Letter to the editor

PETA challenges 'habits carried over'

Dear editor:

Aristotle called man the rational animal and Webster's Third mainly defines animal as "an organism of the kingdom, Animalia," then it goes into a long description of exactly the kind of creature that we are. Any zoologist will tell you that it's what Moyer and I are privileged to be by creation's decree, something to take pride in and live up to. The other animals have the same organs, sensibilities, DNA, and lifestrearn history, except that many are morally superior for being more humane.

Moyer denies that he ever called PETA "wacko extremists with a ditzy message." I maintain that he did. Here's how. Since implication is formal logic's central defining feature, the schools are fussy about it. Compromise that and the whole project collapses. So they now distinguish between strictly formal implication and rhetorical implicature, which is just as surely there but arrived at by connotation (eloquent suggestion) instead of by denotation (literal assertion).

As culture is what results from cultivation (Lat. cultus), implicature comes of intent to imply. Thus, when someone writes, "She was poor but honest," this implicates to expect poverty to contrast with honesty. It gives the statement rhetorical flair that's more than platitudinous.

Moyer in his articles is doing what I've seen him do in controversies with other readers, riding an ambiguity with a switch-pitch equivocation. The phrase, "fringe group," has several possible meanings. It can mean something insignificant on the sidelines. Moyer could have used that adjective if he had wanted only flat denotation. But my dictionary says the word is used to label something as extreme, notably the lunatic fringe. There's no question from the context that this is what he intended.

Moyer undertook to discredit PETA as an example of "moral blindness" on a par with ELF, the Hamas of the environmental movement, as "trying to force their agenda on society." When I defined fringe group parenthetically, all I did was spell out the implicature that he committed himself to by using that phrase to gain a contentious dismissal. Nowwithout taking back his assigning guilt by association with ELF and throwing in an abusive ad personam on PETA's founder, he affects wounded innocence as if he only meant fringe group in the quantitative sense of marginal. He's trying to weasel out of his accountability to what he effectively communicated, even if not then in so many words. Actions, tone, gestures, or context can speak louder than words.

Moyer tells us that the "proof" that PETA is in the wrong is that the majority disagrees with them. I can see him in ancient Rome consenting to the persecution of that fringe group known as Christians, or to the Inquisition of Protestants after the Reformation. One who argues from consensus needs to ask the reason for it. The answer usually is habits carried over. Before the Magna Carta it was assumed that kings had the divine right to dictate to barons. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery was considered the natural order of things. Before the 19th Amendment of 1920 it was assumed that women were the property of men. Before the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 it was assumed that labor had no rights. Sensibilities take time to expand. (People) are not going to turn vegetarian until they discover the huge loss in land, air, water, energy, food, and forestry the meat industry exacts.

The majority eats meat and condones animal abuse because it's a habit carried over. The food merchants propagandize that it's right and good. People addicted to such food don't want to hear of its harm or desirable alternatives. They go to some length to justify narrow sensibilities, as by discrediting groups that try to rouse their conscience.

What do we need to be told? The Christian theologian, John Cobb, wrote: "From the beginning of domestication of animals, interest in their freedom from suffering has been subordinated to economic considerations... But with the advent of factory farming, the evil has been terribly accentuated." What that has done to animals is told in Michael Fox's Eating With Conscience, 1997, and to humans in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, 2001. PETA is trying to spread the ethical word.

Moyer can't mean it when he writes, "I believe that animals should be treated well and not abused," when in the same sentence he adds, "using animals to produce milk, meat and other products is not abuse." It's as if slavemasters had said, "I believe slaves should be treated well, but to work them for all they're worth is not abuse." The fact is that big agribusiness is reducing nature to commercial resources that are making life a hell for our fellow animals. That they're hiding this from the public so that the Moyers can salve guilty consciences doesn't change the cruel reality.

Moyer gets dogmatic when he says people have souls and other animals don't. Some Christian theologians disagree. In honest use, that contention must be existentially justified. Where's reason to believe he has a higher dedication to lifeserving than, say, a faithful dog? He reminds me of Jesus'disciples arguing which of them deserves to be heaven's top dog. Jesus answered that the greatest is the servant of all. Moyer projects instead that he's morally high and mighty, won't be humbled by truth, that his might over animals makes right. Since he likes my quotes, here's one from Plato, "This is what disturbs about one's hastily concluding that he has arrived morally, that he who is no paragon feels no need to improve on his shortcomings."

-- Herman Jank

Nevada