How You Can Support Animal Rights

1. Abolish all animal research - I don't have any problem with this one. I saw a film about a Research Lab Chimpanzee, where they graphically described all the experiments that had been conducted on him―and I thought, whoa, you do that to a human being and you end up at the Nuremberg Trials.

Anyone who thinks I'm being over-dramatic and insensitive here should take a look at their favorite pet and imagine such research being done on it. It's easy to say, go ahead, and shut your eyes to the torment and pain involved when you personally don't know the animal concerned.

Surely, with all the modern technological developments, we can come up with some better and humane ways to treat and extend our own lives?

2. Abolish all product testing, dissection, or demonstrations on animals - More or less same opinion.

3. Encourage 'vegetarianism' for ethical, ecological, and healing reasons - Encourage, yes, but don't force. Otherwise you're being unethical and unhealing.

4. Phase out all forms of 'animal agriculture', i.e., the growing of animals for food. I like cows and pigs and goats and sheep and rabbits and chickens and turkeys (I always wonder how anyone can have a thankful day after having just dispatched someone to their death) and geese and ducks and so on.

5. Abolish all pesticides and any form of predator control - To some extent, yes, as a gardener I try to use natural pesticides. I'm not sure what 'abolish any form of predator control' means - is it 'word overkill' or 'word malfunctioning'?

The Forest Department here just caught a leopard that had sneaked into the neighborhood - if the meaning here is doing nothing and letting that leopard have a go at me, nope, I'm not that altruistic - I highly recommend catching the predator, as they did, and releasing it back into the wild, again as they did.

6. Transfer the enforcement of animal welfare legislation from the Department of Agriculture to a new agency created for the protection of animals and the environment - More bureaucracy? Or an effort to create more jobs?

7. Abolish all trapping and fur ranching - I can't imagine raising furry goofballs and skinning them so people like Ms. Crawford don't have to wear sweaters (I don't have anything against shaving the sheep, by the way).

8. Abolish all 'hunting and fishing' for sport! - For food I can understand, for fun, no, I can't and don't want to either. And people who think it's 'brave' to go hunting are sick and have a screw missing. Stop reading Hemingway for inspiration. He was a good writer, but an idiot otherwise―and we know what happened to all his manly bravado in the end.

9. Save the rain forests and ban all international trade in wildlife or goods produced from exotic animals - OH YES!

10. Abolish all breeding of companion animals - including pedigreed or purebred dogs and cats - OH NO!

11. Abolish the use or association of animals in sports, entertainment, zoos, rodeos, coursing, or aquariums - As Dick Francis, one of my favorite authors said, horses like to run; since he was a jockey himself and spent a major portion of his time around horses probably he knew what he was talking about.

As for entertainment and the zoo, if I were a tiger, I would rather be jumping through hoops in different cities than growing listless in the same old cage. Of course, if I had the choice, I wouldn't have left the jungle in the first place, but you know how these humans are, they think they can decide and manage things for other species.

12. Prohibit the production of genetically manipulated transgenic animals - Why do you want genetically manipulated transgenic animals anyway, when you can't behave well enough with the existing genetically unmanipulated, non-transgenic creatures of both the four-legged and two-legged variety?