COLUMN: Eating Tasty Animals
I’d be a card-carrying liberal except that liberals hate identification cards. But I have to say that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has gone around the bend from liberal to lunacy. They are a flock of humorless, sexist, ageist, thin-brained poseur activists.
“Ethical treatment of animals” certainly sounds like a good thing until it starts to supersede the treatment of rest of the life forms on the planet. You can’t free all the animals any more than you can free everyone in prison. Sneaking out to the mink ranch and just letting all the mink free is just plain dumb.
If you want to do the right thing, take a few of them home with you, nurture them and retrain them to live in the wild, and then take them back to whatever forest they came from 12 generations ago. Or better yet, every PETA member who wants to stop the mink industry should have to carry around a live mink in his pants.
Only slightly less dumb is the tactic of having beautiful young models pose nude for the “I’d rather wear nothing than fur” campaign. Well yeah, that is the whole point of being a supermodel isn’t it? Most of the world would rather see you wear nothing.
You, in fact, get paid a lot to wear almost nothing. If it were instead the average crowd you see at the bowling alley on league night, PETA would personally be out using mink for batting practice if that is what it took to clothe the less young, less beautiful masses.
PETA can’t even laugh at itself. It immediately unleashed it’s pack of vegan lawyers on the guy who put up the parody Web site PeTA – People Eating Tasty Animals. Even the state-sanctioned lunatics behind www.whitehouse.gov have not cracked down that hard on www.whitehouse.com – I do not endorse either site; one is pornographic and one is just obscene.
Amidst all the carnage in Iraq, PETA took the gutsy stand against the use of dolphins and dogs as part of the armed services because “they did not join the military by choice.” Great, give them the vote too, maybe we will get a better turnout at the next presidential election.
PETA is also responsible for the “Got Beer?” advertisements that parodied the “Got Milk?” ads not in support of Blutarsky behavior but because milk subjugates cows. Why not just go straight for the Jack Daniels? No animals were used in its production either.
I love animals. I’ve cared way too much for the five rats I’ve had as pets, and my parents have had a series of St. Bernards that they lovingly refer to as my “sisters.” Still, I think the jury is out on whether or not animals have souls. This probably stems from the fact that I’m not convinced that all people have them. I know of at least five people for sure where I work that don’t have souls. I know this to be true, because they could not have possibly seen their reflection in a mirror and still act the way they do.
Dennis Hinkamp’s column appears every Friday in The Statesman. Comments can be sent to slightlyoffcenter@attbi.com.