Ambrose: Was Obama right to kill a fly?

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"That was pretty impressive, wasn't it?" asked President Obama. He was being interviewed by CNBC, had just dispatched a fly after first trying a negotiating technique called "shooing" and was clearly pleased with hand speed that could have made him a fast-draw hero in a Western movie. But no, PETA was not impressed.
"We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals," said a spokesman for the group -- its full name is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- as he also revealed Obama would soon receive a gift, Katcha, which traps insects so they can later be let go outdoors.
It's an interesting stance, seeing as how PETA itself has killed thousands of dogs and cats, justifying the action by saying the painless methods it used were better than overpopulation and other means of life termination.
The group doesn't much like people to have a single pet; the animal can get lonely and sad, it seems. Maybe flies don't get lonely -- who knows? -- but overpopulation can be an issue and a quick slap cannot inflict pain for more than a nanosecond.
The greater contradiction in the PETA position is that a generally commendable stance against cruelty to animals does not include cruelty to human beings. It throws paint on their fur coats and pie in their faces and opposes animal research that could help cure their diseases. At least one activist in the group has spoken of humans as if they were a plague on the planet.
In its rants against the killing of animals for food, PETA has compared the process to the Holocaust, as if, somehow, there were an equivalence to one of the most despicable enormities of the 20th century.
Most of us who are not vegetarians have no objections and possibly even admiration for those who are as long as they don't try to impose their lifestyles on others, or so I would guess. We shudder at the thought of needless suffering by any creature. I myself find much to contemplate in the great Albert Schweitzer's discussion of what he called "reverence for life."
But I also believe that our perceived obligation to the animal kingdom rises out of our very special conceptual consciousness, and that our times are marked by a confused, degrading, unsubstantiated sense that we are no different in kind from what we have so far discovered elsewhere in nature.
George Ball, chairman of W. Atlee Burpee & Co., summed it up well in a piece noting how much in our intellectual history has seemed to demean the human being -- from the idea that we are here by the accident of evolution, that we have no free will that reaches beyond our genes, that our consciousness is forever overridden by the subconscious.
All of this and more contributes to crimes that threaten human lives in the name of saving nature, to talk of "species colonialism," to a Swiss proposal to extend rights to plants and to one activist's final solution for the environment being to euthanize some people to help keep the population within a reasonable limit.
To rescue humankind from a view of it as more peril than prize, you may need to go to war with many modernist notions, but not with science or so great a theory as evolution. For a piece of the answer, I would turn instead to a book called "The Modern Mind" and a quote it includes from John Polkinghorne of England.
A distinguished physicist, mathematician and priest, Polkinghorne argued that "our scientific, aesthetic, moral and spiritual powers greatly exceed what can convincingly be claimed to be needed in the struggle for survival, and to regard them as merely a fortunate but fortuitous by-product of that struggle is not to treat the mystery of their existence with adequate seriousness."
All of which may seem a long distance from criticism Obama received for killing a fly. I don't think so.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)

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