If you value your life…shut upre: “Animals don’t deserve rights” (March 17)After reading the piece entitled “Animals don’t deserve rights,” I felt nothing but rage and astonishment at the fact that it was written by people who have made it this far in life. Then I ran into a friend who helped me regain my composure. “I just can’t believe it took TWO people to write the dumbest article I have ever read,” was his reaction. They said, “Humans are endowed with the faculty of reason, which is necessary to establish a set of morals.” I guess they prove their own point, demonstrating both an inability to reason and the absence of a conscience. I wonder if they think two-year-olds should also be exploited, beaten, tortured, and left to sleep and eat in their own excrement. Or, that if we don’t speak the same language as another human, we should ignore their rights because they’re probably less evolved than us—who were able to put the issue of animal rights to rest in one little page.I suppose when your best model for a “relevant” human being is Bill Gates, you’re bound to be a little confused about what is really important. It doesn’t take a vegetarian or a social activist to have a heart. It’s a package deal we all get, even the guys who wrote that article. One day even they will understand that needless suffering is just that—no “type” of victim needs to follow for it to count. I just wish the struggle would end sooner.Eliza RadoviciReason includes compassionre: “Animals don’t deserve rights” The trash spewed by Zev Barnett and Ameer Taha’s article is consistent with the feeblemindedness shown by those responsible for ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, apartheid, terrorism, white-supremacist groups, the oppression of women, and all other kinds of injustice.Here we have two twits with nothing better to do than to ignore the compassion that exists in some humans. It is as if they had never heard of it! Why, were one to follow their logic, mentally challenged human beings would not make it past their early years of life, since “lacking the ability to reason, they cannot value life and therefore don’t have individual rights. This would justify killing them…” It is precisely because most humans can reason properly (unlike these two), that we confer rights upon and protect those who cannot protect themselves, humans and other animals alike.Let us not act unjustly by disregarding what they themselves call “the most fundamental right”: life, or by reasoning that beings lacking the ability to reason do not deserve rights. The notion of rights should not be construed as exclusionary, but universal. To restrict “rights” only to humans who can reason makes the word humanity meaningless. Since humanity depends on how well we treat our world, then conferring rights to animals will only benefit us all.Juan Lira’Nuff said…re: “Animals don’t deserve rights” Damn, you two are stupid! I hope you’re not U of T students.Dermot BrennanLost irony aborts messagere: “An immodest proposal” (March 3)I suppose a response is in order to clear up any confusion regarding my true purposes in writing “An immodest proposal.” It was encouraging to discover the response it evoked (March 6 & 11). However, I was shocked by how several chose to interpret my, once again, IMMODEST proposal. Well, guess what? I’m a pro-lifer. Surprise, surprise. It appears I was not sufficiently ironic to make my position clear. Alas, it appears satire is too sophisticated for some. A little more scrutiny on the part of some readers might have saved them some confusion.I think the article is sufficiently clear, if the reader is cautious enough not to read literally a text that advances infanticide. The word “immodest” is here supposed to denote a certain impropriety. I should think the destruction of year-old babies would constitute such a breach of etiquette. I may also have erred in assuming the majority of readers would catch the allusion I was making with the title. My “Immodest Proposal” is a rip-off of the great 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” I suggest those of you unfamiliar with Swift should take a look at this brilliant critique of 18th-century English policy. (Hint: he doesn’t really advocate eating Irish babies)Ben Hutchinson
