Kill a doctor, save a rat

Animal rights activist: 'Kill the researchers'

Read it all on WorldNet Daily:
WASHINGTON – A radical animal rights activist shocked members of the U.S. Senate this week by advocating the murder of those conducting medical research.

Jerry Vlasak, spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front, told the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works that killing medical researchers was "morally justified" to save laboratory animals.

Vlasak compared the life of lab animals to African American slaves and the Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps.

This is the logical result of a relativistic world view. If humans are animals (as we are) and nothing more, then there is no reason to value a human over a mosquito. Peter Singer and his ilk try to define a hierarchy based on sentience, but that leaves a crippled human morally less worthy of life that a healthy rhesus macaque. To quote, “Of course, if the superior intellectual capacities of one being enable that being to have, interests that a being with lesser capacities is unable to have, that may make a difference to how we ought to treat them. But this is not a distinction between humans and nonhumans, for some nonhuman animals are superior in their capacities to some humans, for instance, those suffering from profound intellectual disabilities.” [1] It isn’t rocket science to figure out that those who write such articles are quite high on the hierarchy and thus entitled to life.

Mr. Vlasak doesn't even bother to try and justify himself with the hierarchy. A lab rat is equivalent to a human being, and the killing of a human being in defense of a lab rat is therefore justifiable homicide. Mr. Vlasak's ideal society would no doubt exterminate itself in order to bring back the buffalo. When evil runs out of other targets, it eventually has no outlet for its hatred besides self loathing and self-destruction. Ultimately, it is not dramatic, but merely sad.

Of course, the whole animal rights enterprise neglects to answer the simple question: If coyotes eat deer, and mountain lions eat deer, why shouldn’t I eat a deer? And if I can morally eat one to preserve my own life, why can’t I morally use one in research to preserve another’s life?


[1] Singer, Peter (2004) Taking Humanism Beyond Speciesism, Free Inquiry 24(6), 19-21.