PETA may become a joke
Today’s musical dedication goes out to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: "I Started a Joke," by the Bee Gees.
I still laugh when I think about the day PETA came to Brownsville.
It was April 2005, and a trio from the Norfolk, Va.,-based animal advocacy group stopped by on their national tour protesting chicken slaughter, and those who benefit from it. They first stopped at the Chicken Stop at Boca Chica and McDavitt boulevards.
As the three began their demonstration a Los Fresnos man pulled into the parking lot, got out and started berating them — through a bullhorn.
The protestors fled across the busy street to the KFC restaurant, the amplifier-toting man and his two stepchildren right behind them.
That’s when a school bus filled with rowdy high schoolers rolled up to the red light.
Students slid down the windows, stuck out their heads and gave the PETA folks a good maltratada.
"Where’s your chicken daddy?" "Aqui tengo tu chicken," and a few other choice phrases — a few of which can’t be printed — rained down on the protesters. They retreated from the sidewalk and onto the KFC’s lawn, whereupon the restaurant owner turned the sprinklers on them.
Few sights are sadder than a 6-foot wet chicken.
The memory came up when I saw PETA’s latest campaign: to save Punxsutawney Phil. PETA says subjecting the poor critter to the crowds and cameras that come out to the Pennsylvania town’s annual Groundhog Day festival is abusive.
Not to mention the pressure of deciding if the whole country will have to endure six more weeks of winter. I’m sure Phil gets barraged by lobbyists on both sides of that issue.
Anybody who’s seen pictures of the celebrated groundhog will probably agree that he appears to live a pretty pampered life. It looks like this woodchuck gets to chuck pretty much all the wood he wants.
The rights group suggested that Punxsutawney can still hold its festival; the city can just replace Phil with a robotic groundhog.
Do they really think people will pay any heed to a mechanical marmot? Have they not seen the last scenes of the "2001" movie? If Wall-E can save the world, will people believe that he still fears his own shadow?
This comes just a few months after the group had a conniption over the presidential assassination of a housefly on national TV.
During a televised interview last year, President Obama and his interviewer were being bothered by the pesky fly. At one point it landed on the president’s sleeve and he quickly dispatched it to insect eternity.
As executions go, this one seemed about has humane as you can get. Obama cupped his hand and quickly gave the fly a whack; it fell lifelessly to the floor. Any suffering was probably brief.
PETA folks have their hearts in the right place, except for those misguided few who didn’t know what to do with animals they’d rescued or received from concerned residents. So they killed them — hundreds of them — and dumped the little carcasses in a commercial trash bin. Certainly those people don’t reflect the majority of PETA members and supporters.
And the group has plenty of friends in Brownsville. The city’s mayor and his supporters are testament to that. We love animals as much as anybody, but we still know our place in the food chain. And we can appreciate all the mice, roaches and other bugs on the endangered list, but if any of them crawl into our houses, most of us aren’t going to check the species list before bringing out the traps and chemical weapons.
PETA needs to learn to pick its fights. Going on about the rights of houseflies and talking about robotic groundhogs will likely get many people to just roll their eyes rather than nod their heads in agreement. Besides, Punxsutawney’s furry mascot is more likely to be afraid of RoboPhil than he is of any shadow.
Many animals do suffer abuse, and it’s good that people care about them. It would be a shame to see their highest-profile advocacy group allow itself to become ridiculed to the point of irrelevance.
Carlos A. Rodriguez is opinion editor for The Brownsville Herald. His e-mail address is crodriguez@brownsvilleherald.com.
