PeTA vs The Earth's Inhabitants
Rabid Fanatics - Coming soon to an arena near you

Ever wonder what those squirrely PETA folks are up to when they're not picketing your hometown rodeo? They are certainly on a campaign for something, I assure you. Busy as beavers. Actually, that's not fair to beavers. Beavers around here spend their time doing constructive things like building dams and lodges, plugging up canals and creeks, raising little beavers, and generally trying to avoid being eaten by alligators. They don't spend a lot of time worrying about the pain and suffering of the trees or the ethical principles of their fellow beavers.

It seems that PETA is now trying to win the support of the Southern Baptist Convention. For those of you who are not from the Bible Belt, the SBC is a lot of the reason these here parts are called the Bible Belt. Most of your rank and file Southern Baptists are just plain folks, good people, salt of the earth types. They are not the ones that dance around holding rattlesnakes. They do tend to be fundamentalist, and the SBC has garnered a lot of media attention over the years, because they tend to publicly disapprove of homosexuality and abortion and other controversial stuff. But in terms of radical fanaticism, your most outspoken Baptists are nothing compared to the PETA troops.

Every year, the SBC holds their annual meeting somewhere (you guessed it...) in the South, and this year it's in New Orleans (of all places). I guess this might be called the Southern Baptist Convention Convention. The media eats it up, because they have a feeding frenzy on any kind of controversy, and the SBC has been known to stir controversy by taking a moral stance for or against something and sticking with it. So for example, a lot of gay/lesbian activists are turning out to protest the SBC's opposition to homosexuality, and other people are there protesting the fact that the gay/lesbian activists are protesting, and so on, and it really gets to be a first class circus.

And that is something PETA knows a thing or two about. They hate circuses, but only if they aren't allowed to do their tricks, and for this circus, they trotted out a campaign they started in 1999. They've dressed a guy up as Jesus, complete with hair, beard, robe and sandals, and they have him front and center on the sidewalk outside the entrances (which may or may not be barricaded by the gay/lesbian activists) handing out leaflets proclaiming that Jesus was a vegetarian, and besides that, a great guy -- in hopes that the SBC leaders will decide to denounce eating of meat and drinking of milk and the shooting of coyotes, and I guess whatever else PETA wants them to denounce.

So all of a sudden, PETA wants to side with Southern Baptists? Well, no. They don't give a hoot about Baptists OR pork chop gnawing southerners. Do they think the SBC will take up their cause? Probably not. Not if they are realistic. Can you imagine a vegetarian covered dish supper? No more fried chicken? No more gravy? Lord have mercy!

Truth is, PETA doesn't care so much what the SBC thinks of them, but they are aware of the value of the media attention the SBC annual meeting has been known to garner (remember the Disney boycott?). They are there for much the same reason they are anywhere else: to make the 6 o'clock News. This time masquerading as Jesus. Who's going to say HE is a wacko?

To a cowboy's way of thinking, PETA does and says a lot of silly things. I mean, it's fair to say that Jesus was probably not opposed to fishing, for example. A lot of things they say about rodeo are out and out lies. But they say it anyway, and say it loud and often. They scream their side of the story enough that it sinks in with people who don't know either side. The PETA side is all they hear; it's on TV, on the radio, in the newspaper -- it's everywhere. It's on the air almost every day somewhere in the U.S. because PETA cooks up loony schemes like this that get them media attention. The more asinine their antics, the more attention they get. Smallville is having a rodeo? That's not National News. There are people dressed up as cows picketing the rodeo? That might be National News. The cow people got thrown in jail for attacking rodeo-goers with a hot-shot? Now THAT is National News.

The PRCA does a good job of refuting PETA's claims, but they are preaching to the choir. PETA's eccentric escapades still get TV time, and the PRCA's point of view does not get comparable coverage in the mainstream media. The neutral public, being mostly city dwellers with no exposure to either side of the Rodeo / Animal Rights issue, surely hears PETA's side of the story significantly more often than ours, since the PETA wingnuts are willing to conspire to any amount of tofu pie throwing foolishness in order to get their message on the television news.

The neutral public does not think about the issue as a rule, but when they do, you know why... because PETA is forcing them to think about it. Whether the public believes that the PETA activists are a bunch of quixotic terrorists is irrelevant. They hear the PETA message -- over and over and over again. They don't hear the other side as loudly or as often. Being far removed from any of the realities of nature and agriculture might make it somewhat easier for them to swallow PETA's claims, but it really doesn't matter whether they give it much serious thought. With the help of the media, they will absorb it through their TV set like everything else that is a part of popular culture—good and bad, right and wrong. Say something outrageous and say it often enough, and it becomes part of the background noise. People start to believe it.

And there lies the problem. PETA's train won't be derailed by any common sense debate, and while they might be wrong about a lot of details, or illogical, or at least naively misguided, the right or wrong or logical part of it is of little concern to them. They don't care. They are not trying to justify their cause. They are trying to win a popularity contest by making the most noise. They make their case by appealing to people's emotions. That's the engine that drives most of their campaigns -- the stirring of some emotion in people. Almost everything they do is calculated to get some kind of purely emotional response, even if it's outrage, because it brings their ideas to the forefront.

If you look closely at PETA and the more radical side of the animal rights groups in general, their core ideas are not entirely about saving cute furry critters. Those are popular and noble sounding pursuits, because who would argue that humans should NOT be kind and humane to fuzzy kittens and the like? Millions of people love animals, and PETA -- at least on the surface -- is seen as an organization that is concerned with kindness to animals. The TRUTH is, PETA is an organization of... People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Their true mission is to change our view of Ethical Treatment is. To either coerce or FORCE us to abandon our sense of ethics and adopt theirs...

Ethics is defined as:
a. A set of principles of right conduct.
b. A theory or system of moral values
c. The study of the general nature of morals and of the specific moral choices to be made by a person; moral philosophy.

In a nutshell, PETA seeks to throw out our current "principles of right conduct" and "system of moral values" -- and have us adopt a new "system of moral values" (or "moral philosophy") in which an animal's life is perceived as having as much worth or value as a human life, and in some cases, more. For example, to their way of thinking, the life of a healthy animal could be considered more "valuable" than the life of a disabled person. So, PETA ultimately wishes to overthrow our entire system of moral values and replace it with their own values, and to that end they decide to employ JESUS to help spread the word? No matter what your relationship with God is, you have to see that as the ultimate perversion.

PETA was founded by a a English woman, Ingrid Newkirk. Ms. Newkirk has been the source of a lot of the more infamous quotes that have come out of PETA ("... a pig is a dog is a boy..." etc.). If you do some digging, you will find that she is closely aligned and even co-authored a book, Save the Animals!*, with an Australian philosopher named Peter Singer. Singer is the founding father of the animal rights movement, and the author of a book called Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals** First published in 1975, just five years before PETA was founded, Singer's book foreshadows the utilitarian moral philosophies detailed in his later works, in which Singer makes arguments for practically everything we now consider immoral—from infanticide (specifically, the "mercy killing" of "intellectually disadvantaged" or physically disabled human infants), to bestiality.***

These days, Mr. Singer's work address is the "University Center for Human Values" at Princeton University in New Jersey. His endowed professorship at Princeton is a position of great influence and credibility, and he's very well respected in the academic world for his work in the field of bioethics. Surprising? Of the 42 readers who reviewed Animal Liberation at Amazon.com, 35 of them enthusiastically agreed with Singer's views. Surprised yet?

These are the people we are up against. The kind of people who are willing to work tirelessly to get rid of rodeo, the beef cattle industry, etc. Not because it's particularly offensive to them, it just can't be allowed to exist if animals are going to be elevated to the status of humans or vice versa, either of which serves their ultimate goal: the overthrow of our current standard of ethics. They are willing to publicly slander you, lie about you, throw pies at you, and they would like nothing more than to force you to abandon your moral principles and impose their own utilitarian ideas on you.

Assuming that PETA and their kin have what could be described as a comprehensive "moral philosophy" -- one could assume that the whole animal rights movement amounts to a kind of a new religion.. Throughout history there have been groups who would force others to share their views or suffer the consequences. PETA and other animal rights organizations would love to do this to YOU. They would have you adopt their moral philosophy -- OR ELSE! Fortunately, few of these groups ever grow powerful enough to bring their plans to fruition. Untold millions of people have died in the name of social and moral reform. Starting with Columbus, European Christian invaders systematically murdered millions of the native peoples of North and South America at least partly in an attempt to convert them to Christianity. Hitler in Nazi Germany, Stalin in the USSR, Communist China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia -- all murdered those who did not share their moral philosophies. The desire to bully others into adopting your own beliefs ends in the persecution and murder of innocent people. Mass crimes against humanity are committed by those who truly believe in the higher cause they serve, no matter how unreasonable it may seem to others. They believe they must change the world, and you can't tell them any different. Fanatics.

"Humans have grown like cancer. We're the biggest blight on the face of the planet." -- Ingrid Newkirk****

Do you think they would not try to remedy that if they had the power? Fanatics. Dangerous fanatics.

Slade Long
© 2001 Probullstats.com

* Collins Angus & Robertson, North Ryde, NSW, 1991
** New York Review/Random House, New York 1975
*** "One Man's Animal Husbandry", Debra J. Saunders, The San Francisco Chronicle March 20, 2001
**** Reader's Digest, June, 1990