Guest guest Posted February 3, 2003 Report Share Posted February 3, 2003 eric mills (afa) thought you would be interested in this article from http://www.theglobeandmail.com F.Y.I.eric Get today's news delivered to your in-box. Sign up for our daily News Update! http://www.globeandmail.com/newsletter/ --\ ------------ From globeandmail.com, Saturday, January 18, 2003 PETA has to rethink its own ethics LYNN CROSBIE In the not-too-distant past, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals seemed to be holding the rich and famous in an inescapable hammerlock. Fur coats, once the most tangible sign of one's success, were virtually outlawed through PETA's small acts of terrorism -- members would hurl red paint on offending pelt wearers -- and an enormously successful ad campaign that featured models and actors declaring that they would rather go naked than wear fur. Because most of these nudists were stars, who were also preternaturally beautiful, the campaign succeeded across the board. Fashion sheep followed the lead of their gorgeous dictators, while the rest of us happily concurred that Pamela Anderson, for example, should be nude at all times. The campaign was well-conceived, and ingenious: PETA managed to make fur seem as trashy as polyester, while neatly sidestepping the more obvious and exigent issues surrounding the wearing of fur. At no time did it enlist the bodies of trappers or indigenous people for whom animal pelts are linked to the less glamourous matter of survival and warmth. In time, as with all acts of prohibition, PETA's edicts were repealed. Most of the initial campaign's poster stars dropped out and designers began introducing fur details in their lines. When celebrities and fashion-mongers snapped these up, all bets were off: You cannot open a magazine these days without seeing a celebrity draped in fur, the more ostentatious or vulgar the better. As this trend continues, endangered species will rise in vogue, according to contrarian logic. I am counting the moments until Donatella Versace, couture's Ed Gein, introduces the embryonic red panda coat with snow-leopard-claw clasps. As PETA feels its grasp loosening, its constituents are taking increasingly drastic measures. They recently stormed a Victoria's Secret show to revile supermodel Giselle Bundchen. Rushing the stage, they brandished " Giselle: Fur Scum " signs, no doubt annoying a panty-crazed and animal-indifferent audience. There is a large anti-fur lobby in California, most of which, unfortunately, we may prefer not to see nude (with all due respect to the raw flesh of Bob Barker and Tippi Hedren). Animal activism is associated with youth, yet famous people tend to adopt this cause in their dotage. Brigitte Bardot, for example, after declaring her skin disgusted her, and comparing it with rotting fruit, became fanatical about animal rights in a poignant act of emotional transference. PETA's fight is a good one and its sympathies, like Bardot's, are equal parts political and sentimental. Its " Turkey Terrorism " advertisement (featuring an enraged turkey screaming at grocery shoppers), which was, as always, banned from mainstream media, stood as a trenchant commentary on a consumeristic society that is deeply intent on separating the means and ends of production. I am anti-fur, and not a vegan; further, I have no respect for the fatuity of arguments that insist, toward discursive annihilation, on uniform politics. Like Emerson, I believe that " a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. " I consider PETA's latest frantic provocations to be as fatuous as the reductio ad absurdam logic that maintains an animal activist's credibility is only as good as his or her decision to wear rubber shoes and avoid all tallow-based products, including paper and Oreos. Most appalling in PETA's recent agitprop is its simplistic comparison between human and animal murder. Like those philosophically challenged feminists who declared " Porn=Rape, " and likely spurred on by Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer's bizarre views on " speciesism, " PETA has launched (and since pulled) an ad campaign that compares the alleged murders committed by B.C. pig farmer Robert Pickton to his practices as a pig slaughterer, making no distinction between these acts. (In the past, they used Jeffrey Dahmer's cannibalistic murders as a similar point of comparison). The most compelling scene in Thomas Harris's Hannibal was the eponymous hero's confinement among a group of rapacious hogs that had no problem with the thought of devouring him, with or without a good Chianti. As reasonable carnivores, they made no distinction between the learned doctor and a pile of animal entrails. As reasonable and ethical carnivores, we may find the ways in which animals are slaughtered abhorrent, and PETA is right to alert us to the machinations beyond the Saran Wrapped byproduct of the butcher's labours. This specious comparison between women and pigs is a depraved affront that makes connections that are utterly devoid of compassion toward humanity, a common failure of priority among animal activists. I cannot imagine PETA comparing little Jon Benet or the young victims of Columbine to swine. They would not dare to impugn men and women who -- unlike Pickton's alleged victims, or Dahmer's for that matter -- were not indigent or marginal members of society proper. PETA has since apologized to the families of the victims. It has yet to apologize to every farmer on Earth, whom it has implicitly accused of harbouring homicide in their latent-felonious hearts. Nor have they apologized for their disgusting insult to the unvindicated victims, whose lives were led in anonymity, whose murders were unconscionably ignored and whose posthumous lives are now being used as placards by moral cretins. I also read Charlotte's Web and do not eat pigs largely because of E. B. White's seductive deployment of pathos. By the same token, I would sooner host a luau than offend, in Sylvia Plath's words, in " the way the world offends God, " the lost and sacred souls of the men and women whose lives merit postmortems beyond and above the mad democracy and heat-seeking rhetoric of rabble-rousers whose logical impairment does a grievous disservice to their own cause. lcrosbie Visit the globeandmail.com Web Centre, your competitive edge for breaking news stories as they happen. 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