I am very open-minded on animal rights and animal welfare issues. The way we treat animals (who have the capacity to suffer) for our human ends deserves serious scrutiny and debate. For over a year I chose a vegetarian diet in large part because I abhor the way animals are often treated to produce food and goods for human consumption. I’ve never believed killing and eating animals is wrong, but I welcome the debate about whether and at what level animals deserve special protections and rights. This is why PETA pisses me off.

Instead attempting to engage in constructive debate, they move from one attention-grabbing campaign to another full of the same close-minded zeal and bigotry as the worst fundamentalist Christian evangelists. Their tactics are eerily similar. For example, the image here is the cover of a comic book, intended to be distributed to young children regarding their Fishing Hurts campaign. I’m not so much disturbed that PETA is arguing against catching and eating fish, but that this campaign targets children with the primary message that because your father goes fishing he’s an enraged, murdering monster. Only close-minded, self-righteous zealots would attempt to convince seven year olds that their parents are monsters. This most reminds me of religious comics I’ve seen on the topics of abortion and evolution. Creepy.

While I’m loathe to endorse any work that paints fellow Michigander Ted Nugent in a sympathetic light, Penn & Teller did an episode about PETA that highlights some of their hypocrisy, questionable arguments and tactics. You can watch part of the episode here. I don’t think their treatment is 100% fair, but I do think they present some reasonable criticisms.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Politics, Personal, Environment, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.