Brigitte Bardot Joins Animal Rights Activists
It takes something really obnoxious to give offense these days, but a picture that ran in The Telegram Tuesday was one of the most offensive things to appear in public print since Bono blasted Canadians for being stingy with foreign aid.
The picture featured Brigitte Bardot holding a graphic, which was doctored to look like a photo. It, in turn, depicted a seal holding a club in its mouth, and a human baby lying naked and dead on the ice, with blood collecting under its head.
You would think Irish rock stars and French actresses would have something better to do than lecture Canadians on how to behave. You would think that, France being a country with an old and sophisticated culture, Bardot could find a more traditional pastime to keep her occupied, like torching cars in the night.
But no. Canadians continue to need correcting.
Joining the club
It is not Bardot’s continued opposition to the seal hunt per se that is offensive. Hate the seal hunt? Go ahead. Bash us for it, so to speak. What is utterly offensive, though, is the animal-rights movement’s equating seal pups with human babies. That they can’t see the difference in the value of a seal pup’s life and a baby’s life is profoundly offensive.
Of course, Bardot and the animal-rights boosters would say they were merely trying to shock people into action to stop a cruel and barbaric practice.
Uh huh. Been to the wilderness lately? I thought not. Most of the people who contribute money to the various animal-rights groups live in big cities that are carpeted in pavement. Their experience of nature, or “the environment,” is mostly limited to going to the neighborhood park or getting rained on at the sidewalk cafe.
I’m all in favour of treating animals with kindness and love. Even on bad days, I don’t kick my dog.
But she has a certain station in life. She is not “a member of the family,” as so many animal lovers ridiculously proclaim. She is a pet, a beast. She wags her tail with unconditional love, but I’m well aware that if I dropped dead in the house and nobody found me for a week, she would probably eat me. Get over it, people. They are what they are, and we are we.
Bardot’s latest anti-sealing campaign reveals, yet again, how unreasonable so many self-proclaimed animal lovers are.
You, or someone you know, has probably experienced going for a walk in the park and hearing someone call out, “Don’t worry, he’s friendly,” as an unruly, unrestrained, obviously untrained and disobedient dog runs or jumps at you.
In the minds of dog owners like that, you and their dog are on an equal footing.
Get a grip
We need to put things back in perspective.
There was big news out of France this week about the world’s first partial face transplant. If you followed the tragic story closely, you might have caught the detail that the 38-year-old woman who was the recipient was attacked by her own Labrador.
Meanwhile, residents of a town in Connecticut are up in arms because a local power company removed nests that parakeets had built on top of utility poles, and killed the offending birds. Oh, the outrage.
Never mind that the nests were a fire hazard. If an occasional house burned down, well, at least the lovely creatures responsible were still chirping.
It gives me a pain. We kill to live. It may be ugly and bloody, but it is a fact, and has been for eons, and will continue to be, unless you want to force, at gunpoint, six billion people to become vegan. We kill trees to build our houses. We kill cows, chickens, pigs, etc., so we can live another day, presumably to kill again. There is nothing immoral or shameful about it.
Here’s something for Bardot to ponder: Paris and its pavement is probably more of a blight on Mother Earth than, say, Twillingate is.
