The article about the English botany professor accusing vegetarians of cruelty to plants was enjoyably ridiculous, but points to a more sober philosophical problem (Sept. 10). Even though his own particular statement is not completely sound, Malcolm Wilkins is correct in asserting that animal-rights activists must also be plant-rights activists if they are to be consistent with their position.
One wonders where this trend could end; how soon will it be before microbe-rights activists are campaigning against antibiotics or an AIDS vaccine? This would, of course, be ludicrous.
It appears that a central tenet of the animal-rights movement is the idea that animals have many of the same rights to life and liberty and such as humans do. There may be many good reasons to avoid cruelty to animals and to practice sound management of resources of all kinds, but any supposed ethical identity between human beings and other life is not one of them.
We are undeniably different from animals, let alone plants or microbes, yet we are taught that we are one and the same, merely another organic life form like all others. How many of our society’s problems are made worse by the meaninglessness given to human life by this view?
