A Fly in the Ointment

I’ve seen quite a few fireflies around the last couple of weeks, and I absolutely love it.  Fireflies are the linchpin behind many great summer memories (more on that next week).  When I was a little boy growing up in Texas, we used to catch fireflies and smear them on our t-shirts hoping that they would glow.  Good times.  Yeah, it was pretty gross and the guts didn’t always wash out just right, but we enjoyed it.

Thankfully, I’m older and wiser now than the 10 year old boy that I used to be.  On second thought, maybe I’m just older.  But the 10 year old in me was proud of something that President Obama did this week.  It was something that showed a tremendous amount of dexterity and skill.  All of us who have done it will testify that it is not the easiest thing to do.

"The Fly" from 20th Century Fox

He killed a pursuing fly with his bare hands!  It gets better.  Even PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) noticed his Chicago-style tactics on the innocent fly.  They issued a statement that he shouldn’t have swatted the defenseless, little disease carrier and even sent a “humane bug catcher” to the White House.

Just when I think I’ve seen the most irrelevant and destructive organizations around, most being government agencies, I am reminded of PETA.  Am I the only one that gets a little hungry each time I hear the mention of “PETA”?  It sounds too much like “pita”, which remind me of a gyro, which makes me hungry.

The concept of Ethical Treatment of Animals sounds good, but is ultimately absurd.  Have these people ever seen how animals treat other animals?  I had hamsters when I was growing up, about the same time I was smearing fireflies onto my t-shirts.  I wasn’t aware that you should separate the father from the mother and children when the babies were born.  The father ATE THE BABIES!!!  Talk about rattling an innocent 10 year old – well, innocent except for my bug murdering ways.  He didn’t treat his own children very “ethically”.

Perhaps PETA should watch the Discovery channel sometime to see how animals in the wild treat other animals.  They hunt each other down, steal other animals’ children, and eat each other alive.  The barbarism!  It may be high time for the weak, unproductive, and unskilled animals to form a union demanding that their rights be recognized by all in the animal kingdom.  The could call it “Animals for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”  They could check themselves into a PETA shelter to be protected.  Oh, wait, that wouldn’t work either since PETA killed over 90% of the animals it took in over the last five years.

A few weeks ago, I took a little heat for theorizing that the whack-o “Give Animals Human Rights” crowd, for which PETA members are the poster-child, were the same people that supported the free will murdering of unborn humans.  Ironically, the charge was never refuted – just found in poor taste for stating the truth.

The irony is that, by and large, your every day person treats animals with far more care than other animals ever do.  We oppose cruelty and even create laws to punish it.  But we also recognize that animals are not the moral equivalents of humans.  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?  How about we start with “People for the Common Sense Treatment of Animals”?  Use them as renewable food sources, as non-unionized workers, and as companions.  These are ideas that the remaining, sane Americans would acknowledge with a quick, “Duh!”

Unfortunately, the PCSTA would make too much sense to draw celeb-utard donors or gain coverage from the state-run media.  I guess we’ll have to settle for below-the-radar common sense.

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