Animal Rights and Vermin

This is an image I saw about 7 or 8 years ago. It's against the use of fur in the fashion industry and I fully support the intended sentiment. What confused me at the time, however, was the decision to use a fox as the animal when it is vermin. Of course, actually thinking about it, the fox is a great choice. It would be highly hypocritical to get hold of the carcass of an animal that wasn't vermin for a poster promoting animal rights.

In much more recent news A.A. Gill has apparently made a blunder in admitting that he once shot a baboon on safari "to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone". This is a quite horrible reason to kill an animal and animal rights protestors are right to suggest that if you want to know what its like to shoot a human being, shooting your own leg might be a better choice. After all, unless A.A. Gill wants to feel like a sociopath killing an animal for absolutely no reason would be a rather daft way to go about it. Soldiers in an army do not kill innocent bystanders for no reason unless they are aiming for a court marshal.

However, what is not mentioned until the very end of the article is that the baboon A.A. Gill shot, far from being endangered, is actually local vermin in the area:

Baboons are seen as a threat by some people in Tanzania because they raid crops, and farmers who need to control their populations can apply for licences to kill them in some areas. They have been classed as vermin in the country and often live on the edges of farming areas.

Now I'd say that if an animal is vermin, killing that animal can not so easily be condemned as immoral. Would there really be the same outcry about cockroaches, rats or wasps?

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