Rather than post links to all the various chattering but often meaningless articles published over the weekend and early this week that take PETA to task for comparing people to animals again, I thought I'd post this thoughtful commentary from someone who claims to be in favor of animal rights. I think he demonstrates a reasoned AR perspective on the detrimental nature of PETA's tactics here. I'm not anti-PETA, generally, but they do a lot of things that make it difficult for me to make the world a more animal-friendly place. Unlike Mr. Wise, I have not met many smug, insufferable activists, but I've met a handful, and many of us become fairly indignant when provoked, which could easily play into people's image of AR activists as insufferable.
This is a fairly wide-ranging commentary, touching at great length on race. While that's an important aspect of this discussion, I'm better suited to listen and learn than I am to speak about it. Instead I wanted to highlight this brief excerpt as an example of what I actively speak to, and that's rights for animals (Wise delves into speciesism without really speaking to it directly), and will urge you to click on the link above to read the rest:
Now I'm sure there will be some animal liberationists who read this and who think that since animals are sentient beings too, and since they have the right not to be exploited for human benefit (positions with which I don't disagree), that comparisons with the Holocaust, or lynching are perfectly fair. To think otherwise, they might argue, is to engage in an anthropocentric favoring of Homo sapiens over other species.
But of course, whether they admit it or not, most all believers in animal rights do recognize a moral and practical difference between people and animals: after all, virtually none would suggest that if you run over a squirrel when driving drunk, that you should be prosecuted for vehicular homicide, the way you would be if you ran over a small child. The only basis for a distinction in these cases is, at root, recognition of a fundamental difference between a child and a squirrel.
