Letters: Animal cruelty, Hard to read, Handling M. bovis

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Animal cruelty
Dear me, Margaret Harold, I did not expect to change your strongly held convictions on rodeos. I know how you feel. I arrived here from London in 1963 with many of the same ideas. But contact with animals and farmers changed them over time.

My only aim is to persuade some of the other people who sign the endless petitions to think carefully before they sign. There still are many instances of very bad cruelty to animals, which, in my view, are so much worse than allowing fit, healthy horses and bulls to buck their riders off.

For instance ... in Whanganui, those who set fire to kittens, then leave them, half dead, in a box outside a pet store. I know that other towns in NZ have volunteer groups who patrol the streets at night, always in touch with police, who have caught such incidents.
Margaret, I applaud your energy and dedication to preventing animal cruelty but would wish it to be directed to better causes.

Sara Dickon
Whanganui

Hard to read
Am I correct in assuming that the Chronicle is now being printed by the same outfit that prints the telephone book?

Allan Anderson
Brunswick

Handling m.bovis
The point of Harete Hipango's column of June 14 appears to be that the MPI decision regarding M. bovis has been protracted. I wonder if she has taken the time to consider how this disease has become such a serious national predicament.

It has its origin in the previous National Government's policy of underfunding public services, such as MPI and NAIT, seriously impacting their ability to manage biosecurity threats. For example, the report into NAIT was commissioned in 2016, but it is highly critical findings of the system didn't see the light of day until the new Government stepped in to properly manage NZ's biosecurity risks.

The current Government has, to date, increased MPI funding for the M. bovis response by $85m, appointed 50 new frontline Incident Control Point managers and is proactively working with farmers to eradicate the disease. Early indications are positive, with the number of properties with confirmed infections reducing from 39 to 36 as a result of several properties completing the culling and disinfection process.

Eradication will be a difficult process and is in no way guaranteed. However, instead of standing on the sideline hurling contradictory claims of delay. I suggest the Whanganui MP represent her electorate more constructively by working co-operatively with Government and the farming community to help bring this disease under control.

Tim Easton
College Estate

Muddled thinking
Rod Anderson (letters, June 8) having conceded the correctness of my observations on the availability and practice of gay parenting, constructs the amazing and ridiculous notion of scientifically engineered three-legged runners as an imagined parallel, and asks whether I and "my ilk" would find such "acceptable".

Losh, laddie, put that bottle of scotch awa. The professional and political gatekeepers of scientific research will long since have proscribed such mischief.

My source on genetic "gayness" was The Gene, An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, Bodley Head, 2016, see pp370-379. Mukherjee — a cancer physician and researcher, stem cell biologist and cancer geneticist, is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia Uni., and a graduate of Stanford, Oxford and Harvard universities.

Mr Anderson seems a bit muddled in the religious area. Perhaps he is unaware that the Koran is in large part taken from the Judaic (Abrahamic/Hebraic) text which "we" appropriated as the "Old Testament".

From that text, especially Leviticus, both Islam and Christianity derived their cruellest and bloodiest laws and in both cases their emergent civilisations patterned their notions of muddled law and morality.

The development of the Age of Reason and of the Enlightenment were the key contributors to the evidenced-based changes in social, political and legal attitudes and practice; the overthrow of feudalism and absolute monarchy; the development of various forms of democratic government; amelioration of cruel and unjust law and punishment (slavery, capital and corporal punishment,so-called "hard labour",etc.) and the modern, non-biblical bases of our "mostly peaceful ad ordered society".

Mr Anderson needs to do much more "research" to overthrow the erroneous convictions he currently espouses on the basis of simplistic and partisan notions.

Russ Hay
Whanganui

Euthanasia debate
At the recent evening debate on the Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide Bill there was a lot of discussion on whether or not it's OK to help someone to kill themselves before old age or a disease takes it course. It was said by the proponent of the bill that in putting the document together he had looked at the subject from a legal, moral and social perspective.

Well and good, but in my mind there was a glaring omission. Matters of life and death and whether it's right to help someone else kill them must surely also be looked at from a theological perspective.

Our theological perspective can only come from one reliable source, and that is the Bible. From the perspective of the Bible, euthanasia violates the commandment "you shall not murder" (Exodus 20:13). The taking of human life — for whatever motive — is forbidden in the Bible except in clearly defined circumstances which include justifiable war, self-defence and capital punishment. Societies that have gone beyond these margins have opened the door to unintended but tragic consequences.

For example, the involuntary euthanasia which occurred in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.

Since God created us and redeems us, we ought to acquiesce to God's will rather than assert our own wills. Because we bear the image of God. Life is sacred in every state of its existence, in sickness or in health, in the womb, in infancy, in adolescence, in maturity, in old age and even in the process of dying itself.

So, from a theological perspective, we are directed to choose life for ourselves and others and offer to the dying not poisons and a ghastly death but neighbourly love (i.e. the best possible palliative care) and the hope of eternal life.

Hans Vaatstra
Whanganui East