Obama and the fly

When I saw this story for the first time, I genuinely thought it was a hoax. The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have criticised Barack Obama for swatting dead a fly that was pestering him during an interview – frankly, I can’t think of a news story that carries less import, but because Obama was involved it’s become headline-grabbing news. PETA commented that they “support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals” and that they “believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals”.

It’s people like PETA who give animal rights activists a bad name – OK, maybe it’s more the ones who throw Molotov cocktails at research labs, but the pathetic sentiments are much the same. I’m a big believer in the rights-as-correlative-to-duties school of thought – and to speak of a fly in such terms is, to suspend for a moment the slight disbelief that something so blatantly obvious needs explanation, utterly ridiculous.

Like most beings on this planet (some of them human), the main purpose of flies’ existence is to eat and reproduce, each of which keeps them in their place in the food chain. If you’re going to complain about flies getting killed, then surely the animals that prey on them should be a constant target of PETA’s (and others’) condemnation. And taking the line that this is absurd because this would involve interfering in a natural process is ignoring the fact that the fly dying by being swatted is not in itself an unnatural occurrence. In case PETA haven’t noticed, cows and other animals do it all the time. What is unnatural is PETA’s insistence that, for some reason, humans have to go easy on all the animals they come across. Sure, we could do better at veering towards being ‘responsible custodians of the planet’ and the like, but insisting that everone stop swatting flies is taking it rather too far…

Now, for your delectation, the fly-moment in question…

~ by Marius Ostrowski on June 19, 2009.