Douglas Kern pokes sarcastic fun at German animal rights “spokeskiller” Frank Albrecht in Knut Rock Me:
Don’t take it from me. Look at the pictures. Read the story. The Germans have precision-engineered Knut to win your heart with a kind of cuteness whose intensity borders on the ruthless. Behold: Knut, playing with a ball. Knut, rasslin’ with his blankie. Knut, waving to his adoring fans. He sleeps every night with a teddy bear. The zookeepers play guitar for him. Show me the man who can reject such sweetness, and I’ll show you German animal rights spokeskiller Frank Albrecht, the Grim Reaper of Lovable Animals. “The zoo must kill the bear,” said Captain Killjoy. “Feeding by hand is not species appropriate, blah blah blah kill the cute bear, blah blah blah goofy animal rights reasons, blah blah blah I hate everything good and pure.” I paraphrase, but only a little. In fairness, Albrecht has clarified his homicidal rant, claiming that he only wanted to see the little fellow croaked when he was tiny and especially helpless. “‘If a polar bear mother rejected the baby, then I believe the zoo must follow the instincts of nature,’ Albrecht said. ‘In the wild, it would have been left to die.’” Thanks for the explanation, Angel of Baby Polar Bear Death. Can’t we just buy some dead baby polar bear offsets instead?
Then he gets to his real point:
Don’t think for a minute that the sheer perversion of killing a sweet cuddly baby polar bear is incidental to the goals of Frank Albrecht and those of his ilk. The sheer perversion is the point. For example: have you ever noticed how the global warming aficionados almost seem to relish the prospect of massive economic rollback and worldwide belt-tightening? Al Gore and his minions aren’t interested in arguments that global warming might make people healthier and richer on balance; neither do they care about proposals to reverse global warming through relatively simple attempts at global weather engineering (e.g., lacing the world’s oceans with iron to stimulate plankton production, thereby changing the atmospheric CO2 balance). To make such arguments is to misunderstand why global warming alarmism is so popular. Its adherents embrace it because they savor the doom that it portends. They want a massive shrinkage of the world’s economies. They want reduced industrial development. They want a world made spiritually pure, liberated from the defilement of modern life. And in the same way, radical greens want little Knut sacrificed on the altar of a fictitious, pristine nature. They want these things because some neglected part of the human heart yearns for sacrifice; for a rejection of worldly goods and concerns in pursuit of higher goals.