by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1998 by Michael Finley

Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995 Table of contents and sample chapters of this book... Just click on the book cover to order your signed copy for only $12.95. Table of contents and sample chapters of this book... Why Change Doesn't Work: Why Initiatives Go Wrong and How to Try Again and Succeed Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley Hardcover Just click on the book cover to order your signed copy for only $12.95. "This is the first treatise on change we've seen that is actually entertaining. The authors cover human and organizational barriers to change and change theories, and then take a tour of management theory that's guaranteed to upset every reader at one point or another." -- HR ONLINE Table of contents and sample chapters of this book...

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Some years ago a philosopher propounded to me a paradox regarding the animal rights issue that I have since posed to many animal rights advocates, but never have found one who was able to resolve it. The paradox is this: If, as animal rights activists maintain, other animals are entitled to the same rights as humans, then we must assume humans are on the same moral/ethical plane as the other animals. But if we are on the same moral/ethical plane as other animals, why should we have moral/ethical qualms about killing and eating them? After all, animals kill and eat each other all the time.

To put it another way, animal rights activists assert that humans are no better than other animals, but then in the next breath argue that we should treat the animals better than they treat each other because we're human! Logically, their position simply doesn't add up.

When I put this argument to one animal rights advocate, pointing out that the lion feels no pangs of conscience when he brings down the gazelle, her response, in all seriousness, was: "Well, the lion can't go to a supermarket and buy tofu!" (At that moment I thought I heard the wind whistling through HER cranial cavity too.)

H.B.M.

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You missed one of the most salient points in your case against the protesters: The brain cells being studied were from humans with terminal brain cancers...and the scientist was pursuing this line of research to avoid doing animal testing. The ALF dullards were just venting; destroying everything in their path. Like they did with the minks a while back, allthey succeeded in doing was inflicting more harm on small creatures while damaging their cause.

If this wasn't a religion for them, this event could have dealt the animal rights movement a real blow. Fortunately (for them), religions don't have to make sense.

Mark Gisleson

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These particular yahoos remind me of the anti-porn "activists" who step over the homeless sleeping under the bridges on their way to picket bookstores...

Kate W.

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A Master of the Wired World?

I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.

What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.

Anne C. Leer, editor

To order, click here. Discounted price is $18.87 from Amazon.

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SAINT PAUL - This week a group of animal rights protesters broke into several University of Minnesota labs, set free the pigeons and rats that were there, and trashed some computer equipment.

You know, it wasn't long ago that I, too, had idealistic dreams of committing civil disobedience for a cause I really believed in.

Well, maybe it was long ago. But I understand the emotion behind the deed. Setting mistreated animals loose seems like a good thing to do. I like animals.

But this story keeps growing. First, the university reported $2 million in losses. Then it released the sympathetic information that the research projects were for brain cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

By nightfall, local newscasters were wrinkling their brows as they read stories accusing the animal vandals of setting back the searches for cures for these diseases by years, as if each of those projects were the linchpin in an imminent cure.

Then a pro-vandal group at The University showed their support by speaking bravely to the cameras. "It's cruelty to animals," one coed with an ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS TOO placard said.

"And besides, it's scientific fraud. There are lots of ways to cure diseases without hurting animals who have nothing in common with human beings, physiologically."

If you listened, you could hear the wind blow through her ears like jug music.

Three days after the story broke, I can think of only two groups not to hate: the researchers themselves, who lost months and months of work, and will likely never get it back, and the animals, who, let loose in the wild, have about as much chance of surviving as a milk-cow on the Serengeti.

Of a caged flock of forty lab pigeons, all that remains is a dozen sturdy birds, seen pecking the ground in suburban Woodbury.

That leaves the following groups to despise:

• the University, for running up the numbers and throwing a drape over the issue of inhumanity to research animals and the at-all-costs importance of keeping the grant money pouring in;
• the governor, who opined that the people who broke the equipment should be made to pay for it; duh;
• the local media, which had a ball polishing its idiot story about human suffering prolonged by the thoughtlessness of the vandals ("But for these patients at North Memorial Hospital ICU, help may already be too late");
• the pro-vandal protesters, who have given fresh meaning to the phrase callow fellows;
• and the vandals themselves, for being philosophically inconsistent.

To follow up on that last point, I would ask the vandals this question:

After trashing the work and the computers, and dumping the mice and pigeons into your pillowcases, Why did you leave the scene?

Freeing a hundred little creatures is only a drop in the bucket of sordid goings-on in the nether regions of our research centers. The point of this raid, then, was to make people aware of the problem.

Would you not have been much more successful in raising consciousness, and exhibiting human decency at its highest, by remaining in the lab to face the music?

By departing, you abandoned your defense to the airheads with the placards. And you exposed yourselves to the PR blitz that by tonight's news will have you nosing out Slobodan Milosevic for meanie of the month.

Why did you leave? John Brown would have stayed.

Surely it wasn't so that you could go on with your lives. You didn't leave that possibility to the researchers whose months of work, and possibly career hopes, you destroyed.

You showed no special concern for the dismay you caused families with brain cancer and Alzheimer's.

Because those are people, and people don't matter.

And since people don't matter, it must be a matter of indifference to you whether you spent the next five years pursuing your interests, your loved ones, and your happiness, or sitting in a jail cell, celebrating the rats that got away.

America's Best-Loved Futurist ^(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://www. mfinley.com

(Pic: http://mfinley.com/mike.jpg )

Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995 Table of contents and sample chapters of this book... Just click on the book cover to order your signed copy for only $12.95. Table of contents and sample chapters of this book... Why Change Doesn't Work: Why Initiatives Go Wrong and How to Try Again and Succeed Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley Hardcover Just click on the book cover to order your signed copy for only $12.95. "This is the first treatise on change we've seen that is actually entertaining. The authors cover human and organizational barriers to change and change theories, and then take a tour of management theory that's guaranteed to upset every reader at one point or another." -- HR ONLINE Table of contents and sample chapters of this book...

Why not bookmark Mike's columns for your weekly enjoyment?

Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.

I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did it for free. But this writer is currently out of work, and a bit of revenue would gladden his heart. If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor Box" here. Just click the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks - Mike