ANIMAL WELFARE vs. ANIMAL RIGHTS ...  by Charley Reese       

      JANUARY 9 -- The difference between animal welfare organizations and animal rights organizations is huge and critically important. The animal welfare organizations are based on the premise that there is an important difference between human beings and animals. It is this difference -- cognitive ability to make intellectual and moral decisions -- which imposes on humans the moral obligation to treat animals in a kind and humane fashion.

      MORALITY, ETHICS, rights and responsibilities are all human concepts and are all necessarily predicated on the ability to make choices among alternatives. If a creature lacks the capacity to make a choice, then those concepts cannot apply. A rational person would say it would be absurd to accuse a lion that killed a zebra of immoral behavior. When a lion's body sends hunger signals to its primitive brain, it has no choice but to hunt and kill whatever it can find to eat. It has no choice about being a carnivore..

      Human civilization rests on this cognitive ability we call reason. The human, lacking talons or great strength, survives by using reason. Religion itself requires reason because it would be absurd for God to hold accountable creatures who had no ability to understand right and wrong and to make choices. The animal rights movement, however, is based on the premise that there is no distinction or difference between humans and other animals. "I don't believe human beings have the 'right to life.' That's a supremacist perversion. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy," says Ingrid Newkirk, national director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in an article.

      Newkirk was also quoted in the Washington Post (Nov. 13, 1983) as saying, "Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses." Newkirk's organization, of course, is only one of dozens of animal rights groups, but they all hold this basic premise: There is no distinction between the value of humans and the value of animals. This premise is, in my opinion, an irrational position on its face because even the ability to make such a determination rests on the uniquely human traits of cognitive capacity to make evaluations and choices.

      BUT WHAT HAPPENS when you obliterate the differences between humans and animals is that you also obliterate such concepts as reason, morality, human rights and civilization, not to mention religion. Reason, morality, religion and concepts such as human rights are the only barriers against barbarism. The comparison between a livestock operation and the Nazi death camps is interesting.

      Newkirk is probably unaware of it, and I'm not accusing her condoning the Holocaust, but Nazi officials shared the basic premise of the animal rights movement. This link between Nazi irrationality and the irrationality of the animal rights movement is noted in a book I heartily recommend, Animal Scam by Kathleen Marquardt, with Herbert M. Levine and Mark LaRochelle. The publisher is Regnery Gateway. (If you can't find it at your bookstore, you can order it from Putting People First, P.O. Box 170 Helena, MT 59624-1707.)

      Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. Hermann Goering, another top Nazi leader, was head of the German Humane Society. The Nazis made a big deal out of banning the use of animals in medical experiments, which they used as an excuse to round up Jewish doctors and scientists. They used humans instead. SS CHIEF HEINRICH Himmel explained the roundup of people this way: "We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude toward animals, will also assume a decent attitude toward the human animals." We know what horrors that produced. Don't surrender your humanity.

CHARLEY REESE Copyright 1996 by King Features Syndicate. Inc. (Published Conservative Chronicle Jan. 24, 1996)