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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (5270)	2/9/2001 1:23:53 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Would you rather drink poison or concord grapejuice. Mmmmmooooo! Given the choice and the circumstances, my answer is highly subjective and determined by a variety of parameters. My preference to whose rights is really irrelevant to the discussion of rights. My preference is my own notion of rights. Your notion OUGHT to be more like my notion if you are Jewish, black, Gypsy or Polish. However, your notion of "rights" as a meat-eater are different than mine. It always amazes me that people can scoff at animal rights activists. Many of these same people would wince if someone suggested that the Nazi "final solution" was moral. Rights are largely in the eye of the beholder. Does your cow have a right to become steak? Does my celery have a right to join with me by being eaten? I support limited animal rights because I'm humane and empathetic. I also know that some animal testing is probably necessary. I was at a conference where they were discussing the optical diagnosis of burns using spectrometry. The subjects? Piggies - anesthetized and burned with a calibrated brass rod. While I found the research interesting, I also found it disturbing that people were intentionally giving pigs 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree burns on their backs. I looked around and no one else seemed disturbed or outraged, but maybe they shared my repulsion but held it inside. This is important research because it benefits humanity, but clearly there is a price to be paid. That price is paid by creatures that really have no say. I imagine an advanced society thinking that humans represent a reasonably good animal model for their experimentation. How would I feel and what would my rights be? Rights are like Platonic forms. They exist as notions, but not as real objects in the sense that people use the word "real". They have no substance. They amount to preferences held by groups of people about other people and things.