Letter to the Editor The Miami Herald

January 8, 2010

Letter to the Editor
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: Enough with these sea sloths and feral predators! Some comments on your editorial of 1/7/10 suggesting universal health care for 2 of Florida’s tourist attractions.

Sirs,

I refuse, absolutely and unconditionally, to accept the primacy of primates, invertebrates, Bambi wanabees, and feline man eaters over the rights of man.

Man’s rights are a gift from God. They are ours at birth, “a gift from beyond the stars”. We extend rights to animals as a condition of our humanity.

Having said that let me add that my first Old English sheepdog had his own credit card from the Speyer Animal Clinic in Manhattan on 61st Street. His name was on it but it required my signature. They couldn’t help Falstaff so we took him to the veterinary school at Cornell University where he died on the operating table. The veterinarian who treated him was the author of the book on his particular ailment.

Fast forward 35 years.

It cost me almost $1,000 for Sharpton to die in May, 2007. Yes, he was a black cat and, yes, he was named after the Reverend Al.

I tell you this lest you think I am a closet vivisectionist.

Your editorial on manatees and panthers is, to borrow the most sagacious comment about Jimmy Carter, “more mush from the wimp”.

You say that numbers for the “elusive panther” – Unless you count the cinematic panther are there any other kind? – are “very disappointing”. In the same paragraph you say the population may have increased 5 fold.

Which is it?

“Very disappointing”, “disappointing”, or not “disappointing”?

It can’t be all of them. It may be none of them.

Since panthers are cursory hunters I suggested at the height of the Mad Cow buncombe the importation and release of them into the swamp West of the Sawgrass Mall as a great example of recycling. Even though the word had not entered our lexicon it would have reduced our carbon footprint immensely.

As to the manatees, am I the only person in Florida to say that if the ultimate goal of the alpha male is to eat 2 week old kale and endive tossed from a bridge or a dock by an anti-rational twit and then to swim into a whirling propeller it may be time for them to go?

What would happen if a Florida Wildlife Officer, a person with a badge, a gun, and police powers, were to come upon a Florida panther trying to eat a manatee?

Would he intervene on behalf of the losing party?
Would he shoot both of them?
Would he try to arrange conflict resolution and anger management sessions?

There can be no doubt that the boobies are running the hatch.

Any conversation that brings Orwell into it is improved. He said

“The obvious and true have got to be defended. The
solid world exists. Stones are hard. Water is wet.
Objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center.”

In an age when frigid weather is used as proof of Global Warming, in an age when a filthy WOG terrorist’s inability to light the fuse and kill 300 people is used as proof that “the system worked”, in an age when man, the planet’s most endangered species, is made subordinate to lesser breeds such as the Furbish Lousewort and the Snail Darter it may be time to “retire to bedlam”.

Alas, that is not the nature of man. He, as the poet said, will “not only endure he will prevail”. His enemies are not the hapless animals he protects but, rather, members of the chattering class who, through moral relativism, equate men with apes.




Kevin Smith
PS – I have been trying since 1997 to get the Miami Herald to turn off the A/C in your HQ by the bay. What better example could there be of a commitment to save the planet, not to mention the drowning polar bears, by reducing your dependence on green house gas producing fuels? Should I hope that this is the year you will change?