If an activist of any kind tried to approach my kid, my response is to aim at the crotch, hard and repeatedly.

Wow…I’ll be near Albany in a couple weeks! Wish they were doing this near MY McDonalds. I am teaching my girl that we don’t eat or kill animals. We love them. So, bully for them.

The people who run PETA are extremists, not to be taken seriously. Their founder, Ingrid Newkirk, once said, “There’s no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all animals.” She has also said, “Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.” She once compared the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust. PETA, regardless of their media exposure, is not a mainstream organization.

The people who run PETA are extremists, not to be taken seriously. Their founder, Ingrid Newkirk, once said, “There’s no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all animals.” She has also said, “Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.” She once compared the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust. PETA, regardless of their media exposure, is not a mainstream organization.

Well, I have to agree with Amanda B. I’m not really a fan of PETA myself, and I’d wring a pet dog’s neck if it hurt my kid. Still, I think its funny to shake people up a little bit and remind them where their food comes from. It’s not pretty.

My 3 year old would be insist on having one of these, and if somehow she got one (I would never give it to her, but her sitter might not pay enough attention), she would be horribly upset. 3 isn’t old enough to understand the nuances of animal cruelty (given that we’re starting from an omnivorous place, rather than a vegetarian stance like GP). She hasn’t yet connected the cute chickens in her books with chicken nuggets, and I’m pretty sure it’s not PETA’s job to make that connection for her in a potentially scary way. GP, I’m totally fine with PETA or other organizations raising awareness about animal cruelty, but targeting young kids like this- who may not understand all the issues- is not okay with me. Target me for awareness raising, not my kid. It’s not necessarily the message I disagree with (though PETA is too far out there for my taste), but the delivery system.

Mistress-Scorpio, why aim for the crotch?? How do you know it’s a man inside that getup? The founder, Ingrid Newkirk, sounds like a woman to me. If that’s so, why don’t you aim for the boobs?

You know even though their tactics are brutal they are right. How cna you let your child eat something but you dont want them to see where it comes from? I dont want my kdis growing up thinking chicken nuggets come from clean factories in McDonald Land. What is wrong with reality? Let’s demand McDonalds serve our kids humanely treated chicken not chickens that are stomped tro death, debeaked, wings clipped, bred with breasts so big they cannot stand and never allowed out of a small box their whole life span. Like it or not that is what you feed your child and it is unneccessary to produce food this way. How healthy can it be after such abuse and poor breeding?

I am not a vegetarian. I do support more ethical treatment of animals, particularly animals used for food purposes. However, PETA are nutjobs, plain and simple. Their message could be summed up with Kill All Humans. So yeah, they don’t care about you or your kids.

As someone who raises animals for a living, I think a lot of people have zero idea of what life down on the farm is like. Are some of the practices that large scale farming has adopted undesireable? You bet. But what PETA (and more rational groups) fail to tell you is why those practices are adopted in the first place. People seem ready to learn about sows (female pigs) being kept in farrowing crates and talk about how ‘cruel’ it is, but they don’t know what happens to lots of little piglets that get rolled over on, stomped, etc when ‘momma sow’ is left to roll around with them. The practices that regarded as ‘cruel’ are almost always done to improve the conditions of the animals. PETA would have you believe that every farmer is some sadistic bastard, but we aren’t. We love our animals, and ultimately their healthy growth is what puts food on our tables and clothes on our kids.

Eric – while that may be true on smaller farms, many of the larger farms that provide food for these restaurants do treat the animals in inhumane ways, not to give them a “better life” but for economic reasons.

While I may not agree with all of PETA’s opinions and tactics, I am not sure this is any more cruel to kids than feeding them McDonald’s food…

This is what I’m talking about Dad. I’ve worked on ‘big’ farms and ‘small’ farms. I’ve worked in animal research. When raising animals, one of the best ways to recognize stress in an animal is monitoring its weight. If they aren’t gaining well, they aren’t happy. Here’s an example of where we get in trouble:
Sows pick on each other and will tear each other up now and again. If you seperate them into individual pens, they don’t do that. They spread disease less, and their individual feeder in front of them gives an accurate measurement of how much feed they’re consuming. It was a large cost to put sows in gestation crates (crates are much more expensive than pens); however, in the crates there was more profit as animals didn’t injure each other and illness could be detected and treated more promptly. PETA and others saw the sows in crates and said that it was inhumane because the sows don’t have enough room to move around and socialize (reasonable conscerns). Net result, sows are going to go back in pens where they will beat on each other and get worse medical care. I’m not saying there aren’t downsides to lots of the production methods used today, but bottom line is inhumane treatment of livestock hurts the producers pocket book almost every time.

Eric,
Come on. Tell me how cutting off a chicken’s beak or castrating an animal without any anethesia is “bettering” their lives. How about stuffing them full of anitbiotics to stave off illness? Or making them into unwitting cannibals?

I’m no PETA fan but to suggest that most tactics adopted by industrial meat farmers “betters” the lives of the animals that are forced to live there is totally misleading.

Well karmamama, if you’d seen what full beaked chickens do to each other you’d understand. One little speck of blood on a chicken, and a pretty good group will tear that little hen to pieces. Those are fully witting cannibals for the record. Castrating is probably not as painful as you might imagine. Cattle usually feel much worse after dehorning than cutting (castration). They will be fully back on feed and acting normal in about 48 hours. Till then they eat less and walk slower. Would anethesia be helpful? Sure. If it were cost effective it would certainly be used. Castration has a variety of benefits including easier handling (less injuries to workers and animals) and decreased fighting. These help improve the animal’s life. Antibiotics don’t have a deleterious effect on the condition of the animal, so I don’t know why that would make their lives ‘worse.’ In fact, in cattle, antibiotics are not fed to stave off infection at all. Its more to Dad’s second point: the antibiotics are fed to change the bacteria in cattle’s gut to help them digest grain better.
Dad, I know what you mean in terms of efficiency. Meat needs a lot of grain to produce. If we all ate a little less meat, there would be a lot more grain out there. That said, people like meat enough that the market has created this system.
One more point. Farmers are what is called price takers (think back to any econ you’ve taken). That means they don’t get to set their own prices, they are at the mercy of the market. This means that while it would be nice to use anesthisia when cutting and other management tools, it eats into profits very quickly. Profit margins in agriculture are extremely slim, and added costs will be accepted only if sale prices trend up.

Jubilee, I don’t have a problem with telling my three year old that we eat animals either, but it should be on my terms, not PETA’s. And I’m sorry, but there are nuances to eating meat, as we’ve all been discussing. Animal cruelty is bad, but reasonable people can differ on what constitutes “cruelty.” I like eating meat and don’t think that humane raising and slaughtering of animals counts as cruel.

I haven’t eaten at McDonald’s since 1995, but this kind of thing wants me to go out and eat a Big Mac.

Seriously, this is the issue with PETA. They make themselves look so ridiculous that there is an inevitable backlash.

Eric, thanks for your posts. I don’t know much about farming, but I always think that all these people trying to make rules for farms don’t understand how they really work.

Brooke, what a great idea. That is actually a positive solution that may result in more people eating healthy. So different from what PETA actually does.

Many animals eat other animals. Humans are animals too. Get over it PETA freaks. You are misanthropes hiding behind the guise of “championing” animals and pushing your extremist views on others. Try helping some people for a change instead of scaring kids.

Brooke, I think your idea is good too; and I raise meat for a living! If people want to be vegans, go for it. If you want to convince kids to eat a vegan happy meal instead of a McD’s happy meal, go for it. I’d just rather not have my kid told that I’m mutilating my chickens at home for fun.

So this is how PETA squanders the money donated to them by pathetic fools having them run around in silly costumes and pushing its emotional gobbildy gook at kids and using a bunch of idiots from hollyweed like ALEC BALDWIN or PAMELA ANDERSON to do so PETA IS FOR JERKS ONLY

PETA should stop trying to force its idiotic ideas on other with such stupid protests