Would C.S. Lewis be an Animal Rights Activist Today?
12/20/05
Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of the well-known and often controversial (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), has made quite the recent claim... saying that she believes Lewis might well have become a member of Peta. She says (in her blog and also posted on Disinformation.com):
The idea of preserving habitat or the thought that animals actually have feelings and can enjoy, love, be devoted to and grieve for their fellows had not yet been born. Lewis might well have marveled at how close other animals' DNA is to our own, but no such finding had appeared in scientific periodicals. Konrad Lorenz was Lewis’s contemporary, but his groundbreaking observations of the emotional lives of animals were published a couple of decades later.
Still, Lewis abhorred abuse of animals and condemned even the cruelty that was sanctioned by educated men in authority—experimentation on animals. He wrote in "The Problem of Pain": "Vivisection can only be defended by showing it to be right that one species should suffer in order that another species be happier….If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us, and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reasons."
Sounds somewhat convincing, doesn't it? And she has a point: C.S. Lewis did indeed have deep misgivings and aversions to vivisection for it's own sake--indeed, I believe the same. Animals are under human protection; they are--if you believe in what God said to Adam--under our care on this earth.
But, as we know, PETA is not simply against animal abuse. Indeed, they promote vegetarianism to the extreme. They've called the eating of chickens a "Holocaust on your Plate". They've engaged in the rather questionable "Jesus was a vegetarian" campaign. PETA, simply, is against killing any animals at all. Animals, they feel, have the same value as a life as any human life.
And this is where Newkirk's argument falls apart. She has quite the strategic ellipsis (...) in her quote. Her Lewis quote is:
Vivisection can only be defended by showing it to be right that one species should suffer in order that another species be happier... If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us, and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reasons
But the FULL Lewis quote is this:
Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing up our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reason.
Lewis was not against animal abuse simply for the sake of the animals. Lewis was against it because he saw that the Judeo-Christian "idea of total difference between man and beast" might be abandoned. And, with animal abuse rampant, human abuse could easily follow.
PETA, however, has already placed human life on the same level as animal life (a holocaust on your plate?!). Lewis, I'm sure, would be appalled and disgusted. Animals need to be treated as beings under our care, not as equals on this earth, with the knowledge that human life is absolutely worth more than animal life.
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