As I mentioned in a previous post, there were some truly silly speakers at the Cottesloe protest against the "shark cull" on February 1. Katrina Love of the Animal Justice Party was one of them. I've included a video of her speech below for your amusement.

Now, if your average garden-variety greenie is out where the buses don't go then animal rights activists are well and truly off the beaten track. (Well, metaphorically speaking that is. It's one of the ironies of their movement that the more zealously they worship nature, the closer to the CBD they actually reside.)

Their worldview is truly radical and actually quite disturbing, lets face it. They think that chipmunks, bilbies and skinks are our equals, after all. (Actually, I think they believe they're our betters since they seem to care more dearly about their plight than humans'. Any tears for the poor bastards who were gobbled up by noahs in our waters recently? Nope, they only weep for the sharks themselves. Creepy.)

The whole concept of animal rights is not just a tad sinister -- it's utterly incoherent. Rights are meaningless unless they are balanced with responsibilities, remember. And how responsible is your average polecat, eh? 

And do animals actually want rights anyway? Do they have the slightest clue what they are, for that matter? I think we all know the answers to those questions. So then isn't appointing yourself as their spokesperson in this regard (a voice for the voiceless, so to speak) a violation of the very rights you think they deserve? Talk about paternalistic speciesism!

These are some general absurdities of animal rights ideology. If you then start a political party based on its tenets, things get even sillier.

Take the very title of the one represented at the demo: Animal Justice Party. Firstly, have you heard of animals themselves being just? Nope. Nature is red in tooth and claw, remember. In the amoral, pitiless wild justice is non-existent.

And how just can a party be if it has no animals in its rank and file, as candidates, or even voting for it? Now that's not remotely fair -- nor democratic for that matter.

The silliness became even more obvious when Katrina Love herself took the stage and spoke on behalf of those poor, marginalized and oppressed white pointers. Not surprisingly she began with some dreary PC posturing about acknowledging the rightful owners of the land. (Gawd but it's such a vain and insincere ritual, that. If you think you're on stolen land, you should just bloody well sod off. Same if you think you're in the "shark's domain" -- and aren't you sick of hearing that one, too? Just don't go swimming then you posturing twit.)

But just on that subject of ownership: It does suggest a conflict. If local Aborigines have rights to the land, do they have rights to the water as well? And do these expunge the rights of the shark? Hmm. Makes you wonder if there'll ever be a legal battle over this. Stranger things have happened, after all ...  

In any case Love's speech was full of howlers. Among other things, they revealed her childish naivete about nature and its chaotic brutality. For example, she lamented the huge numbers of sharks killed globally by humans every hour. Well, given these statistics, why get upset when four or five tigers sharks are terminated off the WA coast? Talk about a drop in the ocean. 

Granted, humans kill a lot of sharks, but that number itself is tiny when you think of all the sharks killed in nature by other aquatic life forms large and small. And what about the mass murder of all the other fish -- by sharks and others. The scale of the carnage is mind boggling.

But of course Love and her ilk don't give a tinker's cuss about that brutality. That's natural, so therefore it must be good. Ugh. What a primitive way to see the world. 

Her speech contained other gems of unintentional comedy -- for example when she said: "Respect existence or expect resistance." Sure, it's a neat line. It's spookily reminiscent of that ol' joke: "How do you titillate an ocelot? Oscillate its tit a lot." Considering how many shark huggers were present, that too would have been highly apposite. (Though I doubt it would have provoked laughs. Credulous numpties probably would have been taking notes!)

But back to the original: "Respect existence or expect resistance." Sounds like a perfect catch-cry for the pro-life movement, don't you think? Is she against abortion, I wonder. What are the odds, eh? Nah, it's a dead cert she's pro-choice. So it's only the existence of some life forms she's referring to there. 

She also uses ultra-PC language. Is it a "shark attack"? No, it's a "human-shark interaction that proved to be fatal". You couldn't make this stuff up.

She also uses the word "humanely" a coupla times. That implies that we have higher standards than animals. It's actually speciesist when you think about it. Another internal contradiction there.

And there's this very revealing section in which she lays out her resistance to Colin Barnett's policy. She says her questions are not "will it work or can it be done?" but "is it humane and does it cause pain and suffering?". So she actually doesn't care whether it will work (that is, save lives) or not. She could hardly show more clearly that she's not bothered by the loss of human life.

The climax of her speech is when she says "how dare we!" (kill the sharks). That really is what it's all about for her. In the end it's not really about animal justice or rights or anything else. It's about Katrina Love being virtuous -- and being widely seen to be so. Like all lefties, she thinks it's all about her.

So please do have a squizz at this little performance. And don't be shy about offering your two cents in comments. I'd love to know what you think.