As far as our western, European, world is concerned, this “sense of separation” has in fact been attacked and weakened in modern times not by fantasy but by scientific theory. Not by stories of centaurs or werewolves or enchanted bears, but by the hypotheses (or dogmatic guesses) of scientific writers who classed Man not only as “an animal”—that correct classification is ancient—but as “only an animal.” There has been a consequent distortion of sentiment. The natural love of men not wholly corrupt for beasts, and the human desire to “get inside the skin” of living things, has run riot. We now get men who love animals more than men; who pity sheep so much that they curse shepherds as wolves; who weep over a slain war-horse and vilify dead soldiers. It is now, not in the days when fairy-stories were begotten, that we get “an absence of the sense of separation.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, (Note G)
For the record, I’m all for the careful and proper stewardship of our environment and resources. Cruelty to animals is still cruelty and it is evil. But Man is not just an animal. From any standpoint – philosophical, biological, political – man MUST be seen as a separate sort of creation or all sorts of existential trouble will brew. Man is made in the image of God. Jesus became a man, not just a clever homosapien.
I went to church with a girl in college who now works for PETA. Sorry. I’m afraid she is very confused. It is a difficult atmosphere to recite the Creed in and have it mean anything worth living for.