Tag: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

PETA's Latest Follies

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is back to its bizarre ways (if I didn’t know better, I’d swear
this group had been taken over by hunters looking to discredit the animal
rights movement). In mid-September PETA showed up to protest at the American
Meat Institute convention and held a “human barbecue.” It barbecued
tofu in the shape of a “cattleman.”

“People eat other animals,
why not humans?” asked PETA President Ingrid Newkirk in a press release.
“The notion of eating any animals should be as preposterous as cannibalism.
So eating a hamburger is the same as roasting up Uncle Bob.”

If that wasn’t enough, PETA attacked
ads featuring the National Football League’s John Randle, who plays defensive
tackle for the Minnesota Vikings. The commercial, paid for by Nike, shows
Randle making a small football jersey emblazoned with a No. 4 similar to
the one that Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre wears. Randle then
practices chasing the chicken around the field (Favre is known for his
ability to take off running if he can’t find a receiver to throw
to). The chicken keeps getting away from Randle until the finale where
the audience sees Randle standing over a grill where he is preparing chicken.

PETA, of course, is horrified that
the ad is running and wants it pulled immediately. In fact, PETA claims
that “the commercial mimics what psychologists now see as a sign
of criminal mentality, in that pleasure is apparently derived from trauma
inflicted on a vulnerable animal.” According to Newkirk, “Young
people who see Randle as a role model may learn to associate the terror
of defenseless chickens as a form of amusement.”

So eating hamburger is cannibalism
and chasing a chicken is a sure sign that one is a sociopathic criminal.

I know a lot of anti-animal rights
people despise PETA, but in my opinion they are our best ally. No single
person or group does more to discredit animal rights and show just how
bizarre the animal rights agenda is than PETA.

New skin test to reduce animal use

A recently formed interagency governmental
committee approved a new skin test for irritating chemicals that will
reduce, but not eliminate, the number of animals used for such testing.

The new test checks products to
see if they cause contact dermatitis. Currently contact dermatitis tests
use guinea pigs and cost American industry up to $1 billion annually to
perform. The new test uses mice and requires only one-third to one-half
as many animals.

The test also reduces the level
of animal suffering. In the old test, chemicals were repeatedly applied
to guinea pigs several times and researchers would then wait for the animals
to develop skin irritations. The new mice protocol calls for the
application of the chemicals, but after 6 days the mice are killed and
their lymph nodes examined for antibodies indicative of contact dermatitis.

William Stokes of the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and chair of the interagency
committee that gave its approval and passed the test on to the FDA for
formal approval, said the new test combines the best of both worlds.

We think it’s a win-win situation. These new methods typically use
fewer animals, no animals or cause less pain and distress … but they
also incorporate new science and technology to provide more accurate
tests that do a better job of protecting public health.

In an odd move, even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals endorsed the new test.

“We support any new test,”
said Mary Beth Sweetland, PETA’s director of research, investigation and
rescue. “Everything is relative – using a mouse lymph node beats
blinding an animal for months. A skin sensitivity test can last for any
number of hours, weeks or months.”

Source:

“U.S. scientists endorse more human lab tests,” Maggie Fox, Reuters,
Sept. 21, 1998.

PETA continues protests against the Weinermobile Tour

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has gained itself a lot
of attention by sponsoring on ongoing campaign against the Oscar Meyer
Weinermobile. The Weinermobile is a 27-foot long vehicle shaped like a
hot dog. Oscar Meyer sends it to different cities to promote its products
and audition kids for an upcoming ad campaign. And at almost all stops
it’s been met by animal rights protesters.

Carrying signs with slogans
like “Pigs are friends not food” and occasionally featuring
protesters in pig costumes (how appropriate), PETA recites its litany
about the supposed health risks of eating meat, the “torture”
that animals slaughtered for food are forced to undergo, and occasionally
attacks on Oscar Meyer for “exploiting” kids. Much of the rhetoric,
in fact, resembles the rhetoric used against the tobacco industry. As
PETA’s Bruce Friedrich put it, “The Weinermobile is the meat industry
version of Joe Camel enticing kids into a practice that may well kill
them later in life.”

A typical example of the heated
rhetoric was provided by Brenda Sloss, a director of the St. Louis Animal
Rights Team, who told reporters when the Weinermobile visited St. Louis,

They [kids] deserve to know the truth. The truth is Oscar Meyer is
in reality a dead pig that has gone through torture … Every time you
bite into a hot dog you are biting into pesticides, animal feces, ground-up
animal parts and antibiotics that have been pumped into the animals.

Friedrich seems to think that
the Weinermobile campaign is “raising awareness” and he’s probably
right — like PETA’s recent claim that milk is a racist drink, however,
the effect is probably to alert the public to just how extreme PETA’s
agenda is. As Claire Regan, manager of corporate communications for Oscar
Mayer put it,

Kids love it [the Weinermobile], and we do the auditions like Hollywood.
Hot dogs are fun food; they bring people together at cookouts, fairs
and ballparks. People are out there to have fun. What happens is that
parents get upset when activists yell at them. Parents don’t want someone
making their child feel guilty because they don’t believe in a vegetarian
diet, and they don’t want their kids yelled at. Parents feel they have
rights to choose how they live.

Well said.

Source:

What’s The Beef? St. Louis, August 1998.

PETA pushing fishing ban, hermit crab ban, deer slaughter ban, and "Monkey Shorts" ban

On July 17 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent Gil the Fish
to lead a protest against fishing in Watertown, New York. In a press release
PETA gushed on about the horrors of fishing. “Fish feel pain — they
have neurochemical systems like humans and sensitive nerve endings in
their lips and mouths. They begin to die slowly of suffocation the moment
they are pulled out of the water.”

As Ingrid Newkirk summed up PETAÂ’s
view, “Animal suffering of any kind is not a sport.” PETA wants
a national ban on fishing enacted.

If it is wrong for fish to
suffer is it okay to shoot bears and birds that might eat fish?

In other PETA-related news

  • PETA urged people to send letters to Sundial Beach and Tennis Resort
    on Sanibal Island, Florida, because an “Ecocenter” there sells
    hermit crabs. According to a PETA release, selling the crabs is “disrespectful
    and ecologically unsound.”

  • PETA demanded Sea Pines, South Carolina, abandon plans to kill 200
    deer who are destroying plants in the area (selling crabs is unsound,
    destroying flora is perfectly acceptable.)

  • In a bizarre twist, PETA wants Turner Broadcasting Systems (TBS)
    to stop running a series of short spots called “Monkey Shorts.”
    The shorts feature chimpanzees and orangutans dressed up as different
    characters who move their lips and move around the screen as a human
    voice over plays. The shorts are shown between TBS feature movies. According
    to PETA, “even the most considerate of trainers cannot compensate
    for the anxiety and frustration of such an unnatural life in captivity.”

Sources:

Giant “fish” to tackle fishing in Watertown. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Press Release, July 16, 1998.

Help stop the sale of hermit crabs in Florida. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Press Release, July 1998.

Help protest the slaughter of deer at Hilton Head, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Press Release, July 1998.

Urge TBS to cancel ‘Monkey Shorts,’. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Press Release, July 1998.

Is Milk Racist?

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals made headlines recently after sending Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson a letter asking him to change the state’s official beverage from milk to something “more healthful and humane” such as soy “milk.” PETA’s letter was filled with the typical animal rights nonsense about milk — that it’s “liquid meat” that causes everything from heart disease to cancer to osteoporosis. As PETA’s Bruce Friedrich summed it up, “If the milk industry did not spendso much money promoting milk, it would be listed as a health risk.”

Pretty standard fare for PETA except that beyond its alleged health risks, PETA Chairman Alex Pacheco claimed that Wisconsin’s selection of milk as its state beverage might also be racist. See if you can follow the logic here.

Some members of minority groups are to one degree or another lactose intolerant — most mildly so. Therefore choosing milk as a state beverage is racist or as Pacheco put it, “a white choice in more ways than one.”

It is because of proclamations like this that Wisconsin Farm Bureau spokesman Tom Thieding pretty accurately describes PETA’s predicament. “I think they overplay their hand,” Thieding told Scripps Howard. “I don’t think the general public takes them seriously, especially when they do things like this and shout down children at Oscar Mayer events [PETA has been sponsoring protests of Oscar Mayer’s Weinermobile].”

Source:

“Animal-rights group PETA attacks milk as ‘liquid meat'” – Amy Rinard, Scripps Howard, July 23, 1998.

PETA gets religion

To those opposed to animal rights,
the claims made by groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals often seemed to have a religious
overtone about them — now with its new www.jesus-online.com web site, PETA confirms those suspicions.

As the organization put it in a
press release, “PETA has enlisted ‘Jesus’ as its newest
Vegetarian Campaign spokesperson and hopes to make Christians the latest
veggie converts.”

PETA maintains that Jesus was a
vegetarian and that “Jesus’ vegetarianism can be discerned through
extra-Biblical accounts and sound reason.” What sort of sound reasoning?

Well according to PETA, “if
Jesus had not been a vegetarian, there would be accounts of Jesus eating
lamb at Passover.” This is a classic example of an appeal to ignorance
(concluding that a lack of evidence supports some particular position).
Of course when Biblical evidence is uncomfortable to its claims, PETA
resorts to claiming New Testament stories are mere symbolism The tale
of Jesus multiplying fish is relegated to mere “symbolism.”
If Jesus was so opposed to eating of animal flesh, however, it’s hard
to imagine why he or his disciples would choose such an image — obviously
whoever wrote that story at the very least knew his readers wouldn’t be
shocked at the idea of a fish-eating Jesus. PETA conveniently ignores
other contrary evidence, including the story of Jesus casting demons into
swine and then driving the swine into a lake (an early animal experiment?).

PETA members went to the recent
Southern Baptist Convention and tried to convert their members to vegetarianism
and animal rights philosophy. Hell, the Southern Baptist Convention finally apologized
for its pro-slavery views just a few years ago and recently passed a resolution
that women should “submit” to their husbands — sound like perfect
recruits for PETA’s cause.