his article page collects daily update mentions of PETA, AKA "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals", usually generated by a news item about animals.

Personally, I like PETA, or I'm at least glad they exist.  I don't agree with a lot of their ends, or their means, but I do agree with some and like how balls-out they are in their tactics.  But mostly I like them because they stage ridiculous stunts, often involving nude female models, that score them incredible amounts of free media coverage, and I have to respect that, even when it gets tiresome from time to time.

More recent additions to this page are added at the top.

December 25, 2003

If you want to read something that will really make you wonder why you still eat beef (assuming you do) check out the PETA page on mad cow disease.

Doesn’t the government protect the meat supply?

Because the infected cow was raised for dairy production, she had lived long enough to show symptoms of the disease. Most cows are killed before they turn 2 years old, and before they become symptomatic; no one would know whether they were infected with spongy brain disease. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) admits that it only tested about 20,000 cows for BSE last year—a statistically insignificant percentage of the approximately 40 million cows slaughtered annually.

But for real fun and laughs on the PETA site, you have to check out their comic-book style pamphlet, Your Mommy Kills Animals!  Besides the hilariously over-the-top cover illustration of a manic housewife wielding a butcher knife against a struggling, anthropomorphized bunny, it contains such comic gems as:

But how would you feel it someone took away your kitty or puppy, stomped on their head, and ripped their skin off their bodies?

...just so your greedy mommy can have that fur coat to show off in when she walks the streets.

In the forest, nasty men in boots catch animals with traps that have metal claws that snap shut on animals' legs. Ouch! Some animals bite off their own paws to get away! Mommy foxes do this because they want to get back to their babies to feed the, but they usually die anyway and their babies slowly stave to death, scared and all alone. Trapped animals who don't escape from the traps get stomped to death by the nasty men.

I like the part where mommy sounds like a street corner whore, and the bit about the nasty men in boots.  When did boots become a symbol of evil?  I would never wear fur, but I like boots.  Leather ones too.  Hope my feet don't get holes and rot away like my brain would if I kept eating hamburgers.

November 20, 2003

The ad features the crass puppet Triumph the Insult Comic dog from Late Night with Conan O'Brien urging pet owners to spay or neuter their animals. The barb came from Triumph, but PETA allowed the ad because of an interview Aiken gave to Rolling Stone Magazine in June where he said he didn't like cats.

"There's nothing worse to me than a house cat. When I was about sixteen, I had a kitten and ran over it. Seeing that cat die, I actually think that its spirit has haunted me. I wasn't afraid of cats before. But now they scare me to death," Aiken told Rolling Stone.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has delayed a new ad campaign with the slogan "Get Neutered, It Didn't Hurt Clay Aiken," while it waits to see if Aiken will apologize for negative comments he made about cats, PETA officials said Tuesday.

[PETA] said if Aiken will post a message on his Web site urging pet owners to spay or neuter their animals, and give an interview for PETA's Web site, the ad campaign will be modified to "Cut 'em off. They don't taste that great anyway."

October 30, 2003

A hot debate topic in New Zealand is the pending introduction of genetically modified food and animal stock, with a strong Luddite community protesting it very strongly. I don't care so much about the issue, it was just their very clever and creepy advertising imagery that caught my eye.

New Zealand's debate over Genetic Modification (GM) has returned to centre stage as a moratorium on releasing GM organisms into the environment expires.

The New Zealand Government has said the moratorium's ending on Thursday would not mean a rash of GM releases. But in a nation dependent on agriculture and simultaneously proud of its green credentials, opposition is not fading away. Some protesters have gone to dramatic lengths to make their point. Mothers against Genetic Engineering, led by one of the former Thompson Twins, Alannah Currie, has produced a dramatic billboard showing a woman with four breasts being milked.

It's quite a clever poster, even if it has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue, and the certainty that this is no doubt the ultimate sexual fantasy for any number of zoophile men out there is sort of a bonus point.

I've never been really sure where the opposition to genetically engineered foods comes from.  Pretty much everything animal or vegetable that's in use in the world today is greatly mutated from how it was hundreds or thousands of years ago, and most of the changes are due to human intervention.  Selective breeding, cross breeding, isolating bloodlines, and so on; that's what turned wild wolves into the hundreds of ridiculous dog breeds we see today, and what turned those little pea-sized wild strawberries into the succulent baby's fist-sized fruits we eat today, to present just two quick examples.

Are people unaware of that?  Or is it just that they think it's okay when Farmer Bob crossbreeds his orange trees with grapefruit seeds to produce larger and more succulent oranges, so long as it's not being done in a lab, with test tubes?

Of course the G.E. stuff that people really object to is splicing genes and combining DNA from very different things, like putting animals genes into fruit or vegetables.  I've never seen any credible, scientific evidence that eating such things presents a health problem for humans, but I've also not read up on the subject very deeply. And even the staunchest proponent of G.E. food research must admit that there's little in the way of long term testing of the safety of such mutated food products, if only because the technology hasn't existed for that long.

And anyway, I don't really want to get into that debate at this point, since I'm uninformed about it and don't so much care one way or the other; I just liked their promo picture.  You know PETA is kicking themselves for not creating this bit of shock imagery first.

March 5, 2003

Generally speaking, I support PETA. I'm not a member or a donor or anything, but I'm mostly a vegetarian, and I'm well informed about the horrors of commercial agribusiness (which is why I'm mostly a vegetarian, since I don't want to eat meat that's produced how it is in the US.)  I also would never wear or purchase fur for someone, since I think it's needless cruelty and I don't like the look of it anyway.  And yes, I own several leather garments.  *cough*

Anyway, that being said, their new ad campaign is outrageous. If you haven't seen it yet, the ads are all comparing commercial raising of livestock to Nazi concentration camps.  Jewish leaders are not amused, though one of the head guys at PETA is Jewish and says he lost relatives in the Holocaust.

"The Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, debuted this week in California and will make a national tour.

The display is a set of eight 6-foot-by-10-foot panels showing photographs of Holocaust victims — emaciated men, crowds of people being forced onto trains, children behind barbed wire, heaps of human bodies — set next to similar images of cattle, pigs and chickens.

The Anti-Defamation League denounced the project and PETA's appeal for support from the Jewish community as "outrageous, offensive and taking chutzpah to new heights."

Here's the picture, and yes, the mother desperately clinging to her baby as if fleeing Nazi Stormtroopers is a nice touch.

Funny that it's in San Diego, in Balboa Park.  I spent many days of my childhood jumping bikes and skateboards down the very steps you see to the right, as well as playing on the fountain you see in the background.

True, it's brilliant at getting public notice; as me writing this shows.  Well on second thought, it's not like this is a major stop for most people to get their news, nor am I all that likely to write about major news stories.

Okay, their Holocaust ads being the lead story on a lot of news sites and broadcasts proves that they are great at getting public notice and attention.

Anyway, they are getting attention, and they are hardcore about this.  They don't mean it as a joke or a thought provoker, they (some of them, anyway) really think that killing animals to consume their tasty, crispy flesh, is as bad as the Nazis murdering Jews by the million.

Here is the PETA site, MassKilling.com, about this advertising campaign.  As the URL should tip you off, it's not a place of friendly persuasion.  I do like their attitude on it, at least for the boundless optimism.

Decades from now, what will you tell your grandchildren when they ask you whose side you were on during the “animals’ holocaust”? Will you be able to say that you stood up against oppression, even when doing so was considered “radical” or “unpopular”? Will you be able to say that you could visualize a world without violence and realized that it began at breakfast?

I feel quite safe in saying that vegetarianism will never be more than a fringe movement, and that meat-eaters will always be the vast majority of people.  I'm not exactly happy about this; I would at least like to see (almost) everyone give up red meat.  Cows are very unhealthy to eat, and I am not pleased at my tax dollars and insurance dollars going to pay for the angioplasties and triple bypasses and nurse care for stroke victims after those people largely brought it on themselves with their crappy fatty diets.  But people like to eat meat, it's tasty (at least while you have the taste for it) and the vast majority of people will never see animals as anywhere near the equivalent of humans in their rights to life.

And these new PETA ads are so hardcore and intentionally shocking/offensive that I would bet they backfire.  I can't see anyone really being shocked to their core at a sudden realization that they, by supporting chicken consumption, are just as bad as the Nazis were.

I can see a lot of people being pissed off and ordering a T-bone just to toast PETA with every succulent bite. I was almost motivated to go and get a chicken sandwich last night while I was thinking about this topic. And I'm not even Jewish!

February 18, 2003

The models would be funny, in their somewhat flat-assed shivering state, but the kid squatting down for a closer look from behind is what makes it really funny.

It's also ironic that with the last PETA shot of freezing models I pondered why there is never a rear view, and then here we are, just a few days later. It appears they are done with their sign waving, and are putting on their coats?

A young boy falls behind anti-fur protestors Holly Fraser (L) and Tammy Tawadros (R) while skating on the Rideau Canal, in Ottawa, February 17, 2003. The women were body-painted with leopard spots to relay their message that only animals should wear fur. REUTERS/Jim Young

 

This shot appears to be earlier in the sequence, as the brunette takes off her coat and gets the sign ready.  The woman to her left in the trench coat is the other model, you can see her yellow ankle just barely.  I like the other people on the bench, who are apparently just real people, uninvolved in the anti-fur demonstration, and here these two women are suddenly topless in the ice rink next to them.

Anti-fur protestor Tammy Tawadros (L) undresses beside skaters on the Rideau Canal, in Ottawa, February 17, 2003. Two women were body painted with leopard spots to relay their message that only animals should wear fur. REUTERS/Jim Young

February 13, 2003

Peta has the best PR gimmicks.  One thing I always wonder is why there aren't ever photos from the other angles.  I mean it's always a topless model with a goat or a sign or a snake or some damn thing between her nipples and a worldwide audience.  Yet there is never a photograph released with a side or rear view?

Models for PETA ( People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) wearing strategically placed pink hearts with the message 'Fur Out, Love In', climb into a bed in front of Toronto's City Hall to bring their anti-fur message to consumers in time for Valentine's Day in Toronto, February 13, 2003. PETA models braved - 9C (16F) weather to protest the trapping and breeding of animals for their fur. REUTERS/Mike Cassese REUTERS

December 13, 2002

PETA can usually be counted on for amusing stuff, not to mention hot models naked in weird settings.  This story has both.

A lawsuit filed on Wednesday by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals challenges whether the California dairy industry's award-winning ad campaign featuring "Happy Cows" frolicking in verdant pastures is false advertising.

The suit, filed in San Francisco, asks a Superior Court judge to order the California Milk Advisory Board to permanently suspend its two-year-old television and print advertising campaign.

PETA attorney Matthew Penzer said the campaign's catch phrase, "Great cheese comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California," improperly portrays idyllic conditions for dairy cows and misleads consumers.

They have a point, I mean the cows that produce milk for factory processing are stuck in filthy mud lots and filled full of so many chemicals and antibiotics and hormones to keep them alive and producing gallons of milk and to fight off their constant udder infections, there's no way you can say that they're happy.  However at the same time the commercials feature talking, dancing cows.  Therefore are they fantasy?  Obviously cows don't talk or think on a human level, so is the setting they are presented irrelevant?  I think the milk board could argue that it's all a sort of dream sequence, where cows are both happy and talking, and isn't intended to portray any objective reality.

There's no comment from the milk board at all thus far, and they're obviously hoping this whole thing just goes away.

November 15, 2002

Victoria's Secret runway show was in NYC yesterday, and I've gathered the best shots on a page you can view here.  They are interesting mostly for the PETA protesters who leaped on stage in the middle of things, and there are a couple of pictures of that included.

Activists for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals rushed the stage as Gisele Bundchen strutted down the runway in a beaded bra and panties, thigh-high black stockings and red strappy heels. The four female protesters, carrying signs that read "Gisele: Fur Scum," shouted at the supermodel as she calmly completed her runway turn.

The protesters were taken away, the lights went down and the segment of the show that was interrupted was redone. As Bundchen strode out for the second time in the outfit, the audience erupted into applause for the composed supermodel.

I don't really "get" lingerie, personally. I'd rather see my hypothetical GF naked 99.9% of the time; underwear just get in the way.  And then 99% of lingerie are silly, overly frilly with lace or diaphanous materials galore and not at all sexy. Women like it though, they like to be presented like a present in pretty wrapping paper, and I guess some men must like it as well.  Probably depends largely on what the present looks like beneath the wrapping, which is why it's silly that models are always women with bodies that would look best unornamented.  Rather than some 15 pounds heavy housewife who needs all the help she can get to hide those hips.

Below you can see the PETA-related photos from the photo page.  Click here to see the whole page, though why you'd want to I simply can't imagine.

Victoria's Secret fashion show in NYC, with some of the most expensive T&A on earth, strutting it. I'm only posting this since this PETA invasion shot is amusing.  You wouldn't really think of overpriced women's underwear as a hot topic for anti-fur activism, but anyway.

Given how many stalker psychos there are out there, I'm surprised fashion shows like this don't have more problems and more security.  I mean a guy ran onto a tennis court and stabbed Monica Seles, basically ruining her career since he wanted Steffi Graf to win more and Seles was owning her; supermodels have to have a lot more nuts obsessing over them than Steffi Graf had, don't they?

PETA ( People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) activists rush the stage as supermodel Gisele Bundchen struts on the runway during the Victoria's Secret Fashion show, Thursday, Nov. 14, 2002 in New York. (AP Photo/Stephen Chernin)

Yes, they do have bouncers.  Well-dressed ones too.  Though these guys look old for security, so maybe just random executives, upset that their ogling was interrupted?  I like how the models just keep on strutting.  Occupational hazard.

I also like the caption.  "Apparently protesting..."  Yeah, those "Gisele fur scum" signs are really hard to comprehend. What could they mean?

A protestor is removed from the runway during the 2002 'Victoria Secrets' fashion show as Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen (R) walks the runway in New York City, November 14, 2002. The protestors were from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and held signs apparently protesting the Bundchen's modeling of fur. REUTERS/Mike Segar

November 10, 2002

Huge bacon sale coming to Southern California.

Officials last month began stretching "pig proof" fencing across the 60,645-acre island, the largest of the eight Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. Once the 4,000 pigs are trapped inside the fences, they will be shot by contract hunters.

You can always count on PETA to inject some levity into events.

The program has drawn the ire of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has suggested shooting the pigs with contraceptive darts to eradicate them over time.

August 25, 2002

The news videos of Al Qaeda killing those dogs with supposed nerve gas have been declared fakes by many, but real by others.  Even if they are real, dog-lovers have been reacting with outrage (that angle never really occurred to me, I just looked at them for the potential evidence of gas attack) for the poor dead puppies.  Well, according to PETA (admittedly not the most unbiased of sources) most every military on earth kills plenty of animals in testing, and the US most of all.

Each year, at least 320,000 primates, dogs, pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, cats, and other animals are hurt and killed by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in experiments that rank among the most painful conducted in this country. Because these figures don’t include experiments that were contracted out to non-governmental laboratories or the many sheep, goats, and pigs often shot in wound experiments, the total number of animal victims is actually much higher. The cost to taxpayers for these military experiments is estimated to be in excess of $100 million annually.

July 12, 2002

PETA anti-meat propaganda has never looked so good?  Watch the behind the scenes movie, it's got some funny stuff.  When the model shows her shoulder and says, "This is what you'd be eating if you were eating me." try not to break into nervous giggling.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.