Would the Modern-Day C.S. Lewis Be a PETA Protester?

A dissenting view follows.

http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle14485.html

Would the Modern-Day C.S. Lewis Be a PETA Protester?
By Ingrid Newkirk

The release of Walt Disney Pictures’ “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” has prompted much public discussion about author C.S. Lewis, who wrote the classic children’s book on which the film is based, and Lewis’s Christian message. It’s true that Lewis’s strong faith shines through in the pages of the book, but something else does too: Lewis’s fervent belief that animals should be treated well and his outrage when animals are killed, either by being turned to stone by an evil force or as the subject of nasty experiments, such as those performed on guinea pigs by Uncle Andrew in Lewis’s “The Magician’s Nephew.”

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The idea of preserving habitat or the thought that animals actually have feelings and can enjoy, love, be devoted to and grieve for their fellows had not yet been born. Lewis might well have marveled at how close other animals’ DNA is to our own, but no such finding had appeared in scientific periodicals. Konrad Lorenz was Lewis’s contemporary, but his groundbreaking observations of the emotional lives of animals were published a couple of decades later.

Still, Lewis abhorred abuse of animals and condemned even the cruelty that was sanctioned by educated men in authority—experimentation on animals. He wrote in “The Problem of Pain”: “Vivisection can only be defended by showing it to be right that one species should suffer in order that another species be happier….If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us, and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reasons.”

If he had known what we found decades after his death—that elephants communicate at frequencies inaudible to the human ear, as do mice, that gulls sing lullabies to their chicks in the nest, that squid send messages via dermal patterns of light and color, that prairie dogs utter different sounds to announce the presence of friend, foe or stranger, and volumes of similar research showing that animals talk outside of fairy tales—I believe Lewis would have evolved from a kindly man into a true animal rights activist. I wish, at the very least, I had the opportunity to discuss it with him.

end

http://www.thestonetable.com/articles/291,1.html

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And this is where Newkirk's argument falls apart. She has quite the strategic ellipsis (...) in her quote. Her Lewis quote is:

Vivisection can only be defended by showing it to be right that one species should suffer in order that another species be happier... If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us, and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reasons

But the FULL Lewis quote is this:

Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing up our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reason.

Lewis was not against animal abuse simply for the sake of the animals. Lewis was against it because he saw that the Judeo-Christian "idea of total difference between man and beast" might be abandoned. And, with animal abuse rampant, human abuse could easily follow.

PETA, however, has already placed human life on the same level as animal life (a holocaust on your plate?!). Lewis, I'm sure, would be appalled and disgusted. Animals need to be treated as beings under our care, not as equals on this earth, with the knowledge that human life is absolutely worth more than animal life.

With the hard evidence of his actual words.

:evilgrin::silly: