A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[Animal welfare, not animal rights
By JOHN OAKLEY
Toronto Sun
June 10, 2000
In a case that affirms the questionable assumption that all life is precious and more or less equivalent and, therefore, imperative to preserve, a United Airlines flight from Washington, D.C. to San Jose, Calif. made an unscheduled landing in Denver last week when it was discovered a passenger's dog had mistakenly been placed in an unheated forward cargo compartment.
With the captain doing his best Bruce Willis-confronts-the-killer-asteroid routine, the plane made the detoured descent into Denver in an effort to save Mike Bell's 10-year-old dog, Dakota, from turning into a furry ice sculpture. The ordeal ended on a happy note for all parties concerned, including the 90 or so passengers aboard who reportedly, to a man, concurred with the decision to interrupt the flight.
If these people were the cast of Survivor, the old dame with the ukulele would still be on the island. But then, the inconvenience to the passengers was no doubt negligible, tempering their magnanimity just a tad, methinks.What if the stakes had been higher? It's always instructive to test people's principles and resolve against the extreme.
Saving Dakota by touching down in Denver, interrupting a 41/2-hour flight to the coast, was probably no big whoop, given the in-flight movie was Road Trip and all.
But what if even one of those passengers was on a critical time-line for an important business or personal rendezvous? Could we anticipate that the impressive consensus to save Dakota would've been maintained? Never mind an important business engagement, let's crank it up here. Let's really test the noble ideal that all life is sacrosanct and must be maintained, damn the cost or inconvenience.
What if the dog in the deep-freeze is a butt-ugly homicidal pit bull and the plane is carrying a cadre of top-rank NATO brass to a disarmament summit with the Chinese? Or, say, a rare life-saving snake vaccine is being shuttled post-haste to a stricken young child halfway across the country and up in the unheated cargo hold ... the snake that bit 'im.
Does Bruce Willis still radio the tower in Denver for the okay to touch down? Who are we kiddin' here? This touching episode of "Saving Dakota," like so many issues we confront daily, pits animal welfare against human interest.
And it would be disingenuous to assert that the life of an animal is the relative equivalent to that of a human being, although increasingly we hear the screed of the animal rights crowd who vociferously maintain it is so. They're more to be pitied than scorned.
They suffer from the debilitating intellectual paralysis of anthropomorphism, that tragic condition that ascribes to critters the same attributes possessed by us more advanced human beings. It's called the Bambi syndrome and it's worth noting their empathy usually correlates with a sliding scale based on the degree of cute and cuddly.
Hey, I'm guilty of it too. I wanna shoot the pigeons that crap all over my car, but I'm willing to forgive the cute raccoon that tore the flashing away from the shingles on my roof.
In Los Angeles, city officials are taking a lot of flak right now for their plan to catch and euthanize marauding stray dogs in an attempt to clean up the town in time for this summer's Democratic National Convention.
Here at home, Coun. George Mammoliti is on the cat lovers' shit list for capturing stray kitties in an attempt to clean up his own 'hood. The man's been subjected to some vicious and venomous attacks. These are flippin' strays, people!
Too many well-intentioned fools are confusing animal rights with animal protection. We as humans are duty bound to protect the welfare of God's creatures under reasonable circumstances. However, to maintain this silly notion of equivalence in ascribing to animals inalienable rights, as some activists are attempting to do in arguing, for instance, that a rhesus monkey has an inalienable right not to have laboratory experiments conducted upon him, is sheer lunacy.
To borrow from comedian Nick Di Paolo, if hooking a monkey's brain up to a series of batteries helps to save even one human life from the ravages of MS, CF, or AIDS, I've got just two things to say: "The red is positive, black is negative."
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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