What’s with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), anyway? When they first started out, they seemed like a crazy fringe group. They liked to do stuff like break into science labs during the night to release guinea pigs from their cages, completely disregarding any human beings that might be hurt in the process. They then moved on from guinea pig and bunny rescues to spraying fur coats, which seemed a little bit more acceptable, in my mind, at least, even if it violated the sanctity of private property. Spraying fur coats didn’t put anyone’s life at risk.

I myself am practically a vegetarian, and I’ll admit I secretly admired PETA activists when they were going around New York spraying fur coats. Anyone who wears fur is vain as well as willfully oblivious to the cruelty that produced that fur, period. Long ago, fur was necessary for people living in northern climes in order to keep warm. Now, in an age of global warming and lots of wool, it’s a a stupid and ugly sign of luxury. Pat Nixon had it right, what with her Republican cloth coat. In the last couple of years, however, PETA seemed to have let up even on spraying coats and turned instead to publishing gruesome images of animal suffering caused by humans in order to get us to enact animal-protection laws. They seemed to have become almost mainstream, like the Humane Society.

As of today, however, PETA has gone back to their bonkers origins. They found it necessary to chastise President Obama for killing a fly during a White House interview with CNBC’s John Harwood. The president had deliberately let the bothersome critter settle on his left hand, waited just the right amount of time, and then … whack! Using his right hand, he proudly killed it with a single blow. Not bad, especially for a lefty. I’ve seen a couple of people do this maneuver, and always been rather impressed by it. Not PETA. They announced that they considered it cruel.

Unless you ascribe to Jainism, you’re probably like me and don’t think of flies as having souls. Still, for especially sensitive souls, PETA surely speaks truth. And generally speaking, killing anything, even a fly, incontrovertibly fits into the category of “the cruel.” It’s certainly not a kind or sweet thing to do to a creature. On the other hand, the category of the cruel frequently overlaps the category of the useful, and often the category of the beneficial — and therein lies the problem.

Most of us living in Western culture have come to terms with low-level cruelty, accepting the way it permeates life from top to bottom. We try to put our energy into preventing higher-level cruelties. Few of us have the outlook that sees souls in lowly flies, and it’s emotionally exhausting to give them too much consideration. We kill all sorts of things, rather mercilessly, all the time.

Our only redeeming feature as killers is that we rank our killings from the low and meaningless to the high and meaningful. If killing a fly could be shown to cause increased violence against higher-level animals, I’d agree with PETA. But killing a fly, although indeed a little cruel, is only that — a little cruel. It’s also a little tiny bit fun, not to mention a little tiny bit beneficial.

If PETA truly wants to be effective in making us care about cows, it would do better to keep quiet when we kill flies.