The president of the national animal rights group PETA is donating her remains when she dies, but not to science or sick people. Ingrid Newkirk has instructed that the “meat” of her body be barbecued, her skin made into leather products, her vacuum-packed liver be sent to France to protest foie gras, and an eye be delivered to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a “reminder that PETA will continue to be watching.”
Oh, and by the way, she would also like you to start calling fish “sea kittens.”
Newkirk’s grotesque will and her group’s loopy “sea kitten” campaign are signature PETA antics. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals doesn’t threaten researchers’ lives or condone bombing laboratories like more militant animal rights groups. But it does embrace an end-justifies-the-means approach, which has both attracted devoted followers and alienated many in the mainstream. In its nearly thirty-year history, PETA has garnered a reputation for its approach, which is one part porn—women with few or no clothes are a favorite PETA publicity stunt—and two parts shock value.
Because of—or in spite of—PETA’s strange strategies, the organization has made a large impact, spurring policy changes in many animal-testing laboratories and on livestock and poultry farms. Their investigations have resulted in criminal charges for workers who have abused animals, including one who skinned a pig alive. PETA has been a major force to change public opinion about the glamour of fur. But does their activism go too far, driving away would-be supporters and objectifying women in the name of animals?
Selling Animal Rights with Sex
To protest Canadian seal hunting, PETA held a demonstration with naked volunteers covered in fake blood “writhing” in the grass. The bloody bodies were supposed to represent slaughtered seals, but the image was far too evocative of violent porn.
Eva Mendes, Pamela Anderson, Kim Basinger, and Alicia Silverstone have all posed naked for PETA’s anti-fur “I’d Rather Go Nude” advertisements.
In a campaign that reached cities across the United States, PETA volunteers clad in lingerie gave out bananas along with the message “Get a Rise out of Vegetarianism.” According to PETA, meat can cause impotence and infertility. Call me a cynic, but I find it hard to imagine that any man aroused by the women went to the PETA Web site and explored the reasons for becoming a vegetarian, let alone gave up meat. In another erotic PETA standby, yellow bikini-clad “chicks” crouch in wire cages illustrating the inhumane way chickens are often farmed. And to demonstrate the ethical dilemmas of eating pork, they have exhibited pregnant women in small pens on their hands and knees wearing nothing but panties.
