The employees who dream up crazy media stunts at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) must be working overtime. Whether it’s terrorizing children outside restaurants in Albany, N.Y., mocking overweight beachgoers in Jacksonville, Fla., or protesting trauma training for military doctors in San Diego County, PETA is making it hard to ignore their offensive tactics this week.
First, protestors tried to scare Albany children off chicken nuggets with cartoons of a knife-wielding clown. Parents unanimously thought it was inappropriate and asked them to stay away from their kids, but of course, that’s never stopped PETA before.
Then a new billboard in Jacksonville greeted beachgoers with a drawing of an overweight woman next to the tagline “Save the Whales. Lose the Blubber: Go Vegetarian.” Several people complained that the billboard was offensive and should be taken down, but PETA hasn’t listened. (Nor have they accepted that vegetarianism isn’t a weight-loss strategy.)
Finally, in the news today is PETA’s protest in Southern California over the use of pigs in standard trauma training for Marine doctors at Camp Pendleton.
As we told reporters in the area:
Many corpsman will face a time when he or she will have to pack a gunshot wound, stop a bleeding artery, or cut into a fellow soldier to restore a breathing airway. It is during the first attempts at such procedures that most mistakes are made. I’d rather see it happen on a pig than on one of our military men or women.
Placing animal lives over human lives is standard practice for the animal rights movement. But it’s especially upsetting to see radical activists apply their twisted priorities to U.S. Marines.
It’s also difficult to take PETA’s outrage seriously, when PETA has a long, sad history of euthanizing the vast majority of the animals in their care. In 2008 PETA killed 95 percent of the dogs and cats it took in, finding adoptive homes for just seven pets.
The common thread connecting these stunts is obvious: People do not matter to PETA. It’s fine to manipulate facts and scare children, mock overweight people, and put military lives at risk if it means being nicer to chickens and cows and pigs. Like schoolyard bullies, PETA thrives when the public responds to their media blitzes. But as hard as they make it, maybe if we ignore them, they will go away.
