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Rat = Pig = Dog = Boy = Moral Nonsense

Original Article

My friend, Wesley J. Smith, has a new, long-anticipated book critiquing the animal rights movement. It takes its title from an infamous statement by Ingrid Newkirk, head of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy.

Animal rights, like environmentalism, sounds like something that every well-meaning person should support. But it’s not. In reality, the movement is deeply anti-human. And in just three decades, Smith argues, it has seeped into every nook and cranny of Western culture.

It is dangerous, not because it advocates kindness to animals, but because it denies any intrinsic moral difference between animals and human beings. It may seem counterintuitive to say so, but to ascribe rights to animals is to strike at a core truth on which Western civilization is built: human exceptionalism. The animal rights movement has deserved a detailed exposé for a long time, and Wesley Smith is just the person to deliver it.

Jay W. Richards

Senior Fellow at Discovery, Senior Research Fellow at Heritage Foundation
Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, and the Executive Editor of The Stream. Richards is author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and Indivisible (2012); The Human Advantage; Money, Greed, and God, winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise Award; The Hobbit Party with Jonathan Witt; and Eat, Fast, Feast. His most recent book, with Douglas Axe and William Briggs, is The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic Into a Catastrophe.