I got something you can bite, PETA
Ahoy, fellow bloggers! Yourish.com has designated today International Eat an Animal for PETA Day. PETA’s new ad campaign makes a direct correlation between the Jewish holocaust and eating meat, featuring side by side pictures of inmates at Buchenwald and chickens in cages. Stunning. Just as Elie Wiesel was stunned and unhappy to find that he was in the picture of the inmates.
“They even have my picture here,” Wiesel said and expressed his surprise as he looked at the ad. “They shouldn’t do that.”
So to arms (and drumsticks, and steaks, and lobster tails), fellow bloggers! Send PETA a letter. You can use this text that I shamelessly lifted from Yourish –
Dear PETA,
I found your new ad campaign, “The Holocaust on your plate,” offensive and outrageous. But I don’t expect your organization to suddenly develop any sense of tact or human decency, so I thought I’d tell you what your campaign has wrought:
March 15th has been designated “International Eat An Animal For PETA” day. On that day, I’ll be chowing down on a juicy steak, or chicken, or perhaps I’ll have lobster—fresh, of course, chosen from the tank specifically for me. Maybe I’ll have a plate of ribs at my local barbecue restaurant. Then there’s that great seafood restaurant with the poached salmon and the delicious crabcakes. I could take my family there.
America’s a free country, and you have the right to say what you want, no matter how offensive I think it is. But as a result of your insensitivity to those millions of people who died in the real Holocaust, and to the survivors and their descendants, I and my family will show PETA the same kind of insensitivity.
And have a great, meat-filled dinner, while we’re at it.
Chew on that.
Mail it to one of the following:
PETA
501 Front St.
Norfolk, VA 23510
Tel.: 757-622-PETA (7382)
Fax: 757-622-0457
info@peta.org
United Kingdom:
PETA Europe Ltd.
PO Box 36668
London
SE1 1WA
England
Tel: 020 7357 9229
Fax: 020 7357 0901
info@petauk.org
Thanks to Hestia for the heads-up.
March 15th, 2003 at 5:40 pm
“I and my family will show PETA the same kind of insensitivity.”
Actually, you’re not showing PETA anything. You’re just displaying your insensitivity in general. While I agree that the whole holocaust ad campaign is atrocious and reprehensible, two wrongs don’t make a right. The way to really get PETA’s goat, pardon the phrasing, is to just continue to eat as you normally do. Making up a day to “chow down on a juicy steak” is just shoving your barbarism into other people’s faces for all to see, especially those peaceful vegetarians who chose that way of life for any of a number of reasons and who don’t shove THEIR dietary choices in your faces. Of course, there are vegetarians and vegans who are not so peaceful, but I’d venture to say it’s impossible for them to all stand on either side of a line you draw so you can tell them apart.
Eat meat. Eat monkey brains if you want. But this isn’t doing anything to “boycott” PETA, nor is it being insensitive to them… because PETA is a large organization and unless you set up a table in front of their regional offices and chow down on a hamburger, it’s really not going to have much of an effect.
Now, a more effective way of protesting this heinously ridiculous ad campaign is to send them letters… and I mean mature, well-written letters, not the immature, childish, footstamping, temper tantrum letter quoted above. Or protest to your local government to make sure PETA doesn’t get any tax dollars.
Don’t sink to PETA’s level.