This is a view opposite site of what this site is about.  There are many holes in his argument but an interesting read nonetheless.  It was written by Daniel Lazare and will be featured in the February 5th, 2007 issue of The Nation.

There are many horrifying moments in Anatoly Kuznetsov’s great Soviet novel Babi Yar, but one of the most horrifying concerns, of all things, the death of a newborn kitten. The kitten has been born deformed, so the hero, a small boy living in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, has to kill it. But instead of doing it the usual way by drowning it in a bucket, he decides it would be somehow kinder to pound the animal to death with a brick. "It was a moist, warm blob of life," Kuznetsov writes, "utterly devoid of sense and as insignificant as a worm. It seemed nothing could be easier than to dispose of it with one blow." But when he lets the brick fall,

A strange thing happened–the little body seemed to be resilient, the brick fell to one side, and the kitten continued its miaowing. With shaking hands I picked up the brick again and proceeded to crush the little ball of living matter until the very entrails came out, and at last it was silent, and I scraped up the remains of the kitten with a shovel and took them off to the rubbish heap, and as I did it my head swam and I felt sick.

Somehow, amid the myriad slaughters of World War II, it takes a frail and worthless kitten–"as insignificant as a worm"–to teach us something about the tenacity of life and the awfulness of taking it away.

continue reading at The Nation

Author Information -  During his spare time Eric writes for and maintains wannaveg.com. For his day job he works for an electronics company in San Diego, CA. Eric has been a vegetarian for about 10 years and believes that going 'green' and reducing meat consumption go hand-in-hand.

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