Letter to the Editor

Letters to the editor

Thursday, March 3, 2005

All kinds of animals

Dear editor:

Steve Moyer's going on about ELF and ALF in his last column has me thinking that the solution to it all is to create ARF, Animal Rearmament Front, after Buchman's Moral Rearmament of 1938 that's still going with the motto, "Up With People!"

Our motto will be Up With Animals, What People Are!

Moyer says I offered only testimonials to that claim. I cited authorities and connatural qualities. We've the same organs as other animals, each species a little differently shaped. It's nature's own testimonial that man is a vertebrate bipedal primate mammal related to the great apes.

A caring pet owner discovers that the other animals have our feelings.

Evidence indicates that our thinking of animals as ignorant is comparable to teachers' regarding the young Einstein as retarded because his mental processes weren't conventional.

If manifest structures, feelings, thinking, DNA, and joint evolutionary history aren't "reasons to believe we're related," what could count as suitable relational indicators in Moyer's dark glass?

I objected not to a doctrine of soul in itself but to Moyer's using it in a doctrinaire way to evade ethical accountability, as a way of saying to God's creation at large that he's a superior being to be served.

Looking into his head, I say that he thinks of soul as a license to treat the other animals inanimately, i.e., without ethical scruples, as slavemasters abused slaves since they weren't human.

Judges and jurists have to look into the heads of people who aren't forthcoming.

Moyer's ethical insensibility shows when he says that he "found repugnant" PETA's condoning methods that revealed horrific cruelty toward animals and that were also illegal. Expressing no humane feelings for the abused animals, no delight in their liberation from cruelty, he disdains those who don't observe proprieties.

Is that Pharisaism how "soul" shows its colors?

Instead of trying to conquer and exploit nature, creation spirituality would identify with and tend the universe community as its conservant enhancer.

To disclaim lifeworld affiliation denies that one is his brother's keeper.

Moyer insouciantly tells us that the cows on factory farms are pampered.

He's right that their treatment is not about ethics but money. And the greatest profit is in driving young cows to maximal milk production on minimal feed and expense, wearing them out young then grinding them into hamburgers.

Likewise, the greatest profit was not in supporting slaves lifelong but in working them to an early death then replacing them with more young workhorses.

Industry tries to fire older workers before their salary gets too high and pensions have to be paid.

Books explain how the meat industry exhausts world resources. Jeremy Rifkin's Beyond Beef, 1992, does so in a history of cattle raising. Manifold interconnected environmental consequences can't be dismissed as Moyer tries to do.

In conclusion: In a letter to the editor of the KC Star of March 7, 2003, a Jew wrote that people ask why bystanders of Holocaust suffering weren't moved to action.

She found the same moral insensibility in those who factory farm.

ARF! Up with animals!

Herman Jank

Nevada