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UK: The Animal Rights Crowd Are Beyond Reason By Kevin Myers (Filed: 01/08/2004) The Government's decision to deploy fresh legal measures against animal rights terrorists comes just a little late in the day, for the campaign against using animals in medical research has cost British drugs companies up to £1 billion. But the real price is not financial: it is in the suffering of human patients who will not get the drugs which might have been developed, but for those fascists who prize animal life over that of humans. Since they use fear as a weapon, these animal-venerators are true terrorists. Their targets have been drugs companies that need animals for medical research, scientists working on such projects, their families and even their friends. The tactics include pickets on plants and homes, round-the-clock telephone harassment and physical assault, and they have been outrageously successful: the construction group Montpellier was recently intimidated into withdrawing from building an animal research plant in Oxford, and Cambridge has abandoned plans for a project examining primates. GlaxoSmithKline has spent tens of millions of pounds protecting staff and buildings from terrorist attack. The first step in the growth of any terrorist movement is the establishment of some prime nonsense as a central dogma which is immune to the normal processes of analysis or of democratic accountability. For the IRA, it was Brits out. For animal rights activists, it is the elevation of animal life to parity with human life. Once that has been achieved - as it has, in the minds of many - then the moral basis has been laid for war. You can hear the drums of war in the slogan of Shac (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty), which seeks the closure of the Huntingdon Life Sciences research laboratory. It runs: "A message to all animal killers. Your perverted days are numbered. Our day is not coming. It has just arrived." You can hear them too in the words of Jerry Vlasak, Shac's "scientific" adviser, who compares animal rights campaigns with struggles against apartheid and slavery: "It would be 'speciesist' of me to say that . . . in the fight on behalf of the most oppressed, abused and tortured beings the world has ever known, that there will never be casualties." Arguing against such voodoo fundamentalism is purposeless. If you really insist that a child's soul and a sole's soul are of equal measure, then you are beyond reason. Arguments that dire human afflictions such as Alzeimer's, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis might be defeated through animal-based research mean nothing whatever to today's science-hating veggie-Nazis, who are too hysterical to be logical. Why do they not picket abattoirs where, by their lights, genocide is being carried out? Of course, unnecessary cruelty towards animals is wrong, because the gratuitous infliction of pain is in itself wrong and, moreover, is corrupting of the humans responsible. One of the differences between animals and mankind is that we have a concept of another's pain, and a taboo on its needless infliction. A party of chimpanzees hunting a monkey, a wolf-pack following a spoor, a crocodile contemplating a gazelle by the waterside - these have no such awareness of their prey's feelings. Yet an actual preference for animals over humans - this is very British: your animal rights movement is simply unique in Europe. And by trying to placate the implacable, governments can merely give activists intellectual ammunition. Ben Bradshaw, the animal welfare minister - similarly, a very British political office - last month announced plans to ban goldfish as funfair prizes, because they often finish up dead on compost heaps. Does he think goldfish would otherwise end up in retirement homes on the south coast? Such Bradshavian logic would ultimately lead to a ban on all fishing, which is precisely what human-hating vegans are seeking. The campaign now facing the British government will presumably adhere to the usual cycle of insurgency. The terrorist threat has proved beyond control by ordinary law, so special ordinances have been introduced. But to imprison "freedom fighters" using those laws will inevitably be declared a terrible injustice. Next - no doubt - will come the protests against prison conditions, followed by hunger-strikes. Who knows, if these result in deaths - "martyrs", naturally - then the animal-testing scientists might be held responsible, thereby becoming legitimate targets for murder. But is taking life not inconsistent for animal rights activists? After all, in addition to being humans, are not animal-testers also animals, thereby qualifying for the protection enjoyed by our finned, feathered or four-legged friends? "Ah," declared the veggie-nazis, "but animal-abusers forfeit such animal rights." A classic terrorist riposte, for all terrorism depends on double standards - you foully murder, we justly execute. And here's the bad news. These are early days yet. By the time a grizzled Ben Bradshaw has retired to join those goldfish with their slippers and their briar pipes in Dunromin' Home near Hove, unless they've had their way, the animal- fascists, like the IRA, will still be in business. SOURCE: Telegraph.co.uk, UK - Jul 31, 2004 http://tinyurl.com/42aze * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn