So here's the deal...
Animal rights activism is a blight and must be purged.
Not too long ago, California passed Proposition 2, guaranteeing California cattle more leg room, while simultaneously passing Proposition 8, guaranteeing gays a ticket to Second-Class-Citizensville, (ironically a first class ticket) so it seems evident that people really give a hell of a big fuck about cows and chickens. Therefore, it seems apt that I comment on the animal rights movement.
Alot of people make a rather big hullabaloo (its a word, ask your parents to ask their parents) about the conditions animals face in factory farming, the euthanasia of stray animals, and use of animals and animal products in general. Petitions are signed, signs are made, pickets are lined, rallies are rallied, obscenity is bandied, blood is drenched, rabble is roused, hub is bubbed. It's a really big deal to a lot of people. Big enough to form massive lobbying organizations i.e. PETA and devote sizeable chunks of their personal time and finances to advance the rights and privileges of our fauna friends. Celebrity endorsements and frequent protests make the issue one of the most visible in our current political spectrum. To America, Animal Rights are Important.
Now, if you would, indulge me in a little thought experiment.
Imagine you are a 12 year old girl named Jette living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You live in a modest hut with your mother and father and your big brother. Your parents spend most of their day subsistence farming, an unpleasant, but not uncommon existence, and one that you family has engaged in for generations, and in all likelihood, you will live out that life as well. Neither you nor your brother have ever been to school nor do you know how to read or write. Your only real contact with the outside world is a white missionary who comes to your village occasionally, offering food and medicine in exchange for supplicancy to his god. On the whole, however, your life is not a terrible one. You love your family and they love you.
One day, you hear a monster coming down the road. Two rusted out pickup trucks blasting 80s metal come tearing up to your village, a Soviet surplus PK machine gun belching death into the huts. Friends, people you've known your entire life are ripped apart before your eyes. Out of the trucks pour soldiers, camo and shemaghs, AK47s firing into the crowds, into the air, everywhere. Some of them boys, the same age as your brother. Your father puts up a fight and catches a rifle but in the face, dazing him and knocking him down. Soldier boys pin him down and take his hands and eyes with a machete. They bind your brother and put him and other boys in the truck to be brought back to camp, where Brown-Brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder will be forced into him and he will be brainwashed into the next class of boy soldiers. The women, you and the girls included are all herded into a circle. Those too young to rape are hacked to death. Those who aren't are. Several men force themselves on you, you first and last sexual experience being at gunpoint. Once the men have had their fill they proceed to machete rape you, your mother, and whoever is left alive, the dirty blade entering your vagina, cutting your insides to ribbons. Right before you fade into oblivion, the bossman hops down from his truck carrying a portable television. Your last vision in this world is of a legion of enraged white kids in San Fransisco dressed in chicken costumes covered in fake blood yelling at customers outside of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The point of this story is this: In that last agonizing moment, would you give one good God damn about how much space some chickens in America had? And what would you think of the protesters? Would you support their cause? Or would you wonder where your outrage was? Where are your demonstrations and rallies? Where are your ballot initiatives?
The thing about this story is that, while Jette and her village aren't real, there are real people that this and worse are happening to. It isn't a rarity. Hell it isn't even uncommon. And it isn't an unknown phenomenon either. With movies like Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond, and Last King of Scotland receiving such high attention and praise its almost impossible not to know that this is going on in the world. But support for animal rights activism far outweighs support for war crimes and genocides. How can this be?
In order to remedy this seeming cognitive dissonance, the animal rights activist must accept the following conclusion. Suppose you and your dog live in an apartment. You love your dog. You go to the park and play fetch for hours with him. Every night he sleeps diligently at the foot of your bed. And when you're feeling sad, you can always count on him nuzzle himself next to you and offer comfort. One night, tragedy strikes and on your way home from work, your apartment complex catches fire. You arrive at the scene before the fire department and realize you have only moments to act. Trapped inside are your dog and the neighbor's kid. And you don't even like that fucking kid. He's noisy, and smells, and leave piles of flaming dog shit at your doorstep. Hell he probably started the fire, the little shit. In the time before the building collapses you are confident that you have the time and ability to save one and only one victim. So the dilemma is this, who do you save: the dog or the boy?
If you answered anything other than the boy, then you are a Terrible Fucking Person. It doesn't matter how much you love that damned dog, that is a human being who is going to die unless you help. In order to justify saving the dog you have to value dogs and people on the same level which is, if you haven't guessed already, absolutely and irrevocably crazy pants. But an animal rights activist has to accept the minimally equal, if not superior value of animals to humans because Spoilers: this is a metaphor. People are dying. If not from war then from any number of other sources: disease, famine, bicycle accidents, etc. And the activist knows about this. So in order to make signs, dress up, stand outside of fast food restaurants, and yell at passersby, the animal rights activist must first take a moment to quietly say to themselves, "I know that people are suffering and dying out there, and that my efforts could be used to better their lives, if not save them outright. But Fuck 'Em, I've got a cow to save."
The thing is that these are not all bad people. In fact some of them are fundamentally good people that just want to leave the world better than when they found it. They just haven't stopped to think about what they're doing. The real abject fuckwads are the people at the top like Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA, because what they are doing is taking what is arguably the rarest and most precious resource in the world, human charity and goodwill, and embezzling it. They are taking public attention away from Jette and war victims and AIDS and Malaria and Cancer and saying "Everyone look at me and my cats!"
So the next time someone comes to you and hands you "literature" on how you can Save the fucking Whales, remember this simple mantra; "Eat a Chicken, Save a Life."
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