The Terror of "Animal Rights"
By Ayn Rand Institute: Alex Epstein (09/10/06)
The goal of the “animal rights” movement is to sacrifice and subjugate man to animals.
Over the last decade members of the “animal rights” movement have committed thousands of acts of terrorism against people and property involved in life-saving animal research. At one major animal-testing company, Huntingdon Life Sciences, so-called protestors have for several years attempted to shut down the company by threatening employees and associates, damaging their homes, firebombing their cars, even beating them severely.
Animal rights terrorists are often cast as “extremists” who take “too far” the allegedly benevolent cause of animal rights. But as a recent story in the Los Angeles Times demonstrates, the terrorists’ inhuman tactics are an embodiment of the movement’s inhuman cause.
The Times profiled Dr. Jerry Vlasak, a surgeon who, according to the story, argues “that killing scientists to stop animal research would be ‘morally justifiable.’” He advocates taking “five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives” in the hopes of saving “a million, 2 million, 10 million nonhuman lives.” Vlasak runs the Animal Liberation Press Office, through which he suggests targets for terrorists to hit, and welcomes and publicizes terrorists’ “communiqués.” What justifies advocating murder and being a terrorist ringleader? In the words of the story, “his belief that animal life is as valuable as human life.”
While most animal rights activists do not openly advocate killing animal testers, they do share the view that animal life is sacred.
According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the basic principle of animal rights is: "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment"--they "deserve consideration of their own best interests, regardless of whether they are useful to humans." This is in exact contradiction to the requirements of human survival and progress, which demand that we kill animals when they endanger us, eat them when we need food, run tests on them to fight disease.
Consider the issue of animal testing, which is universally opposed by animal rights activists, and the object of much animal rights terrorism. There is no question that animal research is absolutely necessary for the development of life-saving drugs, medical procedures, and biotech treatments. According to Nobel Laureate Joseph Murray, M.D.: "Animal experimentation has been essential to the development of all cardiac surgery, transplantation surgery, joint replacements, and all vaccinations." Explains former American Medical Association president Daniel Johnson, M.D.: "Animal research--followed by human clinical study--is absolutely necessary to find the causes and cures for so many deadly threats, from AIDS to cancer."
Millions of humans would suffer and die unnecessarily if animal testing were prohibited. Animal rights activists know this, but are unmoved. Chris DeRose, founder of the group Last Chance for Animals, writes: "If the death of one rat cured all diseases, it wouldn't make any difference to me."
The death and destruction that would result from any serious attempt to respect animal rights would be catastrophic--for humans--a prospect the movement's most consistent members embrace. "We need a drastic decrease in human population if we ever hope to create a just and equitable world for animals," proclaims Freeman Wicklund of Compassionate Action for Animals.
To ascribe rights to animals is to contradict the purpose and justification of rights--to protect the interests of humans. Rights are moral principles necessary for men to survive as human beings--to coexist peacefully, to produce and trade, to provide for their own lives, and to pursue their own happiness, all by the guidance of their rational minds. To attribute rights to non-rational, amoral creatures who can neither grasp nor live by them is to turn rights from a tool of human preservation to a tool of human extermination.
It should be no surprise that many in the animal rights movement use violence to pursue their man-destroying goals. While these terrorists should be condemned and imprisoned, that is not enough. We must wage a principled, intellectual war against the very notion of animal rights; we must condemn it as logically false and morally repugnant.
Alex Epstein is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.
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