Anthropocentricity?
Following months of fruitless search on Loch Ness, our two inveterate cryptozoologists suddenly explode into action. "Look! There's Nessie! Quick! Shoot her!"
I found Paul McCarthy's article on cryptozoology and its adherents (The Scientist, Jan. 11, 1993, page 1) fascinating-- until the final sentences: "And then there is always the possibility that some hunter will bring down a Bigfoot. `Bingo, I'm vindicated,' says [cryptozoologist Grover] Krantz."
Does Bigfoot (or Nessie or Mokele-Mbembe) have absolutely no inherent value beyond the vindication of cryptozoologists? Incipient anthropocentricity seems the sour note in McCarthy's symphony of curiosity. Will history find Krantz's full professorship an adequate justification for Bigfoot's demise? Why not drain Loch Ness or defoliate the ". . . 50,000-square- mile swamp in the People's Republic of the Congo"?
DONALD J. BARNES
Director
National Anti-Vivisection Society
