The working theory that police have leaked to the media of the Annie Le murder is that there was no romantic involvement between the two and no sexual motive, but that it was “workplace violence” precipitated by a series emails in which suspect Raymond Clark complained that Le wasn’t following protocols for the treatment of lab mice:

Along with the defensive wounds and the flunked lie detector test, investigators looking into the murder of Yale student Annie Le focused on a lab technician named Raymond Clark because of e-mails about the care of laboratory mice.

In the e-mails, Clark is said to criticize Le for not adhering to the protocols for tending the mice kept in the basement as part of her lab’s ongoing experiments.

Le is said to have responded in a conciliatory tone, promising to keep to the protocols. Investigators wonder if Clark was not satisfied, if resentment suddenly flared to rage, if as crazy as it may seem this was a case of mice and murder.

The Annie Le murder had piqued my curiosity originally because I lived in the area for a while, in Middletown in fact where Ray Clark was living with his girlfriend. But this new development is even more curious because it coincides with something I have noticed on the Web, a dark anti-human undercurrent dressed up in the self-righteous sanctimony of environmentalism but which is in reality nihilism and misanthropy at it’s most basic. More and more I see animal rights activists voicing calls for violence against humans.

Just yesterday I was watching a commercial for the Barnes Varmint Grenade bullet uploaded on YouTube when I saw this comment:

I would shoot that moron who was shooting at those animals with that bullet.

An odd sentiment. Prairie dogs are rodents whose “towns” are responsible for the broken legs of many another animal. They are also fast breeding pests that need to be controlled or they will overwhelm an environment. The human instinct to hunt is nature’s way to control animals like prairie dogs, and is more a part of respecting the natural world than slapping a P.E.T.A bumper sticker on the Volvo your parents pay for. The cult of “animal rights” that P.E.T.A. represents, however, doesn’t respect nature or our place in it. The call for animals to have human rights is not a call to elevate our treatment of animals at all but an effort to dehumanize us and make us targets for their ultimate goal, human extinction.

The “animal rights” cult is anti-nature. These same people de-claw their cats, feed their dogs vegetarian foods and promote legislation that leads to both human and animal starvation. But more telling, these extremists kill thousands of animals themselves. P.E.T.A. in fact kills over 95% of the animals they take in every year, and uses the money they take in to supposedly care for these animals to fund domestic terror groups that have firebombed the home of scientists, threatened researchers with death and even killed ranched animals as a statement against our “cruelty.”

The animal rights movement is clearly disinterested in creating a “cruelty free” world, which even if it was possible would be antithetical to nature. What they are interested in is creating a world where morality is redefined to accept the nihilistic anti-humanism they have embraced as right. To the animal rights movement, people are not simply worth the same as animals, they are worth less. This is a powerful belief to adopt because it means that killing humans is not just acceptable to save animals, but it’s less reprehensible than any action you could take otherwise.

But this isn’t to say that Ray Clark was some rabid A.L.F. member. It is to show how pernicious this animal rights philosophy can become when we allow it to become mainstream. Understand that if the police theory is correct here, Ray Clark murdered a woman just days before her wedding day because she didn’t treat mice to his liking. Mice.

As a child I owned a cat who was quite sweet with me but was known to be vicious among my family (she was a scratcher). When the house next door to us burned down it became infested with field mice who sometime ventured into my family’s house. I think I was 6 or 7 the first time she brought me a mouse, laid on my pillow with it’s middle torn out. Soon she learned that we were throwing the carcasses out and we began finding mutilated mice hidden under throw rugs, in shoes and everywhere you wouldn’t want to find a mouse that looked like it was a hapless teen in a Friday the 13th movie.

I also had another cat who was a gentle and docile creature. He once broke a mouse’s back and began torturing the creature by “playing” with it. It was the only time this gentle giant of a cat ever did anything that could remotely considered mean by our standards. But it wasn’t cruel, and neither was my other cat slaughtering mice. It was simply nature, which is beyond human conception of morality. In nature mice were born to breed and die, often at the hands of predators including us. That we may kill them now in an attempt to cure cancer is irrelevant, we kill them all the time as nature intended. I learned that from owning cats.

Ray Clark, if the police theory of the crime is correct, learned that perceived mistreatment of these tiny rodents was sin enough to kill for. I would put forward he didn’t learn this from nature, and I would hate to see what he would have done to a cat he owned that joyously shredded some hapless mouse. Clark internalized the message we allow P.E.T.A. to mainstream into our schools and pop culture, that there is a moral equivalence between mistreating animals and killing a woman, that Annie Le’s life was no more valuable than the mice she was experiment on.

How many Clarks are out there even now, thinking that hunters, fishermen, trappers and scientists deserve to die for their “cruelty”? More importantly, when will we stop allowing the “animal rights” cult to create them?