On human and non-human animals (2)

It seems that the propagators of animal rights do not let an opportunity go by to prove how good they are at illogical "reasoning". Edward Camilleri's letter (February 1) is a case in point.

For a start he mistakenly says that I tried to justify human beings' meat-eating tendencies by listing Christian facts. I did nothing of the sort. I merely rebutted the fiction that Jesus Christ was a vegetarian. The correspondent then proceeds to declare that he is not going to enter into this discussion because "this is a complex issue and goes far beyond any Christian myths or beliefs". One must be thankful for small mercies!

Next he quotes from encyclopaedias that human beings are an animal species and classified as mammals. Even a child at school knows that, but it is irrelevant to the issue. My statement "Animals, however sentient, are not human beings" means exactly what it says, namely, that animals, such as dogs, cats, birds, mice, are not human beings. It does not mean that human beings do not belong to the animal species.

My next statement "and society must uphold this distinction" (relating to the definition of "murder") follows naturally from the first. We must not have a society that makes no distinction between a man killing another man, and a man killing a mouse. Your correspondent should surely be more "amused" by that possibility than by what he derides as "Christian facts".

Mr Camilleri writes: "Human beings have no right to lift themselves above other species. They must treat their cousins in nature with respect and dignity, etc." Not only have human beings a right to lift themselves above other species, but they also have a duty to do so. Does a cat treat a mouse with "respect and dignity"?

Does a crocodile treat a wildebeest fording a river with respect and dignity? How does a cheetah treat a gazelle, a ferret, a rabbit, and so on? A fox in a chicken run will not usually exit before it has killed all the chickens. Uncontrolled logging, pollution of oceans, hunting fauna to extinction, and a host of other obscenities against nature are the result of humans acting at the level of foxes. It is precisely when human beings do not lift themselves above the animal level that they do not treat nature with respect and dignity!