A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement

by Wesley J. Smith

Overview

Over the past thirty years, as Wesley J. Smith details in his latest book, the concept of animal rights has been seeping into the very bone marrow of Western culture. One reason for this development is that the term “animal rights” is so often used very loosely, to mean simply being nicer to animals. But although animal rights groups do sometimes focus their activism on promoting animal welfare, the larger movement they represent is actually advancing a radical belief system.

For some activists, the animal rights ideology amounts to a quasi religion, one whose central doctrine declares a moral equivalency between the value of animal lives and the value of human lives. Animal rights ideologues embrace their beliefs with a fervor that is remarkably intense and sustained, to the point that many dedicate their entire lives to “speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves.” Some believe their cause to be so righteous that it entitles them to cross the line from legitimate advocacy to vandalism and harassment, or even terrorism against medical researchers, the fur and food industries, and others they accuse of abusing animals.

All people who love animals and recognize their intrinsic worth can agree with Wesley J. Smith that human beings owe animals respect, kindness, and humane care. But Smith argues eloquently that our obligation to humanity matters more, and that granting “rights” to animals would inevitably diminish human dignity.
In making this case with reason and passion, A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy strikes a major blow against a radically antihuman dogma.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594036149
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	07/17/2012
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	14.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Wesley J. Smith, a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute, is the author of the prizewinning Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, as well as Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World and Forced Exit: Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, and the New Duty to Die. He lives in Castro Valley, California, with his wife, the syndicated columnist Debra J. Saunders.

Table of Contents

Foreword Dean Koontz ix

Preface to the Paperback Edition xv

Introduction 1

Part 1 "For the Animals"

Chapter 1 Animal Advocacy Isn't What It Used to Be 11

Chapter 2 "All Animals Are Equal" 23

Chapter 3 Animals Are People Too 35

Chapter 4 Let It Begin with Apes 47

Chapter 5 Here Comes the Judge 61

Chapter 6 The Silver Spring Monkey Case 71

Chapter 7 The Death of a Thousand Cuts 81

Chapter 8 Proselytizing Children 101

Part 2 By Any Means Necessary

Chapter 9 Advocating Terror 115

Chapter 10 Tertiary Targeting 127

Chapter 11 Praising with Faint Condemnation 137

Chapter 12 Murder They Wrote? 149

Part 3 For the People

Chapter 13 Animal Rights vs. Medical Research 167

Chapter 14 Our System of Animal Research 183

Chapter 15 Ensuring the Proper Care of Lab Animals 195

Chapter 16 Meat Is Not Murder 203

Chapter 17 Fur, Hunting, and Zoos 219

Chapter 18 The Importance of Being Human 231

Supplement 251

Acknowledgments 265

Notes 269

Index 301

Editorial Reviews

“Like every antidemocratic ideology, this one [animal rights] is by definition antihuman, and like any antihuman ideology, it ultimately deteriorates into a nihilistic bitterness that is anti-life. . . . Wesley J. Smith knows too well that if the activists ever succeeded in their goals, if they established through culture or law that human beings have no intrinsic dignity greater than that of any animal, the world would not be a better place for either humankind or animals.”

Dean Koontz

From the Publisher