Why do people choose to put animal lives before human ones? What sort of person thinks it is just fine to publish the home addresses of scientists and their families
Well, as it turns out, people who have no respect for the law:
Animal activists target judges
Once, when I was driving home from Suffolk, I heard a show on Radio 4 where they quizzed animal rights activist on why they thought it was acceptable to publish scientists' home addresses on the internet. Then the journalist, quite rightly, challenged the interviewee on why she wouldn't reveal her real name, and why she wasn't prepared for the BBC to publish her name and address on the website. Her answer was, of course, that she was afraid of attacks from the scientific community. Boy, she hasn't spent much time around scientists has she?
Interestingly, the activists fell back on a similar excuse for the publishing of judges' family details on the web:
But Greg Avery, a spokesman for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, said the animal rights movement was not interested in judges' personal details. He said: "Somebody involved in the industry has set this up. I don't believe that it is anything to do with the animal-rights movement."So, let's get this straight: the scientists are publishing the family details of the judges who are protecting them? Uh, yeah, of course.
The problem is, of course, that many of these activists live in little self-reinforcing circles of fanatical belief. Make no mistake, that's what they are: fanatics who believe their own conviction puts them above the law. Certainly they show a fanatic's contempt for the law. With no-one within their circle to challenge their beliefs, they grow and develop in strange ways. They tell each other that there's no scientific basis for animal experimentation, and scientists only do it because companies pay them, as one suggested on Today the other morning. When he was confronted with the question: "And why would companies pay for this if it doesn't do any good?", he had no answer. He'd never thought about it, nor sufficiently interrogated his own beliefs.
This is the politics of the schoolroom, given deadly life by adults. Without any intellectual frame of reference that lets them analyse their own beliefs, we come down to "cute fluffy animals good, nasty scientists bad". The irony, of course, is that the very scientists they call "bad" have to pass every action they take through committees of ethics. Clearly, the activists have no such safeguards.
>> Why do people choose to put animal lives before human ones? <<
I don't know. The same people who reject modern medicine for their sick kids because of easily-misinterpreted passages in ancient religious books?