In a profile of the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals leader, Ingrid Newkirk formulates for the Daily Telegraph a great chain of vegetarian being. Telegraph reporter Warren writes,
How does she [Newkirk] square her vegan philosophy with the fact that animals feed on other animals (the crows that perch on the balcony outside Newkirk’s office occasionally bring PETA staff “presents” of dead baby birds). “some do. The ones that we eat don’t,” she snaps. “We eat the vegetarians. We pick on the most innocent, innocuous, benign and harmless animals.” So is there a hierarchy of the innocents, with herbivores higher up the moral scale than carnivores?
Apparently so. But the article gets even more interesting when Warren dares to wonder aloud about whether or not oysters have rights,
And what about oysters? Do they suffer distress in their final moments of bivalve life? “I give them the benefit of the doubt. People don’t need to eat them.”
But Ingrid has had enough. “Stop asking these nutty questions,” she says. “Come on, we have to have substance.”
Ingrid Newkirk complaining about nutty questions about animals. That’s a bit like the squid calling the oyster a mollusk.
Source:
The woman who makes fur fly. Marcus Warren, The Daily Telegraph (London), May 20, 2003.