Andrew Rule: PETA’s posturing on Winx is a cynical publicity stunt
PETA’s attempt to link a long-dead, failed racehorse to the champion mare Winx is both childish and a cynical publicity stunt that ignores the facts, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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Dear PETA, Emily Rice of your group — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — wrote an open letter on Tuesday as part of a publicity stunt based on the slaughter of a former racehorse in Korea nearly a decade ago.
I’ve read the letter a couple of times. It is demanding I write an extra chapter for the authorised biography of (the champion racehorse) Winx to underline your lobby group’s hysterical position on the relationship between humans and animals.
Boiled down, the Rice letter is gluggy: it suggests horses are more special than other animals; that racehorses are more special than other horses and that “relatives” of champions are most special of all.
Like most propagandists, you try to prop up dodgy propositions with a couple of skinny facts, which is like Clive Palmer hiding behind a walking stick: it doesn’t work.
Yes, PETA, it’s true that millions of animals are killed each year, some by their traditional animal predators and others by us humans, two-legged omnivores that have inherited the earth. It is also true that among the millions of animals destined to be eaten are thousands of horses much better off with a swift death than a miserable life. Same for any domesticated or feral animal.
It’s true that in Korea, as in Australia and elsewhere, horses are ultimately used for meat. In some countries, for human consumption; in others, for the pet meat that a million vegans feed their cats. You know, the cats that are either locked inside all day or allowed out to kill millions of small birds and animals.
Why has Australia lost so many small species? Because of cats and foxes. If Greens and vegans and the rest of the PETA push were doers instead of posers, they would support culling pest animals across Australia. Not just rabbits and rats but feral goats, donkeys, camels and deer … and, of course, feral horses that are ruining millions of wild acres for native wildlife.
If one is opposed as a matter of conscience and choice to killing any sort of living thing, the fact that horses, cattle and sheep and poultry are slaughtered for meat is unpleasant and possibly distressing in an indulgent first-world, Fitzroy-Northcote, frequent flyer sort of way.
But the truth is that for thousands of generations, humans have been like bears: true omnivores that when possible eat meat the way they have since our forebears crawled from the primal ooze.
There is no real difference — actual or moral — between “flesh and fowl” when it comes to eating meat. Just as there is no moral difference between killing plague rats and Persian cats, French poodles and thoroughbred horses.
The idea of “Man’s best friend” is an artificial and sentimental concept cooked up by Anglo-Celtic races in relatively recent times and, sensibly, ignored by most of the world’s peoples. PETA’S implied criticism of Koreans eating horses and dogs has a nasty racist whiff.
It is both childish and cynical to elevate a failed racehorse (a legitimate candidate for the abattoir) to “untouchable” status by labelling it as “Winx’s half brother.”
It’s a specious, meaningless and mischievous description that links a long-dead animal to a “champion” merely because they happen to be two among hundreds of horses fathered by the same stallion over many years.
The horse Bareul Jeong, foaled in 2006 and slaughtered in 2010, is exactly as you say: an example of the discarded progeny of a top sire, Winx’s “father” Street Cry. There are many others.
At the end of its useful life, no horse is inherently more special than the calves that died to supply us with shoe leather or to supply the milk that even PETA members drank until they signed up to a lifestyle fad.
Here’s a thought. PETA should stick to preventing unnecessary suffering to animals. Eating a horse is not cruelty. Beating a horse is.
We look forward to seeing you at the zoo, tossing cabbages to the lions.
Andrew Rule is a Herald Sun columnist and author of Winx, The Authorised Biography.
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