I wish I could do something like the animal rights activists - find something and give it up and fight for it. But I can't do that without breaking up the solidarity of the human family, so that means I have to deal with my stupidity myself. About the only thing that gives me hope is understanding my nature and knowing that if I work at it, with God's Grace, I'll eventually get to the point where I won't do evil. Of course by that point I'll be dead, so there's a trade-off, but I try to do the best I can in this life.
So I figure that if *I* feel like that, and if I don't see tons of poor people or lower middle-class people joining up with these anarchy groups, there's probably a connection.
Either that or I'm just really taken in by a good story.
Tabs...my apologies if you thought I was inferring that YOU sounded like an elected official. I have no reason to insult you.
Your description just brought images of many with political power doing the same things as the money people behind the animal rights movement. The Robin Hood syndrone. The difference with the folks in government is that they tend to favor throwing other peoples money at their causes.
I liked the Cherokee story. It reminded me of one about staying warm....the Indian stays warm by his small fire while the white man stays warm by gathering wood for a large fire.
Mort
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