Having spent the last weekend in the beautiful confines of
Pittsburgh, PA, I had the occasion to visit the National Aviary,
home to more than 500 birds from around the world. As with most
zoo-type places, the natural splendor was replete with tales of
devastation and extinction befalling its denizens at the hands of
evil human beings.
Now I’m just as awed by the sights and sounds of these beautiful
creatures as the next person — the panoply of their colors alone
makes one eager to someday meet their author — but what ruffles my
feathers is the notion that man is solely responsible for their
demise; that he is somehow not a part of nature, but outside of it.
They cite the hundreds of species threatened by human progress
while conveniently pooh-poohing the millions eliminated by nature
herself, countless centuries before the advent of man.
One doesn’t have to hold the Biblical view of the relationship
between mankind and the animal world to see that survival of the
former would have been impossible to sustain without its dominion
over the latter. But those of us who do believe that man was made
in the image and likeness of God to rule over the Earth, also
acknowledge that as such, we have a responsibility to act with
kindness:
The service of man is the end appointed by the Creator
for brute animals. When, therefore, man, with no reasonable
purpose, treats the brute cruelly he does wrong, not because he
violates the right of the brute, but because his action conflicts
with the order and the design of the Creator (Tommaso Maria
Zigliara, Philosophia Moralis).
The recent accusations of animal cruelty against Michael Vick
transcend both religious and political lines. Witness this
denunciation of followers of dog-fighting by
Democrat, Senator Robert Byrd:
The Book of Proverbs in the Holy Bible, the King James
Bible, tells us a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast but
the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. The immortal Dante
tells us the divine justice reserves special places in Hell for
certain categories of sinners…I am confident that the hottest
places in Hell are reserved for the souls of sick and brutal people
who hold God’s creatures in such brutal and cruel
contempt!
While the passion of the venerable senator is worthy of admiration,
one also wishes that he and his party would apply the same
sentiments to God’s most supreme creatures; human beings, and more
specifically, to their babies. And that’s the downside to all of
this compassion for Vick’s victims: as respect for human life from
the moment of conception to natural death declines, reverence for
other life-forms increases.
The outrage evoked by the Vick case reflects the increasing
fanaticism Americans show toward their pets. Unheard of mere
decades before are health insurance, home-delivery of “pet meds,”
animal chaplains and crematoriums for the dearly departed cats and
dogs. It’s almost as if, in a society that aborts over one million
of its children per year, domesticated animals have taken their
place. Indeed, People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals’
well-known slogan, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” takes this
thinking to its most radical conclusion. PETA founder Ingrid
Newkirk states that, as human beings, “we’re the biggest
blight on the face of the earth.”
Indeed, an unfortunate offshoot of all this is that PETA is
getting great press from this mess. They and their affiliates are,
after all, quasi-terrorist organizations, that equate
animal husbandry with the Holocaust and believe that, “The leather
sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made
from the skins of people killed in the death camps.” Fellow
traveler Pete Singer, author of Animal Liberation,
knows (PDF) who the enemy really
is:
[H]owever sympathetically you interpret the
Judeo-Christian religious tradition, it puts animals in a
fundamentally different category from human beings….I think in
the end we have, reluctantly, to recognize that the Judeo-Christian
religious tradition is our foe.
And their influence is growing. In addition to the scolding
warnings at various zoos, the cities of Berkeley, CA and Boulder,
CO have passed laws stating that people who have pets do not “own”
them; rather, they are the pet’s “guardian.”Animal rights activists
insidiously play on the emotions of pet owners in their campaign to
devalue human life, and the Vick case plays right into their hands.
But America is still overwhelmingly a country under the
Christian influence, and hopefully as such, its citizens will see
through the “animal rights” canard and enjoy their steaks without
guilt, and their pets without cruelty, and thank God for both.
