Wednesday 6 November 2013

False Equivalencies


“What are ‘pets’?”
“Um… they’re animals you don’t eat.”
“I thought those were called, ‘children’?”

That is my favourite dialogue from the animated film, “The Croods”.

I thought of it recently when the incident of a woman putting her pet puppy to sleep (for being overly aggressive) resulted in an explosion of comments on Facebook. Many commenters asked something along the lines of “what if her children were ‘overly aggressive’? Would she put them down too?”

Which is an example of “False Equivalencies”.

A puppy is not the same as a child.