People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) vice president Bruce Friedrich is well known for his advocacy of property destruction in order to bring about “animal liberation.” But we always assumed that he would have picked up a basic foundation in barnyard facts during his 14-year career at the animal rights group. Maybe we were too generous: Friedrich posted a “request for information” on a Google group for animal rights news Friday night asking for simple livestock statistics:

Anyone have easily accessible info on how much water and food cattle consume on a daily basis, and how much excrement they produce?

Gee—that’s odd. PETA has been doing a “shower protest” for years, claiming that it takes the equivalent of months of showers to equal the amount of water needed to make a pound of beef. Why isn’t Friedrich asking PETA’s research department instead of putting out a wide-reaching query on the internet?

Here’s a more pertinent question: Does PETA even have this information at all? After all, PETA’s original shower protest claimed a pound of meat took the equivalent of one year’s worth of water. PETA cut that figure in half to six months in a subsequent protest. And according to real research groups even that’s a stretch: The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology determined it would take less than 18 ten-minute showers to consume the amount of water required to produce a pound of American beef. (That includes all the water consumed by cattle, plus everything involved in irrigating feed crops and processing the meat.)

Is it any surprise that the VP of the craziest animal rights group in the world, and one of the leading “go veg” advocates on the planet, doesn’t know the most basic things about livestock farming? Since he seems to have his eye on advocating more radical measures—like “blowing stuff up and smashing windows”—perhaps he can’t be bothered by fundamental farm facts.