A COMMUNITY gives $1 million so that a whale can be moved to safe water. A businessman spends a reported $125 million on six attempts to circle the earth in a balloon.
No creature should be left to suffer. But would the whale have been injured if it had remained where it was? Maybe, maybe not. Might it not have found its own way to safe water?
And there is a related factor: while frequent, extraordinary efforts are made to save animals and plants, humans are suffering and life in the womb is being destroyed wholesale.
Embryonic life is, after all, human life with potential, not merely potential human life. Why is it left to comparative few to try to save it when so much effort goes into saving non-human life (as desirable as this is)?
And what has the balloonist added to human knowledge or wellbeing? This adventure was surely solely for his personal satisfaction. Maybe he gives to charity, but if he had not been so fixated on this adventure, he could have given a lot more – to health care in the Third World, training for jobless youth … The list of real needs is endless.
RAY OWEN
Acting editor
