Review: 'A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy'

*
It's far too easy to dismiss animal rights groups as simply leftist crackpots, but there's more to them than meets the eye. One such organization, Defenders of Wildlife, recently suffered a setback when its campaign to pressure Discovery Networks into dropping its planned series "Sarah Palin's Alaska," failed. Eileen O’Neill, president of Discovery subsidiary TLC, recently announced that the series would not only go on as planned with a mid-November premiere, but added that the show is going "extremely well." The latter is a direct contradiction of the lies Gov. Palin's political enemies have been spreading that there were problems with the program. This illustrates the Alinskyite tactics that animal rights groups frequently employ.

These groups aren't composed solely of kooks, at least not all of them. They are very well financed and have employed some savvy media types to broadcast their propaganda. Wesley Smith's book, A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement, is a good, but rather general introduction to what is a relatively young movement that sprang up in the 1970s, coinciding with the departure of the larger environmental activist movement from the cause of conservation into the realm of wretched leftist excess. Rev. Michael Orsi has written a review of Smith's book for The American Spectator. Here are a few excerpts:

Smith introduces us to the major players and groups, explaining their philosophies, exposing their tactics, and warning of the consequences if their misanthropic activities are left unchallenged. He begins by noting the difference between "animal welfare" and "animal rights." The first is a well-established and quite legitimate cause that calls for the humane treatment of animals, while the second is a movement that puts forth the dubious notion that all sentient beings have inalienable rights to life and liberty akin to human rights. The idea that animals have rights is illegitimate because, he says, animals "are amoral and cannot conceive of the rights of others or of bearing obligations."

[...]

Animal rights activists rely heavily on certain distinctively human emotions to gain sympathy. Groups such as PETA and the Animal Liberation Project (ALP) frequently employ graphic photos of animals suffering in laboratories and slaughterhouses. They make Holocaust analogies or employ anthropomorphic depictions of animals that would make Walt Disney blush. Their tactics range from educational propaganda, deceptive "investigative" journalism, political lobbying, and litigation right up to outright threats.

[...]

But Smith's primary concern is with the degradation of the human person inherent in the attempt to make animals equal with people. He demonstrates how this leveling harms science, medicine, education, good nutrition, and, of course, human dignity -- all of which reflect the ultimate objective of the movement: elimination of people.

[...]

Smith doesn't connect animal rights activism with the broader environmental movement, but the similarly anti-human aspect of the "green" agenda demonstrates a natural linkage (which would make an intriguing subject for a follow-up book). One need only look at the environmentalists' emphasis on caring for the ecosystem while decrying the damage done to it by human beings with their infernal "carbon footprints." Both movements seek the reduction of human presence on the planet through birth control, euthanasia, eugenics -- even by starvation, if you carry the policies they advocate to their natural conclusions.

We wonder how many in the this movement are "true believers" and how many are just leftist operatives who manipulate these useful idiots for less high-minded political purposes, as Defenders of Wildlife are being employed to smear Sarah Palin for her unforgivable sins of being a hunter and supporting scientific predator control methods to manage Alaska's wildlife populations when she was governor. It's this latter bunch which seems to us to be the more insidious and dangerous.

Rev. Orsi's review of Smith's book is here.

- JP