Two issues of X-Men Unlimited in two weeks.  Such bounty.

Bafflingly, this is to all intents and purposes an extra issue of Uncanny X-Men, featuring that title's cast and written by that title's regular writer Chuck Austen.  It's the same length as a normal issue, so why not just run the damn thing in Uncanny and sell twice as many copies?  Seems a dreadful waste of money.

Anyway, the big subject of the day is animal rights.  When the X-Men find some neighbouring kids torturing animals, they stop them.  Because torturing animals is bad.  And...  yup, that's pretty much it.

Okay, that's a little harsh.  It's fairly obvious that Austen is trying to make a wider point about animal rights.  He opens with a lengthy quotation from Jeremy Bentham, in which Bentham seems to be rebutting the old nonsense that animals can't have rights because they don't have a sufficiently advanced intellect to have obligations.  This argument is total drivel, for the reasons Bentham gives.

As Bentham and Austen say, the moral question to ask is whether animals can suffer.  It's at this point that we hit a snag.

Few people would disagree that gratuitously torturing animals is a bad thing.  It's doubtful that there are all that many people out there reading this comic who spend their free time nailing a squirrel to a plank or chucking darts at a stoat, and that's the level we're dealing with here.  Vivisection is a separate matter.  Rightly or wrongly, it at least claims to be justified by reference to the greater good.  I am deliberately going to avoid getting any deeper into the merits of that argument.  The point is that since it at least claims to be justified by countervailing virtues, vivisection has no moral equivalence to the scenario presented here.

That leaves us with a story whose main point is to hammer home the idea that animals can suffer pain.  And yes, Austen sells that idea quite effectively.  The problem is that it's not really a moral viewpoint in itself.  Either they do or they don't.  Since the story assumes as a starting point that they suffer, wheeling out the telepaths to provide spurious evidence - complete with shameless anthropomorphism of the sort that the opening quotation declared irrelevant - it's hardly surprising that it reaches the conclusion that they suffer.

It's all a bit of a straw man, and directed towards a particularly unsubtle version of animal abuse which doesn't really get into the true animal rights debate.  Everybody already opposes the mistreatment of pet dogs, aside from the handful of psychos who actually do it.  It's quite an effective exercise in tugging at the heartstrings, but to the extent that it's trying to make a point about the animal rights debate, it misses the mark.  Really, it misses the entire field of debate.

Rating: B-

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