Letters to the Editor
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Boycott China
It seems to me that the almost immediate knee-jerk reaction is to 1)ask what's the difference between a domesticated cat or dog and a lamb or a calf or a pig, and 2) the usual heralding of the human and its suffering as opposed to animals. As a vegan, I continuously deal with people taking this approach of "you care more about animals than people". It's such a flawed argument. The human being's capacity for love is limitless. I love people - most people - and animals. I don't believe either need to be tortured. I don't believe either should be wrongfully incarcerated and killed. I care a great deal for the plight of citizens in China that are being swept up, tortured, and imprisoned. I cannot fathom why we trade openly with a ruthless totalitarian government that crushes demonstrations with sweeps of brutality, while a little country off our coast is economically sanctioned.
If you have not watched the Chinese fur video (available at PETA), I am telling you from someone who has seen every conceivable animal rights video, it is the most upsetting, cry out loud in shock, display of human cruelty that I have ever seen. But let's get one thing straight, we as Americans consumers, are responsible for it, as well as the brutal torture of billions of animals in our own country. An animal is a thinking, feeling creature with as much capacity for fear and pain as we human beings. Our treatment of them, from the abuse of elephants in Thailand and for Ringling, to the barren, dark, pungent holding cells of pigs and calves and other sentinel beings all across this country to the fur farms in Russia and Missouri - we are responsible for the CARE of animals, not their demise. I decided, after the Tibetan fiasco, that I can no longer pretend that China is some innocuous entity supplying cheap crap for everyone via Walmart and other purveyors of substandard goods. I will not be a party to the rampant cruelty that is inherent in this sort of dictatorship - a far crueler rule than Saddam. I will not buy Chinese anything, as hard as that might be and I am boycotting the Olympics. I have no interest in watching a charade, while athletes cough and splutter through a pollution thick environment, all the while knowing that anyone who has spoken out is now facing violence beyond our comprehension and that dogs and cats are being skinned while fully cognizant and thrown upon a pile of disposable flesh, fully aware and alive.