Deer should know when they're conquered

Animal rights activists struck another blow for... animal... freedom in Scotland, cutting fencing surrounding a local deer farm. They must have been terribly disappointed when their rescuees failed to make a break for the sweet air of freedom, preferring to stay and be slaughtered in comfort.

As always, fruitless and counterproductive animal rights attacks like these make me ponder several questions regarding the gullibility of man and our changing relationship with nature:

• Why don't animal rights activists ever attempt to set wildcats or bears free from their enforced captivity in zoos?
  
• If our responsibility extends to protecting animals from being mistreated or eaten, what sort of responsibility do we have to wild animals to protect them from starving to death or being eaten by other animals?
  
• I feel like the vast majority of civilized societies used to view nature as something vicious and violent, to be tamed and surpressed. As Mr. Burns expressed so eloquently in The Simpsons: "Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese!" Certainly, it is better, even necessary, to be magnanimous in victory. But that shouldn't lessen the fundamental necessity that we stay on top of the poison monkeys.
• I would have thought that the inhabitants of Britain would have learned their lesson about animal release raids after the success of 28 Days Later. I mean, the deer could have been infected with Rage.
• Or Chronic Wasting Disease.

Bottom line? If someone started rounding up ALF activists to slaughter them, I'd probably cut the fences around them. But I wouldn't herd them out, either.