Animal Rights and Terri Schiavo

23 March 2005

            Watching the animal networks of television my wife has become addicted to convinced me of one thing. In many parts of the country animals have more rights and get more consideration than people do. This is not a good foreshadowing of things to come. Since I have been keeping and training animals most of my life I am not an animal hater but I do recognize that animals are not humans with a soul and eternal existence. But the attempt of PETA to put animals on an equal if not superior footing with people has made great strides across the land.

            Reading a hundred or more articles on Terri Schiavo, I came across one from Diane Alden that contained words from General Taylor, who took over the prosecution during the Nuremberg Trials. He quoted the 1933 law the Nazis passed for the protection of animals and concluded had the principles in the law been applied to humans the Nuremberg indictments would not have been filed.

            Were that law active for people in the United States today, we would not be seeing the controversy over the life of Terri Schiavo. I give you the words of Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen in a sermon he preached in Muenster in 1941: “It is a terrible theory (euthanasia) which wants to justify murdering the innocent, which practically legalizes the violent killing of disabled people who are no longer able to work, the crippled, the incurably sick, and decrepit ones…” He was right then and he is right now.

            Today there are more nongovernmental organizations concerned with animal rights than there are groups concerned with the rights of human beings. If you had a sick animal that could not function for its self, and decided to let it die by denying it food and water, and law enforcement found out about it, you would likely be arrested. In most states you cannot even deny your pets basic veterinary care without running afoul of some statute. Terri Schiavo has been experiencing the lack of proper medical care for some time and now she is being subjected to the former.

            What is happening today in Florida is establishing precedents, and like those who kept silent in Germany when they came for others, we might one day find ourselves alone when they come for us, because we are less valuable than our pets.