Was there ever an organization so devoted to the destruction of its own cause as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?

Its members have in their smooth human hands one of the most ethically pure causes of our age -- treating animals well -- and they've managed to equate it with utter crackpottery. One suspects that PETA members were horrified by the collapse of the twin towers because of the hundreds of thousands of rats that perished in the rubble.

Unfair? Consider this: In a world of suicide bombing, nuclear threats and germ-warfare fears, PETA has found a new horror on which to lavish its time and dilute its cause:

Fishing.

PETA has filed suit in the states that ban hunting in state parks, demanding that fishing be prohibited as well. It's cruel. It's mean. It causes pain. Fishing is terrorism. Every day on every lake, it's 9/11, with boats instead of planes, hooks instead of box cutters.

Fish are just like you and me, in other words -- they have central nervous systems and can feel pain, and thereby deserve every ethical consideration one would extend to the pope, Nelson Mandela, Bob down the street, or the large bear that is charging toward you. A school of fish equals a day care center. As Ingrid Newkirk, PETA's co-founder, famously phrased the ethical equation: "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." [...]

But at the risk of sounding like a chauvinist to my species, the similarity stops there. Babies grow up to be doctors who find cures for cancer, and this might mean using rats in labs.

This troubles some people. Better that people should die of cancer than rats die in lab trials of cancer drugs. A rat is a pig is a dog is a little bald boy in a room full of beeping machinery, hugging his teddy. He has no better claim on tomorrow than a rat, or a minnow.

By making the child and the rat equal, you do not bring the rat up to the child's level. You push the child down to the level of the rat. [...]