Animal Rights Groups: A Threat to Humanity

Colleen Carroll Campbell has a fine article here on how "Animal Rights Extremism Endangers Human Rights." She writes:

"When General Electric Co. subsidiary GE Healthcare recently unveiled its plan to use human embryonic stem cells in its drug trials, the company proudly touted one of the plan's potential benefits: Using stem cells derived from the destruction of human embryos may make the experiments on rats unnecessary."This could replace, to a large extent, animal trials," Konstantin Fiedler of GE Healthcare told a reporter, according to Reuters news agency. "Once you have human cells and you can get them in a standardized way, like you get right now your lab rats in a standardized way, you can actually do those experiments on those cells."Well, that's a relief. Researchers may need to kill a few million embryonic human beings for the sake of scientific progress, but at least they will not continue perpetuating a true atrocity -- like the mass murder of mice. PETA must be proud."

So it finally has come to this: kill the humans to save the animals. It started out as "Don't kill animals (as in animal testing) to save humans." Now we kill humans to save the animals. But then, little embryos aren't as cute and cuddly as seal pups and that is all there is to our moral system, isn't it? Sentimentality.

Later she writes:

" When they came to power, the Nazis passed sweeping animal-protection measures that prohibited vivisection and kosher butchering and prescribed everything from the most painless way to cook a lobster to the most humane way to shoe a horse. Heinrich Himmler, overseer of the Nazi extermination camps, denounced hunting as "pure murder" of the "innocent." Nazi commander Hermann Goring threatened to send to concentration camps those who "continue to treat animals as inanimate property." Blurring the moral distinction between animals and people did not make the Nazis more compassionate to people. Instead, it contributed to some of the greatest human-rights violations the world had ever seen, culminating in the slaughter of six million Jews, whom the Nazis treated worse than animals."

I'm sure that if you asked a German concentration camp commander if it is logical to treat Jews worse than animals, he would fall all over himself explaining how it makes emminent sense to do so. He would even have "scientific" reasons!

But, you protest, am I really comparing Peter Singer, PETA, Greenpeace, etc. to the Nazis? Yes, yes, I see what you mean - it may be a little unfair to the Nazis. After all, they were not out to exterminate the whole human race as some of the most radical of these animal "rights" nutbars are.