Was Mentioning "Happy Feet" Really Necessary?

I listen to Rush to learn his ideas on politics and football. If he wants to maunder on about 24 or Apple Computer stuff, that's okay. But today he just had to bring up the fact that the penguin that was recently found, saved, and re-released into the wild may have died - eaten by some predator.

The implication being - the penguin never should have been saved, just let it die. (Or perhaps, it should have been put in a zoo.)

And presumably the money wasted on the animal that was just going to die anyway.

But it's like that story of the boy walking along a beach on which are thousands of star fish, and he's throwing a few of them back in the water, and a guy says, "Why bother, you can't save all of them, you can't make a difference." And the kid throws a star fish into the water and says, "I made a difference to that one."

The way I look at it - human beings have brains, they're able to see the future, they can tell what is or is not bad for them. If they do something stupid that messes up their lives, well, it's their own fault. But animals... animals don't know that swimmng through some black gunk is going to kill them, they can't clean themselves off afterwards, they can't find food once their habitat is destroyed, etc. Animals need the help that humans shouldn't need.

Thus it's not a question of "caring more about animals than humans" - it's a belief that humans can damn well take care of themselves, but why should animals lose out because of mankind's incompetence?

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think a whole community should be put out of work because a snaildarter fish is going to go extinct. But I'm all for the banning of shark finning, for the banning of cutting down Amazonian rain forests, and things of that nature.

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My Schedule of Regular Posts:
*Monday through Friday morning - schedules of President, VP and Secretary of State and her diplomats
*Monday through Friday afternoon - List of topics Limbaugh discussed on his program that day
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