My Frustrating Appearance on BBC World Service: "World Have Your Say"

The show is World Have Your Say. The topic was animal rights. The guests, in addition to me, were a member of the Dutch Animal Rights Party, a Brit vegan, someone defending European farming practices, and a German man whose perspective I never quite got.

The show was something of a frustrating experience. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t really get to say very much because they had so many guests and permitted the Dutch Animal Rights Party representative to pretty much filibuster. But the discussion never left the periphery, and thus, the crucial issue in this debate was never addressed: The distinction between animal rights and animal welfare. Nor, were we able to discuss the tremendous human harm that would follow from the animal rights agenda prevailing.

I was planning to read this quote from PETA’s infamous Holocaust on Your Plate Campaign to illustrate what is so wrong and misanthropic about animal rights/liberation. I think it is important because it blows past the smoke and mirrors game they often play when on the radio, pretending to be for animal welfare, and gets right the crux of what is so poisonous about animal liberation ideology:

“Like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in cramped, filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the modern equivalent of the lampshades made from skins of the people killed in death camps.”

So, to the liberationist, any of the readers here at Secondhand Smoke who wear leather shoes are akin to the SS Camp Guards. People who think this way have no right to preach morality to anyone.