The animal rights movement has been growing within this country and across the globe for many years, but in the recent years it has begun to cross the border into ridiculous. Animal rights activists have begun pushing for more and more federal environmental control in order to protect wildlife, and now in Europe animal rights activists are pushing to get a court to grant human rights to a chimpanzee in order to allow the animal to be adopted.
The animal rights groups might have started in the right places, but they have lost sight of the goals they should be pursuing. They were created to protect wildlife and prevent abuses of the environment, but in the modern day they have moved into the range of extremism that makes their stances and claims ridiculous.
Environmentalists and animal rights activists are among those who can be blamed for many problems mankind faces today, including energy problems, skyrocketing gas prices, food shortages, and federal regulations that serve only to hurt citizens. Their doctrine preaches that animals are to be protected at all costs, and teachers who subscribe to this dogma pass on to their students claims that show the lives of these creatures are more important than the needs of mankind.
Animal rights protectors should not be abolished by any means. There are places when the people who protect the earth's creatures should step in to prevent abuse or torture of animals, such as when people abuse pets or threaten an endangered species. But animal rights activists have moved far beyond there bounds. They preach that drilling for oil will endanger species that, in fact, use oil pipelines as sources of heat. They teach that seawater cannot be used as an alternative energy source because it might harm the microscopic life forms which abound in the oceans. They want animals treated with more respect than people around the world.
This activist nature is dangerous and needs to be ended. Environmentalism and animal rights activism has a rightful place, but today's activists have far overstepped the bounds of being productive and their political power now exists to enforce their dogma on a population whose interests lie in directions opposed by environmentalists.
The most recent even which displays the abject lunacy of some animal rights activists can be found in Europe, where an activist recently took a case before a court to get a chimpanzee declared a person, the ultimate goal being the adoption of the animal. This is patently absurd. Granting the rights of humans to chimps would open the door for activists to grant rights of humans to many other species, and could lead to crippling international regulations on the habitats of these animals.
And what would be next? Granting a chimp these rights puts it at the same social level with children. Will chimps one day be expected to be granted the rights of citizens? Will animals be given the right to trial by jury, the right to vote?
We need to draw the line between environmental protection and the ridiculous. And we need to do it soon, before all that makes us human is lost forever.
