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Sue Kedgley is calling for a ban on the importation of dog and cat fur. She’s a clever politician, using a time-honoured technique of prompting emotional acceptance of an idea before asking for reasoned agreement. Why? Because what she’s saying only works on the emotional level.
So here’s the situation; Kedgley, in a statement entitled ‘Stop trade based on Cruelty to Cats and Dogs‘, announces a members bill to amend the Customs Act. You can read her arguments on the Green website.
She’s pushing a great emotional button. Kiwis feel that farming dogs and cats (for either fur or meat or ear wax, or whatever other disgusting fake medicinal quackery) is reprehensible. They regard it as unethical, immoral, illegal or just plain yucky. They don’t want to buy the stuff, and they don’t want to be hoodwinked into buying it — for example, being told they are buying possum fur. It’s insufficient for it to be illegal to mislabel an item; New Zealanders just don’t want the stuff in the country.
So, what to do? Ban it at the border? Yeah! Make a law! But this is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, surely. I mean, how bad is the problem in NZ really? I want to know. But can’t find out; neither NZPA via Stuff (pathetic reporting), nor the Humane Society (a US lobby group, and the prompt for Kedgley’s statement) nor the Fur free Alliance (the information source for the Humane Society) tells me.
What’s really going on here is a Green MP cleverly using an emotional stalking horse to draw people in to potentially agreeing with a larger set of ideas (in this case, meat market=bad, etc).
I’m not buying it.
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