PETA: People Eternally Terrorizing America
One of the reasons it sometimes takes me so long to put the next article up on this site is that I have to be in a certain mindset to really cut loose here. When things are going well and nothing's bothering me, it's much harder to write something compelling and filled with violent hate and rancid bile. Fortunately, it's at just this sort of time when PETA does something so remarkably insensitive and asinine that I want to start stabbing people with chainsaws.
Actual quote from 2003 PETA "Holocaust On Your Plate" ad campaign
In order to fully understand what's going on right now, I have to give you some background. Last Wednesday some Chinese guy lost his mind on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba and stabbed the guy next to him about 50 times for no reason with a huge fucking knife. By the time this was done, the driver and other passengers were all off the bus. Then he cut off the guy's head and dropped it down the stairs of the bus, and spent some of the next 3 hours eating the guy's body.
Here's the initial news report on CBC.ca. This is easily the most disturbing event in Canada of 2008 so far, just edging out Toronto receiving a record-breaking 19cm (almost 8 inches) of rain in the month of July. The guy's the most fucked up Canadian since Howie Mandel, except he was actually good at something: random murder and cannibalism. Nothing could possibly be worse than this, right?
Wrong! You can always count on PETA to do something absolutely distasteful with a tragic event like this! Somehow, someone at PETA thought it would be a good idea to use this event as the backbone for a marketing campaign which compares this guy's random act of insanity to how animals are slaughtered for food. Don't believe me? Read the story for yourself.
This isn't the first time PETA has tried something like this. In the past PETA has been known to equate sex with death, put up ads comparing a mass murderer to slaughtering pigs, and trivialize the holocaust. Also they've said they would reject animal testing even if it led to a cure for AIDS. Oh, and they also sent the comic books you see on this page (click them to enlarge) to children. Nice, huh?
Basically, it seems PETA has nothing better to do right now than give our morals and sensibilities a big huge FUCK YOU by trying to capitalize on tragedy. Again. I think whoever PETA has in charge of their marketing campaign needs to be fired from a cannon.
Let me get one thing straight here: when something like this happens, the correct response is not to use it as a scheme to make money. The correct response is to use it in a series of offensive jokes until it becomes funny. When Steve Irwin was ruthlessly murdered by a peaceful animal, jokes were everywhere, mostly in the form of funny pictures. This is just a healthy part of the grieving process. Like my joke about Howie Mandel not being a cannibal a few paragraphs ago (seriously though, everyone knows he eats babies).
Now I don't know about you, but when I see something like this turned in to a marketing campaign by the people who fund the eco-terrorist group ELF (Earth Liberation Front; they spike trees in order to maim lumberjacks, among other things), it makes me seriously consider tracking down the leaders of PETA and beating them to death with a badger. A pregnant badger. With diarrhea.
What PETA really needs to figure out is that using tragedies for gain is not the way to get people on your side. If anything, it makes people want to do you harm. If I knew the person who came up with this bright idea lived near me and I knew where, you'd better believe they'd be on their way to the hospital right now.
Oh, and did I mention that they kill an average of 84% of animals placed in their care, and store the bodies in a $9,370 meat freezer? Seriously. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals kills an average of 5 innocent animals a day. You may recall a 2005 news story or two about 31 dead adoptable dogs being left in a dumpster by two PETA employees. They testified under oath that yes, PETA routinely kills animals, and they store the bodies in the previously mentioned walk-in meat freezer. Have I mentioned recently that I really hate hypocrites?
Here's how successful this new PETA strategy has been: Because of what they did, I'm going to eat nothing but meat and things that come from animals (except for bread and condiments) for the rest of the week, and for most of next week. Anything that comes from an animal is fair game. In fact, I'm going to eat more food than I normally do, just so I can eat as many animals as possible before I start suffering from scurvy. I'll bet I can get through an entire cow before the month ends.
The point of all this is this: Tragedies are not something that should be used as a marketing campaign. Fuck PETA, and fuck anyone else who somehow thinks this kind of behaviour is appropriate. I think I know how best to deal with this though: Let's cut up PETA president and co-founder Ingrid Newkirk's family as if they were cows, and then run a PETA marketing campaign about how people and animals have the same parts, and see how she feels about it. ...What do you mean it's not funny when it happens to you? After all, you can't spell slaughter without laughter!