Animal Rights and the Focus of Activism

I must commend the young man featured in your Life section on May 19. I respect what he believes and is trying to do. However, this whole issue of animal rights, which is featured more and more often in The Times, has me concerned.

I too am an animal lover, and have owned and loved many pets through the years--every one of them a “rescue” case--rescued from people who loved their animals too much to have them neutered. Like young Antonio Aguilar, I also looked into this movement when it first got my attention; unlike this young man, I have some years behind me, and I have some doubts and some questions. First, I disagree heartily with the statements, as repeated by Aguilar, that animals have the same rights as people--or emotions either, for that matter. A rat is not a boy, although People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) literature says there is no difference.

If animals are to live unexploited and free, and cannot be killed for any purpose, then I hope all these people love rats as much as they profess; they will soon be knee-deep in them. And, as much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, animals in their own habitat eat each other. They eat their young too. The latest literature I got from PETA said that we are now to avoid silk and wool too (I think shearing the sheep makes them cold, or something). I guess that leaves polyester? Who is out there to speak for the environment which is being destroyed by the production of all of these oil-based synthetics? And isn’t oil “endangered” too?

If you think about it, animal “families” are being evicted from their homelands by homes and roads being built. Let’s stop building? And since all we can eat is vegetables, how are we going to protect the crop from the birds, and rats and squirrels--and all of the other vegetarians in our midst? I’d say share, but they multiply faster than we do, and I don’t think these families know about birth control.

Yes, I own and wear and enjoy fur. I get cold. I am comfortable that my furs come from well-managed and maintained farms or from well-controlled and necessary trapping. I read. I eat meat too--much as I think cows are cute. And I would unhesitatingly sacrifice all five of my well-loved pets in an instant to protect a child--any child. Please, spare us from any more of these animal “rights” fund-raisers and rabble-rousers. I have a right to wear and to believe what I choose without fear of being harassed.

Hooray for young people with a social conscience! Wouldn’t it be nice if that social conscience was directed toward abused children or neglected old people?

T. ROSE

El Toro