When Barbaro was put down, I noticed and skipped several commentaries on the matter, which is why I'm only noticing now how bereft the Formerly Gray Lady was. Far be it from me to mock a lady's grief (and I've cried over my share of lost pets), but
this reminds me of freshman year of high school when, returning our first batch of creative writing essays, perky little Sr. Sharon was moved to say,
Oh you girls and your dog stories!
Gee whilikers:
Barbaro’s death was tragic not because it was measured against the races he might have won or even against the effort to save his life. It was tragic because of what every horse is.
You would have to look a long, long time to find a dishonest or cruel horse. And the odds are that if you did find one, it was made cruel or dishonest by the company it kept with humans. It is no exaggeration to say that nearly every horse — Barbaro included — is pure of heart. Some are faster, some slower. Some wind up in the winner’s circle. But they should all evoke in us the generosity of conscience — a human quality, after all — that was expended in the effort to save this one horse.
Fr. Thomas Berg of the Westchester Institute brought this to my attention, writing in his
With Good Reason blog,
I was slowly overcome by that feeling, something between disgust and embarrassment, which I feel in the face of someone grasping to say something profound, but whose thought crumbles into absurdity
I've no doubt every pro-lifer in the biz immediately noted that the NYT has never shown much sadness at the tragedy of abortion or destruction of embryos because of what every human is. The Times' editorial is fruit of the denial of human exceptionalism...an argument at least as old as Aristotle, who wrote about a corrupt form of democracy in which donkeys walk the streets and humans stand aside for them. Mr. W remarked that one of his philosophy professors once wrote about his interview with an animal rights activist:
She insisted on equality of rights for all species. He kept pressing her on the rights of amoebae and paramecia until she grew very angry and admitted he was "logically right" but the issue was not logic but feelings. Her key point was that equality of species is based on the universal sense of pain. Of course she could not respond to the problem of how a human being should act when pained by other species, such as bacteria.
Heh. Or I guess I should say, snort. Horses are better than we are says the Times! I suspect a few --or at least portions of 'em--may be running the editorial page.
