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September 03, 2004
Moral relevance, thy name is PETA
Posted by McQ
From the Waterbury Republican American (Waterbury CT - no link) comes the following story:
Janet Tomlinson's name may not ring many bells. Miss Tomlinson, 61, has been an animal-rights rebel in Great Britain for more than 20 years. The Times of London reports she is "a regular protestor" at a guinea-pig farm that supplies animals used in medical research as well as at companies that test products on animals.
In May, she was arrested at a protest outside a police station. After a magistrate dismissed an assault charge against her, she raged, "I will not stop fighting this unashamedly biased police force until they are handing me those poor guineas from those stinking sheds!" Indeed, she repeatedly has pledged to die for her cause.
However, she recently was stricken with breast cancer and must take time off from her protests for treatment. Her prognosis for survival is better than ever. Thanks to advances in detection and treatment, the five-year breast-cancer survival rate in Britain is 77 percent, a 5 percent improvement over a decade ago, according to government statistics. The rate would be much better, said the Royal College of Radiographers, if not for the nation's system of socialized medicine, which forces women to wait at least five weeks to begin radiation treatment after cancer surgery. In the United States, the five-year survival rate is 89 percent.
What makes Miss Tomlinson's courageous fight so noteworthy is the drugs she is taking to combat her cancer were developed by companies that first tested them on guinea pigs and other laboratory animals. But rank hypocrisy is nothing new in the animal-rights movement. Mary Beth Sweetland, senior vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is a diabetic who injects herself daily with insulin developed through animal testing.
Just as Ms. Sweetland doesn't believe that is hypocritical -- "I need my life to fight for the rights of animals" -- Miss Tomlinson likewise justified her drug therapy with, "I can do more good for animals staying alive than dying. ... I am only taking the course of action I am because there is no alternative."
"It's disgusting that I don't have a choice," she complained. If this was the world according to Ms. Tomlinson, the drugs she is taking would never have been developed. Yet she lives on to fight the animal-rights fight another day.
And if she's really lucky, she will succeed in depriving future cancer victims of potentially life-saving drugs and leaving them with no alternative but to die.
Uh Mary, there is an alternative, you just don't want to face it. You could live up to your principles that no animal's life is worth sacrificing for a human and die ... or you could hypocritically take the drug and live.
Now I'm not suggesting you die, Mary. I simply want you to understand that everytime you take that shot of insulin you are, in effect, saying that you, a human being, are more important than the animal who died so you could do so.
Or don't you understand that?
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