Sunday, May 4, 2008

Around The Bend...

The Swiss government has an organization known as ECNH (in English, the Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology). Recently they published a paper (available in English) entitled “The Dignity of Living Beings With Regard to Plants”. The 24-page document is full of photographs, fancy diagrams and other graphics, and some stunning blather. Here's one of their conclusions:
The Committee members unanimously consider an arbitrary harm caused to plants to be morally impermissible. This kind of treatment would include, e.g. decapitation of wild flowers at the roadside without rational reason.
In other words, it's immoral to pick roadside wildflowers.

Read the whole thing for a disquieting view of the Euro-looniness the American Left would like us to emulate.

You just can't make this stuff up...

1 comment:

  1. What is "euro" about Switzerland?
    Sure it is part of mainland Europe (Geographical), it is not however part of the eurozone and with certain cantons (states) only having given the vote to women many years after Kuwait did so, it is hardly considered the arbiter of 'Euro good taste' . Perhaps they are merely continuing the tradition of neutrality, but this time between the animal and plant kingdoms, after all , who knows which will be in the ascendancy this week and therefore be needing their money banked. Should we to be fair draw our conclusions about the US based on the most extreme pronoucements of its most reactionary states? And yes, I think picking roadside plants is bad, not because of any pain they might feel but because you deprive others of the view of them. We had some pretty rare plants in the field across the road from our house until passing motorists decided to come and pull them up, now if they ever got replanted, great, what I suspect is that they were left to wilt in the back of the car. They are gone now.
    Unless you take them home to plant, you have needlessly killed a living thing.
    I do not stamp on beetles, and I do not pick wild flowers. They look ten times better where they are, they can be seen by many tens more of people than in a vase in my house. It seems like a no brainer to me - if you want to see wild flowers, go out and look at them.

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