Meat + Poultry - May 2004 - 10

Ethical shortfall

his past summer's infamous campaign by the People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals equated the Holocaust to the harvesting of animals. It was an unbelievably thoughtless effort that offended millions of people and dealt a serious
blow to any pretense PETA had to being a credible organization. Most U.S. broadcasters
and print media had the good taste to refuse the ads.
PETA then expanded on the aborted American campaign and launched "Holocaust
on a Plate" in Germany earlier this year. One ad paired images of hens in cages with
Jewish concentration camp inmates crammed into barracks. Another ad paired dead
pigs with a pile of dead Jewish bodies.
Germany's Jewish community called it anti-Semitic hate literature. The courts
agreed and stopped the ads on the grounds that they trivialized the Holocaust, a violation of German law.
Not content to limit their offensiveness to Jews, the equal opportunity-minded PETA
launched a very special Easter ad campaign this past April targeting Christian sensitivities. It featured an image of a pig with the caption that read: "He Died for Your Sins."

If innocent pigs deserve ethical
consideration, which is the mantra of
PETA, then innocent people do too.
Researchers have consistently
shown IONAL LC to be an
effective means of reducing and
inhibiting the growth of food
borne pathogens such as Listeria
sp. and Clostridium perfringens
in/on ready-to-eat meat and
poultry products. At effective
usage levels IONAL LC is more
cost effective than lactates

I hoped the Holocaust campaign would go down in the annals of cause advertising
as something mercifully unmatched in the history of that specialized and often controversial marketing segment. But, in an ongoing effort to offend everyone, PETA is at it
again. Here is a clip from the April 8, 2004, edition of Canada's Globe and Mail: "Teens
have been hired to plaster the city with controversial anti-meat posters linking the fate
of 61 missing or slain women from the Downtown Eastside with the slaughter of pigs,
after local billboard firms refused to rent space to the radical group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals."
Meanwhile, the mastermind of the shock campaign that has already featured its message on billboards in Toronto and Edmonton is unapologetic about using the tragedy of
the missing women to promote vegetarianism. The PETA billboard features pictures of a
young woman and a pig, with the caption: 'Neither of Us Is Meat.'"
It refers to recent speculation that the remains of some of the missing women may
have been fed to pigs, which were later butchered for meat on the farm of Robert Pickton, who is charged with murdering 15 of the women.
This one isn't as universally callous as the Holocaust campaign, but it's still a brutal slap
in the face to thousands of Canadians. You have to wonder about how such a message impacts the families of the missing women. Someone from PETA should ask them what they
think about a promotion that links their wives, mothers and daughters to pigs.
Here are two comments I picked up while reading Canadian newspapers online: The
Vancouver Sun reported that Rick Frey, whose daughter's remains were found on Pickton's farm, said the "terrible" ad gave him nightmares.
According to the London Free Press, The Canadian Association of Sexual Assault
Centres called the ad "grotesque and exploitative in the extreme." If innocent pigs deserve ethical consideration, which is the mantra of PETA, then innocent people do too.
Ethical is the key word here.
Americans are free to exercise their rights to express their opinions, but no one is entitled to trample on the emotions of people who have suffered great loss to further any
cause. It's a question of exercising ethical behavior. PETA desperately needs a lesson
in human ethics.
- Chuck Jolley, Publisher
cjolley@sosland.com

For more information, see ad index on Page 74

MEAT&POULTRY

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MAY 2004

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Meat + Poultry - May 2004

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