Ruminations of an Old Goat

I was out in the car Saturday morning, wondering just what I was going to write about this week. Out of the blue, or more accurately, the left lane, came my answer. I'm always interested in reading bumper stickers, hoping to run across something clever that I've never seen before. I did not run across anything clever or new this time. Instead, I ran across one variant of a series of bumper stickers I find...irritating. It read "My parrot is smarter than your honor student."

I was tempted to pull along side and yell, "How much English did your parrot learn on its own? Did your parrot figure out to say 'tooken' as the past tense of 'took,' showing your parrot to be more logical than the English language? The first time your parrot saw fireworks, did it coin a phrase such as 'dancing stars' to describe them? Then again, your parrot has probably never seen fireworks because they'd scare the crap out of it. Has your parrot gotten together with a group of friends and, while still an adolescent, presented fairly logical arguments why he's convinced time travel is impossible?"

I didn't do that, of course. Challenging the bumper sticker would waste my time and irritate the parrot owner. Why it's okay for the parrot owner to irritate me with his bumper sticker but it's not okay for me to irritate him by responding to it, I'll never understand.

I was about to put this whole thing out of my mind when I exited the highway and pulled up behind a car with another bumper sticker. It read "My [insert dog breed here] is smarter than your honor student." At that point, I figured someone was sending me a message.

Why do those bumper stickers irritate me so much? It's all just a joke, right? Maybe, except you can tell a lot about a society from what the society considers funny. I find bumper stickers are all the more telling because they are something people purchase and choose to display. In other words, before a bumper sticker shows up on a car, some thought has gone into the message on the sticker. Bumper stickers, even supposedly funny ones, give us an insight into a person's values. To me, all of those "My critter is smarter than your honor student" bumper stickers are really saying "My critter is more valuable than your child."

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's paid attention to the political landscape over the past few decades. You need look no farther than PETA's claim that President Obama "executed" a fly on television last week to see just how deeply some people have taken their "animals rights" beliefs. These are people, all from the far left wing of liberal politics, who honestly believe it is more noble to allow a child to die rather than have an animal suffer as part of testing for medicine that might save the child. These are people who believe maintaining the propaganda against DDT -- none of which was borne out scientifically -- is more important than the estimated 850,000 children under the age of five who die from malaria every year (World Health Organization estimates for the years 2000 - 2003). Almost all of these deaths occur in the wretched poverty of sub-Saharan Africa.

These are people who will argue that all humans should be vegetarians because all creatures have an equal right to life. When pushing this argument to impressionable children, they invariably show photographs of cute, fuzzy baby foxes and cute, fuzzy baby bunny rabbits. Who would want to harm cute, fuzzy animal babies? How about those cute, fuzzy baby foxes? The foxes would be more than happy to kill -- in a non-humane manner -- and eat those cute, fuzzy baby bunny rabbits! This, to me, is the greatest hypocrisy to the entire animal rights movement. On the one hand, they tell us foxes and rabbits are the equals of humans and that killing them is as morally indefensible as killing another human. On the other hand, the foxes must kill the rabbits in order to survive. If a fox is the moral equivalent of a human, why is it okay for the fox to kill and eat the rabbit but it's not okay for the human to do the same?

To bring this back around to people and pets, I've had pets in my family since I was four. We've got a couple of cats lazing around the house right now. They're lovable little critters who add a lot to our life. Despite that, if someone told me that sacrificing one our cats would save the life of a child I do not know nor ever would know, I would begin mourning the cat and rejoicing the life of unknown child.

Am I stretching to say everyone with one of those "My critter is smarter than your honor student" bumper stickers believes all of this? Probably, but I still believe anyone who would put such a bumper sticker on their car has a skewed impression of the value of their pet as compared to my child. There is no moral equivalence between an animal and a child. There never will be a moral equivalence between an animal and a child. I just hope to God none of those who believe otherwise ever become parents.