…..PeTA keeps making it harder and harder to support anything that they do?

Anyone who knows me knows two things. First is that I love animals. I have two dogs and a cat and they run roughshod throughout my house. The second thing is that I have a pretty severe phobia involving vegetables. I eat corn, romaine lettuce (carefully trimmed), and cooked spinach. Tomatoes and a few fruits pretty much round out the entirety of my veggie intake.

I imagine at this point you can deduce how likely it is that I may become a vegetarian at any point in the near future considering my vegetable issues. I also must say that one of my finest talents is cooking flesh on a grill in the yard and that there are truly few things better than a fine steak or filet of fish and a great glass of wine.

Now as for my love of animals, I have had pets and always will. I also think that observing wildlife is a fantastic way to further education and to just get out and blow off some steam. I have never been a hunter and personally don’t see the thrill. I do however own guns and find many other things to shoot. I guess maybe I would feel differently if there were some more inherent risk to the participants. I have a lot of respect for the hunter who goes after bear with say, an archery rig. Most deer hunter’s biggest danger usually involves inebriation and either shooting another hunter or themselves.

I have a great deal of respect for the efforts of many groups such as the Humane Society, the ASPCA, and PeTA. But PeTA has been making this increasingly difficult as their stance becomes both more extreme and downright ridiculous. Take their latest campaign to try to get people to stop eating fish.

The gist of this campaign is that fish are being eaten not because they are a healthy source of protein and are an abundant food source. They are not being eaten because in many parts of the world they are the primary and in some cases only source of sustenance available. They are being eaten because they suffer from bad publicity. That’s right. A quote on the campaign page actually says

“Of course, if you look at it another way, what all this really means is that fish need to fire their PR guy—stat. Whoever was in charge of creating a positive image for fish needs to go right back to working on the Britney Spears account and leave our scaly little friends alone. You've done enough damage, buddy. We've got it from here.”

Here is a link to the campaign home page. (click here)

Now that they have taken control of the public relations department for fish worldwide, what is their solution to this dilemma? They want to begin by “retiring the old name for good.” And what do they propose to call fish henceforth? “Sea Kittens.” Yes, that’s right. “Sea Kittens.” Their reasoning is that if fish were called sea kittens, nobody would want to hurt them. Other areas of their site include initiatives to ask the US Fish and Wildlife, oh sorry, the US Sea Kittens and Wildlife Service to stop promoting the hunting of, yep, you guessed it sea kittens.

I guess that nobody has bothered to mention to the fine folks at PeTA that though actual kittens are kept as pets in the United States and many other countries, they are just another food source in many other countries. They should also consider that many non-meat eaters will allow fish into their diets because their sensibilities allow for the fact that most fish barely have a developed nervous system and that means it likely that fish do not “feel” pain.

In the end, like many groups whose sole aim is to impose their radical positions on the public at large, they continue to marginalize themselves and make it harder for reasonable people to get on board with anything that they hope to accomplish. Campaigns like this one become insulting to your intelligence and that is one thing that we don’t need more of these days.