ABSTRACT
In 2010, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith published a book provocatively entitled A Rat Is A Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement.1 As his subtitle makes clear, Smith’s work is intended as an exposé on what he judges to be the very real dangers to western civilization of a belief system that, he contends, attributes too much value to non-human animals while at the same time undervaluing human beings. The belief system that he specifically targets is that which he considers to be advanced by the American animal rights movement, represented for him by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), to whose President, Ingrid Newkirk, he attributes the grotesque equation of his book title.2 In his effort to combat what he considers to be the anti-human ethical stance of the animal rights movement which, he charges, seeks to prove that a moral equivalency exists between human and non-human animals, Smith declares, “I will mount an unequivocal defense of the belief that human beings stand at the pinnacle of moral worth, a concept sometimes called ‘human exceptionalism.’”3 Smith fears that if the animal rights agenda prevails, the lives of human beings will be profoundly and negatively affected, with crippling restrictions imposed on medical research, food production and consumption, clothing choices and entertainment options, and that ultimately, “we will knock human beings off the pedestal of moral distinctiveness.”4
