???In recent weeks, Americans have been presented with two opposing examples of the stickiness of animal rights featuring two of the most beloved farm animals in the world: horses and pigs.
???Across the country, horses are being abandoned as the economy falters and plummets. For those farmers and ranchers for whom a horse is not just an animal, but a piece of farm equipment as well, the cost of care is simply too great. The result being, the horses starve because their owners cannot feed them.
???So, people are forced to confront a hard issue: at what point does it become more humane to kill an animal than to let it live? State troopers put animals that have been hit by cars out of their misery, and no one makes a fuss. Is it a bad thing to slaughter a horse that would otherwise starve to death?
???On the other side of things, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has come under fire from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the American Humane Society for testing body armor on live pigs.
???These animals were strapped into Humvees that were blown up in simulated roadside bombings. This was done to discover whether advanced body armor focused concussive blasts away from the torso towards the head and brain.
???Organizations like PETA and the Humane Society have an oddly myopic view of the world. On these issues they do not disappoint, advocating an absence of in-country slaughterhouses for the horses and a moratorium on the use of live animals in DARPA research.
???Horses as we know them would not exist without humanity. Simply put, it's more inhumane to allow them to starve than it is to kill them quickly. The money to care for the abandoned animals, just shy of $100,000 worth were sold for slaughter last year according to the Humane Society, simply is not there.
???It's sad, but real. So is the situation with DARPA. The experiments were designed to ward against brain damage; how are we supposed to simulate something like that? Pig brains are the closest animal equivalent to our own. The only alternative is using live humans as test subjects.
???What PETA and the Humane Society are attempting is to deny reality in favor of some sad foolish fantasy world. Bad things happen, and sometimes life is cruel and the only viable options still hurt. In the end, though, we are the dominant species on this planet and this is the responsibility that comes with the assertion of dominion.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
