As mentioned here earlier, the voters of Beverly Hills, CA were to decide the fate of Proposition A, a measure requiring the city's furriers to tag all garments informing customers how the animals that provided the pelts died.

On Tuesday, 11 May, the proposition was soundly defeated, as it should have been.

Notwithstanding the waste of public funds to even consider such a measure, what if it would have passed? The furs would still exist, albeit with some silly tag. So what? Exactly what would have been accomplished by the animal rights activists? The answer, of course, is nothing except some publicity.

But let's take a look at this whole animal rights concept...

From Black's Law Dictionary: "Rights" are defined generally as "powers of free action." The primal rights pertaining to men are enjoyed by human begins purely as such, being grounded in personality, and existing antecedently to their recognition by positive law. Less abstractly--a "right" is well defined as "a capacity residing in one man of controlling, with the assent and assistance of the state, the actions of others."

Straightaway, the construct of animal rights runs into some problems. Assuming that someone can read their minds, and know all of their history, where are primal animal rights defined? What natural law applies to animals other than the law of the jungle?

Ironically, it took domestication of animals by man to create the notion that we should care for them, and provide some measure of comfort to them. Absent our interaction with animals, there would be no standards of humane treatment, and no veterinary science.

This is not to argue that animals have no emotions nor feel pain. Surely they do. But how does this prove that we shouldn't produce fur?

If we were to eliminate all animal products, and somehow rely only on plants, why is that any less exploitive of a lower species?

The simple, brutal fact is that for us to live, something else must die. There are no exceptions to this. That some of us are more comfortable killing plants than animals is mere quibbling.

Should we be good stewards of the environment and not waste resources? Of course, but this gets into very sticky territory. The man eating steak could survive on soy protein. The driver of a Rolls-Royce could use a bicycle. But by what authority can we force him to do so? Some sort of pagan/pantheistic world view that can't stand a moment's scrutiny?

Better that these animal rights activists should consider the big picture. Given its abuses, who would argue that medical research on animals has not benefitted man? Eliminate all "objectionable" products and what would happen to the environment of those unemployed?

Unfortunately, logic and right reason were never requirements for being an activist.

Properly understood, Ecology is much more a question of balancing all forces in nature--including man, than what preferences or pet theory is currently in style.