Tibor Machan on Shark Attacks and Animal Rights

The recent story of the young Florida boy who almost died from a shark attack made national news, but philosopher Tibor Machan noticed something odd about those news reports — where the animal rights activists?

Machan quotes from an MSNBC story describing how the shark tore off the boy’s arm. The boy’s uncle then wrestled the shark to shore where Ranger Jared Klein shot the animal four times and a volunteer firefighter used a clamp to retrieve the arm so doctors could attempt to reattach it. Machan writes,

Few among us would have hesitated at this choice: boy’s arm versus life of shark. Of course the boy’s arm is more important, and so the shark had to go.

Yet, there are millions of animal-rights advocates around the world, many of them Hollywood celebrities with easy access to talk shows and news reporters, who have remained completely silent about their professed view — namely, that human beings are not more important than non-human animals.

If, in fact, you accept the general animal rights view that granting special status to individuals based on their membership in a certain species (specifically homo sapiens) is immoral, it is hard to see how you could justify the “murder” of the shark. I’m surprised PETA hasn’t rushed out a special billboard denouncing those who would callously kill sharks in order to save members of their own species.

The weird thing is this: animal rights activists who did come out in favor of the shark in this case would certainly be roundly denounced. Yet when those same activists campaign against the very sort of life-saving animal research that led to the medical advances that enable people to survive such deadly attacks — not to mention the reattachment of severed limbs — they rarely face any sort of sustained condemnation. In fact, if anything, the media will often go out of its way to express a general uneasiness with animal research.

Source:

Shark versus Boy. Tibor R. Machan, The Mises Institute, July 11, 2001.

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