Hey PETA Members, Quit Wasting Your Lives

"No one would ever put a hook through a dog's or cat's mouth," said Bruce Friedrich, PETA's director of vegan outreach. "Once people start to understand that fish, although they come in different packaging, are just as intelligent, they'll stop eating them." (Yahoo! News)

They'll stop eating fish? I guess since PETA has been such a wild success in the past, and nobody eats chicken or beef anymore, it's only logical to turn their focus to fish.

This seems as good a place as any for my environmental diatribe. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how groups like PETA and other "environmental" fringe-radicals can reject the human place in the biosphere so absolutely. Opinions like these; that the planet is a big china shop and people should tip-toe around and for-God's-sake not touch anything, are in the same ballpark as the opinions that everything out there is ours for the taking -- consequences be damned. Both positions are a complete abdication of responsibility and judgement.

Conservation and exploitation are competing values -- values which can both be taken to their arrogant, ridiculous extremes, as exemplified by PETA. However, both of these values are human values. There is no intrinsic value in biodiversity or even in life itself.

I'm tired of environmentalism disguising itself as altruism. I am an environmentalist because I know that my life is better off with diverse ecosystems that function to provide me with many services including food, clean water, medicines, paper and yes, aesthetically pleasing landscapes. The notion that fuzzy animals should be protected just because they're fuzzy animals is, to me, peculiar. What utter arrogance it is to set humans apart as an exception! I intend to extract and use things from the environment. If I extract too much, I'll die. If I extract too little, that will kill me also. If I fail at it, maybe some other life-form will get it right. It really doesn't matter in the long run.

As for Bruce Friedrich's intelligent fish: if fish are so goddamned intelligent then why can the average 8 year-old catch one without assistance?

"Fish are so misunderstood because they're so far removed from our daily lives," said Karin Robertson, 24, the Empathy Project manager and daughter of an Indiana fisheries biologist. "They're such interesting, fascinating individuals, yet they're so incredibly abused."

This statement is ridiculous on its face. Fish are much less removed from our dinner tables than cows or chickens. Of the many, many animals that I have eaten, fish are one of the few that I've caught, killed and eaten on my own. Mr. Friedrich? Closing thoughts?

Friedrich acknowledges the difficulty of changing long-held customs, but thinks his project is worthwhile. "We'd rather go too far than not far enough," he said.

Spoken like a truly poor strategist.