Fur Flies in PETA's Fight for Animals

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 17, 2000 | by Aimee Welch

Animal-rights activists claim biomedical research is cruel and unusual punishment, but the scientific community says PETA's incendiary brand of activism might be dangerous.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, better known as PETA, has a dream of equal rights for animals. No more lab rats in cages, whether for testing cosmetics or cancer treatments. No more circus performances by lumbering elephants. No more zoos in U.S. cities. No more chickens in boiler pots or cows on farms or milk in refrigerators. No more animal companions curled up on American hearths.

As PETA activists are fond of saying, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy, and human animals have no more business using the parallel nations of nonhuman animals for food or clothing or forced companionship or lab experiments than the evil Dr. Josef Mengele had experimenting on fellow humans.

PETA is celebrating nearly 20 years of in-your-face activism with business as usual: a steady stream of tofu pies aimed at the faces of perceived perpetrators of animal injustice (most recent high-profile target as Insight goes to press: Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, hit mid-press conference on May 30 by a 23-year-old activist shouting, "Meat pimp!") and sassy campaigns such as the latest against McDonald's.

"We don't mind taking off our clothes or tossing a pie if that's what it takes," says Ingrid Newkirk, PETA's longtime president. "We would rather do that and make idiots of ourselves than be quiet on an issue. And people appreciate it."

Controversy and sex. The activists know what sells. To that end, PETA has created campaigns for almost everyone. To name a few:

* For the international anarchist types, there was the Web posting urging PETA supporters to join social-justice and environmental activists in Washington to protest the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, wearing cow masks and holding signs proclaiming, "The World Bank Is Killing Me" or "Animal Liberation = Human Liberation."

* For college kids there was the St. Patrick's Day ad campaign countering the dairy industry's "Got Milk" ads with the slogan "Milk Sucks, Got Beer?" PETA argued that drinking beer was healthier than drinking milk ("wipe off those milk mustaches and replace them with foam," said the ads) and told students that the dairy industry promotes cruelty to cows and calves. Mothers Against Drunk Driving responded in outrage demanding PETA pull the plug on the campaign.

* For the religious-minded there is the PETA-sponsored JesusVeg.com Website that claims Jesus was a vegetarian. This is augmented by Jesus and cow impersonators waving signs reading "For Christ's Sake, Go Vegetarian" and encouraging diners at steakhouses to take up a more compassionate diet. In a press release last month PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said, "Christians should extend the message that `God is love' to animals by not eating them." Never mind that the New Testament says Jesus ate fish or that the Old Testament says God commanded ceremonial feasts centered around animal sacrifices.

* For grade-school youngsters there is the McDonald's "Unhappy Meal" tour. PETA activists are distributing colorfully illustrated boxes to kids at schools and McDonald's playgrounds. The Unhappy Meal illustrations imagine the lives of chickens and pigs on factory farms before they are slaughtered.

* For older men, a billboard featuring a model PETA describes as "a curvaceous red-white-and-blue-bikini-clad vegetarian" claims meat consumption is linked to impotence. The model tells men that "vegetarianism is good for all your organs and lets animals keep theirs intact, too."

Newkirk says that long before all this hype began, when she was an English girl growing up in India she was horrified to see animals collapsing in the streets from starvation and abuse. Newkirk says her mother helped Mother Teresa in her human charities and they took in any animals they could. "My mother would say it didn't matter who suffered, but how," she says.

But Newkirk "didn't realize animals were in trouble in the West" until she was an American grown-up and working in a brokerage on the East Coast. When she took some abandoned kittens to a shelter and discovered animals in deplorable conditions, caged and sitting in their own urine, she quit her job and set out to reform that shelter.

This led to a job inspecting laboratories for the city government in Washington. Later, she tells Insight, she read the new book that was becoming the bible of animal-rights activists, Animal Liberation, written by Peter Singer, now a professor at Princeton University. "I decided there was no excuse to treat animals this way, no matter what good you get out of it. Later I decided no good came out of it. And I began to ask how many people are there like me, people who love animals in their hearts but haven't a clue that they are supporting cruelty: buying flesh, dissecting animals in school."

So PETA was started, says Newkirk, to show people they "could be kind instead of cruel in everything they did."