Making Light:  PETA ::: January 14, 2004, 01:05 AM

At last I'm drawn out into the blogosphere...

I heard on the radio last week about mountain lions out West who have
been on the protected species list so long they think humans are
wimps.  So they tend to hang around town and browse on the house pets
now and then, and a few of them have stalked and attacked able-bodied
humans.

So now the animal controllers deport the ones they find in back yards,
and counsel that the greater kindness is to be "mean" to wild critters
--drive them off, and make it clear it's not okay to hang with the
naked apes.  And the ones that bite Rover get shot.

Well, this is a blog entry about PETA, and I have to say that the
"Fishkill" episode has firmly cemented them in the "not concerned with
accuracy" column as far as I'm concerned.  Lydy mentioned Raphael's
theory that they were not born to looniness, but had it thrust upon
them, that "The first lab that PETA busted into was one of the
real horror-show DOD labs.  What was done there was ... [ awful ].
Raphael's theory is that the experience traumatized them and caused
PETA to be a dysfunctional group from their very inception."

I don't believe that theory, but I believe that if PETA found someone
who might believe the theory and be swayed by it, they would tell
the story.  Like Colin Powell's unquestionable evidence for WMDs.
(Republicans--the other "L" word.)

Anyway, you might suppose that since this is a blog entry about PETA,
I'd be interested getting PETA to confront the moral dilemma of
dealing with the mountain lion who ate your companion animal.  But no,
that's not what caught me, not in that sense.  I just thought that
killing mountain lions was a waste of good predator that could serve
a useful purpose if delivered to PETA's headquarters.