PETA: Whatever It Takes. Poodle burgers at a dog show? [View All]

Excellent longish article about PETA. I took the Poodle burger thing out of context to draw attention to this. Woof! Sorry.

http://www.alternet.org/story/26094/

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I started following PETA's activities because of my personal connection to it, and as I did, I became engrossed with its media tactics, which, to sum them up would be to say they say and do anything at all to draw attention. It sounds simple and obvious enough -- anything at all -- but it clearly isn't, or other groups would be following its lead. Other than the ACLU, which progressive advocacy group (yes, PETA is progressive) garners a regular share of news coverage across the country on a daily basis? Not a single one.

PETA goes after places, people, events and ideas of social meaning and finds a way to seize the headlines -- or create its own. It will do whatever it takes to expose people to its point of view. When PETA asks an agricultural town to change its name from say, Cowtown to Liberated Cowtown, it knows that a bored reporter in the surrounding region will fall for it and write a story about it, and that a bunch of readers sick of stories about septic tanks and cattle prices will fall for the headline. Somewhere in that story will be the sentence: "A PETA representative told the mayor that killing animals is wrong."

With that sentence, PETA scores a victory.

So PETA sends vegetarian chefs to Camp Casey; runs semi-nude pictures of Pamela Anderson with anti-fur captions; and urges the USDA not to rebuild animal labs at the Katrina-devastated Louisiana State University. And every time PETA gets mentioned in a story, it's a win for the organization -- and some real animals might be saved in the process.

Because the truth is, this animal rights thing is a tarpit. The more people are exposed to it, the less comfortable they are with the concept of animal suffering. That's the premise, anyway, and I think it's true.

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