I was joking!

Look, when I said this, my point was that it was absurd to use these tactics of asking embryos to testify.

But even if they do get a nice image of a curled, fishlike embryo that is maybe a tenth as sharp as the worst images of zebrafish embryos that I see in my low-power dissecting scope, so what? It's not testifying. It's twitching. You'd get a more intelligent response if you dragged a cow in front of the committee and asked it to moo against slaughterhouses.

But wouldn't you know it, the animal rights extremists are now arguing that they should adopt the tactics of the anti-choice movement, and are carrying it even further than I would have imagined.

Without taking a position on the substantive issues involved, animal liberationists are encouraged to pay close attention to the anti-abortionists' tactics and strategies and, as activists, we must note the stronghold their cause is gaining. They have begun to move away from theology to secular-based arguments [this is total nonsense, of course --pzm] geared toward the greater population. Many of us have begun to move away from arguing our "theology" of rights toward engaging people on the issues with which they are already concerned (e.g., health, vanity, abuses of tax money).

We need to gain traction despite complacency and by any means necessary.

Moreover, within the past month, a group calling itself "Americans United for Life" (AUL) has successfully introduced bills that are being considered in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa. The proposed legislation seeks to expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include murder committed in defense of an unborn child. The logical extension of their efforts is to expand the definition further to include murder committed in defense of an imprisoned and tortured nonhuman animal.

Someone tell those Republican farmers in South Dakota that kooks have found common cause with their abortion arguments, and think they justify gunning them down. Bringing in a cow to testify would be sane compared to what they propose to do.