Yes, Honey, If You Don't Skin Animals, You Don't Care About People

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-12-01 06:47:00 UTC
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Remember the large anti-fur protest that was scheduled in Utah this past weekend? Go here. Click on the second photo to enlarge it.

Yes, that is a child. Her family took her to a protest in support of fur farming, to counter an anti-fur protest. Some adult in her life, most likely her mother or father, handed her a "People First!" sign to hold, with the pelt of a dead animal draped over the sign.

And that image of a mere child holding out that sign -- and proudly displaying the remains of a dead animal -- is such a sad sight. Even if you do arrogantly, narrow-mindedly hold to a "people first" philosophy, you aren't inherently required to support the exploitation and killing of animals, but that's not what this little girl is being taught.

This isn't an either-or matter: "kill the mink, or a person dies"; "eat the cow, or you won't survive." Where's the logic? How does supporting humans or even putting them first require supporting unnecessary brutality toward other animals, unless people astonishingly believe that all human desires, no matter how selfish, unnecessary, and even cruel, trump all interests of our fellow animals, no matter how basic?

This video report from a local FOX station doesn't paint any prettier of a picture. A teenage-looking boy who works on a fur farm tells the reporter, "We treat 'em better than our brothers and sisters ... We don't hurt 'em at all." And he probably believes what he's saying. It's probably been drilled into his head so many times since he was a toddler that he doesn't recognize how outrageous and illogical the statement is.

Such assertions are mind-boggling, whether they come from mink farmers or dairy farmers. As I've said before, unless the farmers also confine, mutilate, rape, kill, skin, and butcher their children and children, the comparison is a foolish one -- and a terrible one to be teaching the next generation to repeat.

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Photo by Flickr user dcJohn

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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