It must be tough to be Bruce Friedrich. As a newly minted Vice President at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), if you’re not condoning terrorism, telling kids that their moms are murderers, or grouping Timothy McVeigh with the likes of Gandhi and Albert Einstein, there are all sorts of gimmicky publicity stunts you need to pull to make sure people keep watching you.
Just this week, Friedrich and about a half-dozen of his co-workers staged an anti-meat demonstration outside the annual meeting of a poultry trade group in Washington, D.C. We stopped by and handed out literature of our own to ensure that passersby wouldn’t be fooled into taking PETA seriously. That’s not too hard, though, when the centerpiece of their protest was a cage full of dirtied and fake-bloodied interns. Friedrich was aghast at the notion that some people might find such a stunt base and offensive. As he told the Washington Examiner: “I can’t imagine what someone would have found tasteless about the demonstration.”
Fake feces and fake blood mixed in with the repulsive notion that people and chickens are morally equivalent: What’s not to like? As we also told the Examiner, “It certainly was in poor taste. We saw schoolchildren walking by and parents rushing their children by.”
Truth be told, Friedrich’s recent antics were pretty tame compared to some of the other tricks in PETA’s “outreach” arsenal: an exhibit that equates farm animals with holocaust victims and African American slaves, a “Got Prostate Cancer?” billboard showing Rudy Giuliani with a milk mustache, and advertisements equating Jesus Christ with a pig.
