THE New Heritage Dictionary defines murder as "the unlawful killing of one human being by another." In recent rallies around the country, the animal rights movement promoted a different definition for murder: manufacturing, selling and wearing fur coats.

Fur is not murder. It may be a needless fashion symbol, it may involve the death of many animals and it may even entail cruelty to these animals. But, because it does not involve the death of humans, it is not murder.

This distinction, while obvious enough, is of utmost importance in analyzing the growing strength of the animal rights movement in the United States. While some of its goals may be noble, and some of its means acceptable, its basic premise is faulty. Most of the animal rights groups gaining publicity and popularity in the United States do think that killing animals is murder because they believe that animals and humans have the exact same right to live free from undue pain and suffering.

This is a dangerous doctrine. Less than three weeks ago, the militant Animal Liberation Front (ALF) firebombed nine British stores which sell fur coats. In New York, Jewish furriers have been the targets of anti-fur vandalism which equates the manufacture of fur coats to Nazism.

Animal rights protests also endanger a field that is more important to human life than coats--animal experimentation. ALF, for example, recently claimed responsibility for sending Stanford University bomb threats because researchers there had successfully infected mice with the AIDS virus, and were testing possible treatments on them.

Two months ago in Connecticut, a woman was arrested for attempting to place a bomb under the parking spot of the president of the U.S. Surgical Corporation, which experiments on dogs to create surgical staples. ALF reportedly sent a Cambridge University researcher, who heads the physiology department, a potentially lethal letter bomb.

TO be fair, one cannot judge a movement by its extremists. Some members of animal rights groups denounce such violent tactics. And groups, such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, justifiably seek an end to excessive animal experimentation and cruelty, without equating human and animal life.

However, moderate animal rights groups are not gaining ground in the United States nearly as fast as the more radical ones. Membership in the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has grown from 8000 in 1983 to over 300,000 today, according to Carol Burnett, spokesperson for the group.

PETA considers itself a "non-violent" group. But Burnett clarified that, "If there is no [human] life involved, and if there is just property damage, we can't take a position against it... We don't consider liberating an animal from a lab violent."

PETA opposes all animal experimentation and suggests the use of human volunteers, instead. If animal experimentation were eliminated and scientific research were hurt as a consequence, the probable increase in human suffering and death would not be a big problem for PETA. "We don't have a right to exploit animals under some notion of 'human good," said Burnett.

The group's leader even explicitly equates animal life with human life. Alex Pacheco, chairman of PETA, was recently quoted as saying, "We feel that animals have the same rights as a retarded human child, because they are equal mentally in terms of dependence upon others."

THE day after the Armenian earthquake, when the world was flying millions of dollars in medical supplies to the devastated region, PETA spent $400 to fly lobsters from a tank in a Chinese restaurant in Rockville, Maryland to the coast of Maine. The lobsters were "liberated" by being dumped into the ocean.

This "rescue effort" reflects the perverted values of many involved in the animal rights movement today. Yes, excessive animal cruelty should be stopped. Yes, we should search for adequate substitutes to animal experimentation. And yes, potential fur coat buyers should be dissuaded from their purchase.

But no, animals are not and never will be equivalent to humans. They may be cute and furry, but they are not part of a group which can understand morality, can reason, can conceive of its own existence or can fully comprehend pain. Killing animals is not murder.