Spring Break
Letters to the Editor
Issue date: 2/13/09 Section: Commentary
An invitation to participate in HuskyTHON
I wanted to extend an invite to the DC readers to this year's HuskyTHON.
This is our campus' largest philanthropic event, involving nearly every student group on campus pledging 18 hours of their time to benefit the Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford.
On behalf of the board, I want to thank those who have already registered as dancers and those who have committed themselves to volunteering at our event. We are looking at potentially our biggest year yet, and this is due in part to your commitment in helping the Connecticut Children's patients and your Husky pride. See you all at HuskyTHON from Feb. 21 at 6 p.m. to Feb. 22 at 12 p.m. in the Hugh S. Greer Fieldhouse.
- Jessica Budnick, Executive Director, HuskyTHON 2009
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Supporting cause of animal rights is not a radical position
While Columnist George Maynard already counts himself as a proponent of animal welfare, I am confident that, if he learns the immensity of the suffering experienced by animals who are violently transformed into food and clothing, hunted and killed for sport, and mutilated in laboratories that he will not consider animal rights to be such a radical notion ("New OIRA head too radical over animal rights" Feb. 9).
Moral progress has always taken the form of expanding our circle of compassion; increasing the number of individuals whose interests we take seriously. It is time we acknowledge that animals are members of the moral community and that their suffering matters; that we cannot trade their most vital interests to satisfy our trivial desires. Animals have lives and interests of their own and they deserve to be respected.
It may seem strange to extend rights to animals upon first consideration, but it probably seems no stranger than the idea of extending rights to women did to previous generations.
- Ian Smith, Research Associate, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
Willimantic
I was disappointed to read The Daily Campus's recent piece on the appointment of Cass Sunstein as U.S. regulatory czar ("New OIRA head too radical over animal rights," Feb. 9).
Sunstein's selection represents a new dawn in American culture and politics in which people are taking seriously the interests of all thinking, feeling animals - human and nonhuman. And why shouldn't we? Evolution and empirical evidence demonstrate that humans, the fish who are suffocated at the end of a hook, the mice and rats abused in laboratories and the chickens crammed into cages and killed on factory farms all share the five basic senses and have conscious encounters in the world around them, including experiencing pleasure, pain and suffering.
Animals have their own lives, and those lives matter. It is a grave injustice to reduce the entirety of their existence to how they can be used to benefit others.
Treating others with respect and protecting those who are most vulnerable, no matter how different from us they may seem, is not "radical;" it's a moral imperative.
- Stacy Lopresti-Goodman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Psychology
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An open letter to Kellogg's
To whom it may concern,
I will no longer be purchasing Kellogg's brand products until the company reverses its decision to dump Michael Phelps as its spokesman. Many of your customers are proud, moral, otherwise law-abiding marijuana smokers, and with this action you have insulted every one of them, myself included.
Shame on you, Kellogg's. We're not all Oral Roberts or Nancy Reagan, but we are your customers, without whom your success could not be possible.
I've paid good money for your overpriced half-filled boxes of sugar corn, and I didn't do it so that you could turn molehills into mountains by disgracing a national hero for having the audacity to make his own reasoned judgment, rather than accept the government's, as to what can and cannot go into his body. Michael Phelps will find lucrative endorsements elsewhere, and may the market have mercy on your corporation.
- David Haseltine, Mansfield Center
I wanted to extend an invite to the DC readers to this year's HuskyTHON.
This is our campus' largest philanthropic event, involving nearly every student group on campus pledging 18 hours of their time to benefit the Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford.
On behalf of the board, I want to thank those who have already registered as dancers and those who have committed themselves to volunteering at our event. We are looking at potentially our biggest year yet, and this is due in part to your commitment in helping the Connecticut Children's patients and your Husky pride. See you all at HuskyTHON from Feb. 21 at 6 p.m. to Feb. 22 at 12 p.m. in the Hugh S. Greer Fieldhouse.
- Jessica Budnick, Executive Director, HuskyTHON 2009
- - - - - - - -
Supporting cause of animal rights is not a radical position
While Columnist George Maynard already counts himself as a proponent of animal welfare, I am confident that, if he learns the immensity of the suffering experienced by animals who are violently transformed into food and clothing, hunted and killed for sport, and mutilated in laboratories that he will not consider animal rights to be such a radical notion ("New OIRA head too radical over animal rights" Feb. 9).
Moral progress has always taken the form of expanding our circle of compassion; increasing the number of individuals whose interests we take seriously. It is time we acknowledge that animals are members of the moral community and that their suffering matters; that we cannot trade their most vital interests to satisfy our trivial desires. Animals have lives and interests of their own and they deserve to be respected.
It may seem strange to extend rights to animals upon first consideration, but it probably seems no stranger than the idea of extending rights to women did to previous generations.
- Ian Smith, Research Associate, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
Willimantic
I was disappointed to read The Daily Campus's recent piece on the appointment of Cass Sunstein as U.S. regulatory czar ("New OIRA head too radical over animal rights," Feb. 9).
Sunstein's selection represents a new dawn in American culture and politics in which people are taking seriously the interests of all thinking, feeling animals - human and nonhuman. And why shouldn't we? Evolution and empirical evidence demonstrate that humans, the fish who are suffocated at the end of a hook, the mice and rats abused in laboratories and the chickens crammed into cages and killed on factory farms all share the five basic senses and have conscious encounters in the world around them, including experiencing pleasure, pain and suffering.
Animals have their own lives, and those lives matter. It is a grave injustice to reduce the entirety of their existence to how they can be used to benefit others.
Treating others with respect and protecting those who are most vulnerable, no matter how different from us they may seem, is not "radical;" it's a moral imperative.
- Stacy Lopresti-Goodman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Psychology
- - - - - - - - -
An open letter to Kellogg's
To whom it may concern,
I will no longer be purchasing Kellogg's brand products until the company reverses its decision to dump Michael Phelps as its spokesman. Many of your customers are proud, moral, otherwise law-abiding marijuana smokers, and with this action you have insulted every one of them, myself included.
Shame on you, Kellogg's. We're not all Oral Roberts or Nancy Reagan, but we are your customers, without whom your success could not be possible.
I've paid good money for your overpriced half-filled boxes of sugar corn, and I didn't do it so that you could turn molehills into mountains by disgracing a national hero for having the audacity to make his own reasoned judgment, rather than accept the government's, as to what can and cannot go into his body. Michael Phelps will find lucrative endorsements elsewhere, and may the market have mercy on your corporation.
- David Haseltine, Mansfield Center
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