Just what the hell is happening?

Apparently today the remains of a woman, Gladys Hammond who died aged 86 have been stolen from a grave in a village called Yoxall. The perpetrators of this crime are alleged to be animal rights activists and have targeted this woman’s family because they breed Guinea Pigs for the express purpose of selling them to a laboratory specialising in medical research. It is thought that the grave robbers now intend to dismember the remains and send them back to the family bit by bit. Nice huh? Really classy! Or how about just plain old sick, demented and depraved.

Let’s get something straight here, these aren’t activists, they are terrorists. They may not be beheading people or kidnapping them, but they’re not too fucking far from doing this and surely it’s only a matter of time before someone is kidnapped, tortured and maybe even killed in the name of animal rights. This leaves a bad taste in the mouth less than a week after Ken Bigley was brutally murdered by extremists in Iraq, and for a large part of the population an act of barbarism which touched them in some small way or another. Also in a week where a young girl, Danielle Beccan was brutally shot in Nottingham aged 14 it seems that somehow or another the UK is going to Hell in a Handcart. Far be it from me to start walking down Bigotry Avenue to Littlejohn Mansions but in some respects I agree with the knobber journo from The Scum that things are badly wrong in UK Village and that perhaps the exercise of freedom can be taken too far. What with drive by shootings, grave robbers and dead horses being dumped outside the Labour Conference I think it’s all too easy and increasingly acceptable for people to use extremes to make their points, whether it’s a political cause or an inter-gangland rivalry ( I think the girl was shot as part of a gang initiation ceremony)…the rule of law is breaking down.

For my own view I don’t think animals do have rights. Rights can only be granted by beings that can rationalise, form concepts of justice, right, wrong, good and evil. As far as I know there are no animals that have awareness of such concepts. Our most treasured rights are also enshrined in law, laws are something that only humans can make and comply with or break. Rights in the philosophical sense imply moral duties and obligations and so animals, which have no notion of any of these, do not have rights. They may be aware of their suffering but they are not aware of any violation of rights. However, I do believe that we as rational beings have a duty of responsibility towards animals, without assuming they have human traits. I believe that unwarranted cruelty is morally wrong and that as humans we should not be able to apply cruel methods to animals, whether that be in sport (fox hunting covered off then) or food production (factory farming…products of which I avoid if at all possible) and research for non-medical purposes (i.e cosmetics testing). But we should e able to eat meat that is garnered humanely, and control pests via efficient and humane methods. I do believe that if medical research can use animals to discover cures for disease in humans then yes that is OK. If someone I loved could be cured by a treatment first discovered by using animals then I have no moral qualm about that whatsoever. I feel the same way about the use of Embryonic Human Stem Cells as championed by the late Christopher Reeve, someone who was truly brave of heart.

I think the people who protest against animal cruelty have a noble cause, at least to them, but the method to choose is via legal protest, awareness campaigns and the fucking ballot box. Anything like what has been done today is terrorism. And there are no “degrees of terrorism” , just plain old using peoples fears to intimidate them. The terrorist is a simpleton, a person who sees their cause as good and anyone not with them is against them. Therefore anybody is fair game and is on the side of “bad”. They then demonise the other side so that there is no compromise solution or anything good about them at all. They are demented and perhaps society has a duty to eradicate them. The minute you become a terrorist is the minute you forfeit any human right at all.

Personally I hope they find these sick fuckers and put them in a grave, unmarked and silent.

More later, GrocerJack