31. Think were humans put here to kill all other living creatures,opioion live and let live were have we went wrong,answer search not your brain but your soul.

Roger Waugh at 2:12PM on May 8th 2008

32. Think were humans put here to kill all other living creatures,opioion live and let live were have we went wrong,answer search not your brain but your soul.

Roger Waugh at 2:13PM on May 8th 2008

33. Think were humans put here to kill all other living creatures,opioion live and let live were have we went wrong,answer search not your brain but your soul.

Roger Waugh at 2:14PM on May 8th 2008

34. Like others have said before - I'll start taking PETA seriously when I see them confronting the Hell's Angels for wearing LEATHER!

I had one of them get in my girlfriend's face at a public event because she was wearing a fur coat. When he stuck his finger in my face I simply HAD to break it for him. But no animals were harmed in the process!

URKiddinMee at 3:04PM on May 8th 2008

35. I don't know about PETA confronting the Hell's Angels, but animal activists have encouraged people into S&M to use nonleather alternatives.

In 2006, Pete Cohn of Veggie Jews (in San Francisco) said tersely, "PETA's not Jewish." Animal rights, as a secular, moral philosophy, may appear to be at odds with traditional religious thinking (e.g., human "dominion" over other animals), but this is equally true of democracy and representative government in place of the divine right of kings, the separation of church and state, the abolition of human slavery, the emancipation of women, birth control, the sexual revolution, lesbian and gay rights, and perhaps every kind of social progress since the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment.

Some of the greatest figures in human history have been in favor of ethical vegetarianism and animal rights. These include: Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Alice Walker, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Browning, Percy Shelley, Voltaire, Thomas Hardy, Rachel Carson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pythagoras, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Schweitzer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gertrude Stein, Frederick Douglass, Francis Bacon, William Wordsworth, the Buddha, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau.

Vasu Murti at 3:43PM on May 8th 2008

36. Hey PETA, I'm going to go shoot a couple cats in the back yard, anyone want to help?

larrye43 at 6:46PM on May 8th 2008

37. Eight Belles Rest In Peace. You were a magnificent girl and you ran a beautiful race. The jockey did no wrong.

Groovy at 7:07PM on May 8th 2008

38. There's a word for the argument in your last post, Vasu Murti: "Fallacy."

Specifically, the Appeal to Authority. "Because these wonderful people believed this," you say, "you should believe it, too."

Your laundry list means nothing, really. Find me a nutritionist there. Oh, there's not one? Hmmmm ... flawed reasoning, anyone?

Now, I'm not one for the needless exploitation of animals. I believe meat animals should be raised and dispatched humanely and used in their entirety (and I have no problems with watching the dispatching. My aunt and uncle raised cattle, and I was present for several butcherings.)

I also have no quarrel with hunting and fishing for food. I've done both and plan to continue doing both.

Want to be vegetarian or vegan? Fine. Just don't try to convert me -- or if you do try, please keep the fallacies out of your argument.

Steve at 7:54PM on May 8th 2008

39. "The reasons for legal intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves--the animals."
---John Stuart Mill

A rational case exists for the rights of preborn humans. The case for animal rights is stronger and more readily apparent. Animals are highly complex creatures, possessing a brain, a central nervous system and a sophisticated mental life. Animals actually suffer at the hands of their human tormentors and exhibit such "human" behaviors and feelings as fear and physical pain, defense of their children, pair bonding, group/tribal loyalty, grief at the loss of loved ones, joy, jealousy, competition, territoriality, and cooperation.

Dr. Tom Regan, the foremost intellectual leader of the animal rights movement and author of The Case for Animal Rights, notes that animals "have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; and emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference and welfare interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independent of their utility for others and logically independent of their being the object of anyone else's interests."

Peter Singer writes in Animal Liberation:

The principle of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans; it is a prescription of how we should treat humans. Thomas Jefferson saw this point. He wrote in a letter to the author of a book the notable intellectual achievements of Negroes in order to refute the then common view that they had limited intellectual capacities:

"...whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the property or person of others."
Similarly when in the 1850s the call for women's rights was raised in the United States a remarkable black feminist named Sojourner Truth made the same point in more robust terms at a feminist convention.

" ...they talk about this thing in the head; what do they call it? ('Intellect,' whispered someone nearby.) That's it. What's that got to do with women's rights or Negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?"

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose? In a forward-looking passage written at a time when black slaves had been freed by the French but in the British dominions were still being treated in the way we now treat animals, Jeremy Bentham wrote:

"The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.

"The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor.

"It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate.

"What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"

The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in a meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is.

Vasu Murti at 8:21PM on May 8th 2008

40. Like any self-important organization , they go too far and drive people away . Ask a Baptist or a Catholic how attendance is holding up .

Bollweevil at 9:25PM on May 8th 2008

41. May all beings, human and non-human, be free from suffering and the causes of suffering...may they all have happiness and the causes of happiness. Why kill those you don't have to kill? Why harm those you don't have to harm?

Tashi at 11:02PM on May 8th 2008

42. Sorry, Vasu ... yet more impressive-sounding text, but meaningless in the end.

Animals and people may exhibit similar behaviors from time to time, but animals aren't people. Sorry, but they're not. You can't apply human standards of reasoning, emotion, ethics, etc., to animals.

You can try, though. Lock yourself in a cage with a salad and a hungry tiger. Then trust the tiger not to "exploit" you, but to make the rational "human" choice.

Or maybe that's not in the tiger's belief system ...

Steve at 11:04PM on May 8th 2008

43. I can understand PETA's anger toward Michael Vick treatment of dogs but asking for the suspension of jockey Gabriel Saez is asinine. PETA has gone wacko for as long as I have known them. Their motto should be "We treat people like the way we want them to think."

George B Vieto at 11:29PM on May 8th 2008

44. The frugivores (gorillas, chimpanzees and other primates) have intestinal tracts twelve times the length of the body, clawless hands and alkaline urine and saliva. Their diet is mostly vegetarian, occasionally supplemented with carrion, insects, etc.

Flesh-eating animals lap water with their tongue, whereas vegetarian animals imbibe liquids by a suction process. Humans are classified as primates and are thus frugivores possessing a set of completely herbivorous teeth. Proponents of the theory that humans should be classified as omnivores note that human beings do, in fact, possess a modified form of canine teeth. However, these so-called "canine teeth" are much more prominent in animals that traditionally never eat flesh, such as apes, camels, and the male musk deer.

It must also be noted that the shape, length and hardness of these so-called "canine teeth" can hardly be compared to those of true carnivorous animals. A principle factor in determining the hardness of teeth is the phosphate of magnesia content. Human teeth usually contain 1.5 percent phosphate of magnesia, whereas the teeth of carnivores are composed of nearly 5 percent phosphate of magnesia. It is for this reason they are able to break through the bones of their prey, and reach the nutritious marrow.

Zoologist Desmond Morris makes a case for vegetarianism in his 1967 book, The Naked Ape: "It could be argued that, since our primate ancestors had to make do without a major meat component in their diets we should be able to do the same. We were driven to become flesh eaters only by environmental circumstances, and now that we have the environment under control, with elaborately cultivated crops at our disposal, we might be expected to return to our ancient feeding patterns."

In The Human Story, edited by Marie-Louise Makris (1985), we read: "...recent studies of their teeth reveal that the Australopithecines did not eat meat as a regular part of their diet, and were mainly peaceful vegetarians, rather like chimps or gorillas. The popular image of the murderous ape is now as extinct as the Australopithecines themselves."

Dr. Gordon Latto notes that carnivorous and omnivorous animals can only move their jaws up and down, and that omnivores "have a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth, a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth--showing that they were destined to deal both with flesh foods from the animal kingdom and foods from the vegetable kingdom...

"Carnivorous mammals and omnivorous mammals cannot perspire except at the extremity of the limbs and the tip of the nose; man perspires all over the body. Finally, our instincts; the carnivorous mammal (which first of all has claws and canine teeth) is capable of tearing flesh asunder, whereas man only partakes of flesh foods after they have been camouflaged by cooking and by condiments.

"Man instinctively is not carnivorous," explains Dr. Latto. "...he takes the flesh food after somebody else has killed it, and after it has been cooked and camouflaged with certain condiments. Whereas to pick an apple off a tree or eat some grain or a carrot is a natural thing to do; people enjoy doing it; they don't feel disturbed by it. But to see these animals being slaughtered does affect people; it offends them. Even the toughest of people are affected by the sights in the slaughterhouse.

"I remember taking some medical students into a slaughterhouse. They were about as hardened people as you could meet. After seeing the animals slaughtered that day in the slaughterhouse, not one of them could eat the meat that evening."

Author R.H. Weldon writes in No Animal Food:

"The gorge of a cat, for instance, wil rise at the smell of a mouse or a piece of raw flesh, but not at the aroma of fruit. If a man can take delight in pouncing upon a bird, tear its still livng body apart with his teeth, sucking the warm blood, one might infer that Nature had provided him with a carnivorous instinct, but the very thought of doing such a thing makes him shudder. On the other hand, a bunch of luscious grapes makes his mouth water, and even in the absence of hunger, he will eat fruit to gratify taste."

As far back as 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that: "A vegetarian diet can prevent 97% of our coronary occlusions." More recently, Wiiliam S. Collens and Gerald B. Dobkens concluded: "Examination of the dental structure of modern man reveals that he possesses all the features of a strictly herbivorous animal. While designed to subsist on vegetarian foods, he has perverted his dietary habits to accept food of the carnivore. It is postulated that man cannot handle carnivorous foods like the carnivore. Herein may lie the bais for the high incidence of arteriosclerotic disease."

Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), responds to the argument that killing animals for food is natural:

"The main problem with this argument is that it does not justify the practice of meat-eating or animal husbandry as we know it today; it justifies hunting. The distinction between hunting and animal husbandry probably seems rather fine to the man in the street, or even to your typical rule-utilitarian moral philosopher. The distinction, however, is obvious to an ecologist. If one defends killing on the grounds that it occurs in nature, then one is defending the practice as it occurs in nature.

"When one species of animal preys on another in nature, it only preys on a very small proportion of the total species population. Obviously, the predator species relies on its prey for its continued survival. Therefore, to wipe the prey species out through overhunting would be fatal. In practice, members of such predator species rely on such strategies as territoriality to restrict overhunting and to insure the continued existence of its food supply.

"Moreover, only the weakest members of the prey species are the predator's victims: the feeble, the sick, the lame, or the young accidentally separated from the fold. The life of the typical zebra is usually placid, even in lion country; this kind of violence is the exception in nature, not the rule.

"As it exists in the wild, hunting is the preying upon isolated members of an animal herd. Animal husbandry is the nearly complete annihilation of an animal herd. In nature, this kind of slaughter does not exist. The philosopher is free to argue that there is no moral difference between hunting and slaughter, but he cannot invoke nature as a defense of this idea.

"Why are hunters, not butchers, most frequently taken to task by the larger community for their killing of animals? Hunters usually react to such criticism by replying that if hunting is wrong, then meat-hunting must be wrong as well. The hunter is certainly right on one point--the larger community is hypocritical to object to hunting when it consumes the flesh of domesticated animals. If any form of meat-eating is justified, it would be meat from a hunted animal."

Finally, even if humans really are omnivores as some claim (and this claim is subject to dispute: I would refer these people to the website of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, www.pcrm.org , which advocates a vegan diet, an end to vivisection, etc., for the latest on whether humans are frugivorous or omnivorous), my friend Mareechi Duvvuuri (another Hindu-American!) who once studied sports medicine, pointed out that the diet of natural omnivores is mostly (85 percent) plant food.

Vasu Murti at 11:47PM on May 8th 2008

45. During my childhood, a good percentage of the meat our family consumed was gained by hunting. My Father & Grandfather were experienced woodsmen / hunters, and we had more rabbit, squirrel & pheasent, than beef or pork. Almost all the fish we ate were caught ourselves - with the exception (of course) of (canned)tuna.
The guiding principle was that meat not be wasted! Any fish caught were cleaned & eaten - those "sportsmen" who came home with stringers of fish they didn't want to clean, or deer they wouldn't cook were scorned!
As for animal "suffering", The predator /hunter(or the slaughterhouse - for that matter) gives an animal a far more merciful, quick & painless death than "natural causes"!

Robert e. Quillen at 1:11AM on May 9th 2008