Ah, psychology, PC, and social Darwinism. Recently, as readable at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/ramdas_lamb/2010/06/animal_rights_and_human_wrongs.html , the Washington Post carried a Hindu professor who says naughty, rotten, mean-spirited folks in the Abrahamic religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) insist animals have no souls and thus "abuse" them in ways...the animals themselves do.

Now, I am not attacking Hinduism at all, just the opinion of a professor who happens to be a Hindu interposing that religion with undertones implying Abrahamic faiths ipso facto cannot ever truly be a friend of Hindus. In fact, I appreciate and respect the Hindu way of respecting ALL life on dharma and karma basis...do not mistreat a single atom, mite, ant, elephant, dog, human being, or anything at all in earthly existence. To me, this is a satisfactory and non-exhaustive place Hindus and Abrahamics meet in metaphysics.

The relevant professor, however, doesn't bother much noting that Abrahamics, Hindus, and gosh just about everyone sees that animals rapaciously eat each other, destroy humans and their children even if beasts aren't rabid or provoked, and fight each other for epigenetic reasons not known in but antithetical to human metaphysical circles...including Hinduism. Then there are all those Humboldt squids, great white sharks, and others which just eat anything that moves, inflict fatal "are you tasty enough" maimings on humans and other animals, walruses who will crush kayakers just for being in the same water (ditto hippos)...nope, the animal and aquatic world surely doesn't offer much in the way of supporting that earth's non-human fauna approach each other and humans with the same kind of soul humans display.

Thus, our relevant professor can only mean to say, on the modern "I have a degree...I am above question or proof!" doctrine, that humans are the same as animals in that HUMANS have no souls or souls capaable of more than animals, and rightly should be disregarded or handled in any pecking order governments may deign to mete out.

Unless a government fund- dependent educator (and his colleagues) misses the gaping disparity between human and non-human animus, together with fact animals have no capacity for developing propaganda.