I can’t pretend to be much of an animal-lover myself personally, but I do fully recognise that our fellow creatures on this planet should not be needlessly mistreated. Discouraging impressionable young children from poisoning badgers, incinerating budgerigars, drowning fish or drop-kicking hamsters over rugby-posts is, of course, a universal public good. But what about henceforth forbidding them from riding horses, too? Well, you could make a decent fist of saying the practice is physically abusive, and so ought not to be encouraged, I suppose. But what about if the horses junior jockeys are riding are wooden? What then?
According to PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals), even this previously innocent-seeming action is now profoundly morally deviant. The prominent animal rights charity has just launched an international campaign of writing off to circus and fairground operators, ordering them to remove all the wooden horses from their carousels and merry-go-rounds in order to end the currently ongoing global equine genocide.
Addressing Aaron Landrum, CEO of Chance Rides, America’s largest merry-go-round manufacturer, PETA argued wooden carousel horses “normalise the use of animals as conveyances and amusements”, suggesting they replace all their old steeds with new ones “in the shape of cars, airplanes, spaceships, bulldozers and other vehicles or whimsical designs, like shooting stars, rainbows [of course!], or brooms”. As is well known, “children learn through play”, and by letting children play at being jockeys at the funfair, they learn that animals are mere toys to be played with by their future adult selves, too, a vicious cycle which ought to be broken to “help create a more just and merciful world”.
PETA wrote off to wooden horse-exploiters in Holland, too, prompting the following dismissive response from Atze J. Lubach-Koers, Chairman of the Dutch National Association of Fairground Owners: “Maybe we should tell PETA that the horses aren’t alive.”
For PETA’s Sake!
In actuality, PETA does not believe that carousel horses are alive at all – but it also knows full well that this isn’t the way in which corrupt journalists such as myself will most likely phrase the matter in their headlines, in search of easy clicks. Even a staid outlet like the Times went with the suggestively misleading ‘Activists ride to rescue of carousel horses’.
A cynic might guess that PETA, in search of free easy publicity, has an entire PR department devoted towards designing deliberately daft campaigns, in the full knowledge dupes like me will then go straight online and begin writing about them: in which case, well done, mission accomplished! Ridiculous past efforts from PETA have included its 2009 plea to rebrand fish as ‘sea kittens‘, to make them seem cuter and cuddlier and thus bring a complete halt to the pastime of angling, a stupid 2012 stunt requesting Nottingham be rechristened ‘Not-Eating-Ham’, and (a little more serious) its irresponsible 2014 poster-campaign dubiously implying drinking milk causes autism, which it doesn’t.
Particularly notable are PETA’s attempts to grab the attention of kids by targeting videogames as with its piggybacking (a phrase which, as we shall soon see, is highly ‘animal-racist’) upon the release of the 2012 Nintendo DS game Pokémon Black & White 2 by making an online knock-off parody, PETA’s Pokémon Black & Blue: Gotta Free ‘Em All. This made the rather hyperbolic claim that the gameplay in Nintendo’s real title, which involved players collecting fictional cartoon animals from the equally fictional land of Unova inside tiny balls, then forcing them out again to battle one another with their unique magical powers, encouraged small children to engage in bouts of playground cockfighting. Furthermore, according to PETA’s associated website:
Again, the point of this seemed to be to gain cheap media attention by virtue of easily being misreported along the lines of “Ha ha ha, now these cretins even think Pokémon are real!” which isn’t really accurate, but certainly makes for a good headline.
Does PETA’s brand of campaigning actually work? Well, it certainly gets the group lashings of free publicity. But as it tends to be overwhelmingly negative and mocking in tone, as in this present sceptical write-up of the charity’s antics, you could easily argue it simply undermines PETA’s entire case by making its employees sound like a bunch of lunatics, and thereby smearing animal rights as whole as an equally lunatic cause by association. But there is another potential problem with this line of self-promotion, too: what if some people out there actually end up taking it all seriously?
#BeeKind
PETA’s most successfully ‘gone viral’ operation was surely its 2018 crusade to remove and rewrite common animal-related phrases from the English language, like bowdlerising ‘Flog a dead horse’ into ‘Feed a fed horse’, or ‘Bee in your bonnet’ into ‘Thorn in your side’. No longer was it permissible to speak of ‘Killing two birds with one stone’; instead, you had to ‘Feed two birds with one scone’. Interestingly, whilst ‘Shoot fish in a barrel’ was now likewise to be verbally banished, its officially approved replacement was to become ‘Steal candy from a baby’, implying that, whilst animal-abuse was now verboten, child-abuse was fine and dandy.
Again, this was easily misreported – which I would speculate may have been the whole intention – as being a story along the lines of “Now PETA wants to ban the saying ‘pig-ignorant’ to avoid offending pigs!” or “Now PETA thinks the term ‘snail mail’ spreads damaging racial stereotypes against tardy gastropods!” But, again, it wasn’t quite this way: to think otherwise was merely to be done up like a kipper, if I’m still allowed to phrase it that way. As with banning wooden horses, PETA was actually claiming that “these old sayings… can normalise abuse” in infant minds and that therefore “teaching students to use animal-friendly language can cultivate positive relationships between all beings and help end the epidemic of youth violence towards animals”.
Consequently, PETA teamed up with its internal TeachKind subsidiary department, which designs animal-based learning resources for schools, to produce rather twee posters for classrooms from which, if pupils weren’t careful, they could end up drawing the erroneous conclusion that even using the word “milk” could badly upset the dairy herds from which it had been “stolen”, or that talking of “ants in your pants” was a form of heinous insect-based sexual abuse:
All very silly and pointless, but probably mostly harmless? Mostly, no doubt. But not necessarily always, because, whilst the generous interpretation of PETA’s PR tactics is simply that the group seeks easy publicity through overt absurdity, the less generous interpretation is that, to some degree, it actually believes all this stuff! One of PETA’s current campaigns goes under the following logo:
By saying that “Every Animal Is Someone”, PETA appears to be implying that, in some sense, animals are actually human beings, not really animals at all. Is this just a rhetorical device, intended to elicit empathy for all God’s creatures, akin to its 2009 ploy of rebranding fish as Sea Kittens? I’m not so sure. On its campaign website, PETA specifically implies that all animals have “unique personalities”, just as humans do, even Ed Miliband.
Well, maybe I can see how you could say that about a particularly cheeky monkey or a clever parrot. But I have yet to meet an eccentric termite or an arrogant axolotl. Yet, according to PETA, “Geese fall in love and are loyal to their partner for life, even when facing danger”.
This is purest anthropomorphism, as if PETA has fallen for its own Pythonesque propaganda: love as such is a purely human emotion, geese mating for life being simply a useful evolutionary survival strategy, not some form of avian marriage.
Sympathy for the Devil-Fish
Worse, PETA has an associated downloadable “empathy pack”, which, absolutely drenched in far-Left Newspeak, encourages people to “Speak up when someone makes a racist, ableist, speciesist or otherwise disparaging comment.” Speciesist? Is that a real word now? Yes – Wikipedia says so. It was coined in 1970 (by humans, just to be clear) in order to “create a rhetorical and categorical link to racism and sexism”.
“See The Individual,” orders the PETA empathy pack, alongside a large photograph of a parrot-fish. I’m sorry, but I can’t see any such thing within the limited frame of a small marine creature. “When it comes to what matters, we are all the same,” the blurb continues. How? I can’t even swim.
Apparently, “If we empathise with someone… it’s impossible to intentionally cause them harm.” If all species can only come together as one, then “there would be fewer wars, other violent conflicts and mass shootings”, most of which are evidently caused by longstanding antipathy between warring tribes of men, orangutans, lobsters and ocelots. Inevitably, joining as one with animal-kind will even help solve (here we go…) “the climate catastrophe”.
Empathy-seekers are urged, apparently by a cute talking squirrel, to perform a series of deeply weird self-help exercises, like: “Write down a list of traits you have in common with someone of a different race, age, religion or species, such as ‘We both feel hunger and pain, we both love our families, and we both want to be free of oppression’.” The only thing I have in common with a red squirrel, I’m afraid, is a recent experience of a mass of unwelcome new arrivals.
Gulls On Film
How are animals being subjected to “oppression” by the malign forces of Western capitalism? Just like the workers of the world in the view of Marx and Engels, they are being exploited, maybe even sexually, if you listen to certain animal rights obsessives who are even further beyond the fringe than PETA itself is.
The most interesting PETA recommendation is that empathetic wannabe-wolfmen get to know their fellow fauna better by watching what are termed “respectfully filmed (unobtrusive) nature documentaries”. What does PETA mean by “unobtrusive” here? Incredibly, there is a peripheral school of thought amongst the terminally anthropomorphic wing of the animal rights community that animals, like human beings, ought to have a legal right to privacy when performing potentially embarrassing acts like engaging in sex, masturbating, giving birth or having a poo.
Notoriously, back in 2010, Brett Mills, then a lecturer in Film Studies at the ‘University’ of East Anglia, released a study in the Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, arguing:
We have an assumption that humans have some right to privacy, so why do we not assume that for other species, particularly when they are engaging in behaviour that suggests they don’t want to be seen? … The key thing in most wildlife documentaries is filming those very private moments of mating or giving birth. Many of these activities, in the human realm, are considered deeply private, but with other species we don’t recognise that.
Here’s more, from the abstract of Mills’ paper:
It is argued that the ‘speciesism’ which affords humans a right to privacy while disavowing other species such rights is one of the tenets upon which humanity’s perceived right to maintain mastery over other species is itself maintained; that is, in order for wildlife documentaries to ‘do good’ [by increasing environmental awareness] they must inevitably deny many species the right to privacy.
When an amused British press subsequently reported on Mills’s paper, it was further noted that, following a 2008 edition of Springwatch, the BBC had received complaints from the public when presenter Bill Oddie voyeuristically spied on two innocent beetles having sex with his morally dubious hidden camera set-ups, describing what should have been a highly private act of loving union in the breathless language of an over-excited sports presenter: “He crash-lands on top of a likely looking lady. There’s a bit of luck! One thing’s for sure: this boy is horny!”
In response, Brett Mills was reported as saying that, whilst the idea animals have a moral right to privacy may seem a bit peculiar at first glance, the idea should not necessarily be dismissed wholly out of hand. “We can never really know if animals are giving consent” to appear in Bill Oddie’s extensive insect-porn collection unknown, “but they do often engage in forms of behaviour which suggest they’d rather not encounter humans”, like hiding away in burrows, Mills said. When will PETA finally launch its inevitable campaign against beetle-erotica, then? That’d certainly get them a few more cheap headlines.
Heavy Petting
Yet it turns out certain blue(-whale) movies might be perfectly ethical after all – namely, ones involving obviously homosexual animals, such as rainbow trout. Here is the abstract of Mills’ 2013 paper ‘The Animals Went in Two by Two: Heteronormativity in Television Wildlife Documentaries’:
This article examines British television wildlife documentaries in order to outline the ways in which limited representations of animal behaviour recur. It focuses on representations of animal sexuality, monogamy and parenthood, and suggests that how such activities are repeatedly represented draw on normalised human notions of such behaviour… It is argued that how animals are represented in such documentaries matters, partly because normalised discourses must be drawn on in order for programmes to make sense of the behaviour they present, but mainly because animal behaviour is commonly used as evidence for ‘natural’ forms of human behaviour.
If only Bill’s beetles had both happened to have been male, the BBC’s gross invasion of their privacy would have been completely acceptable in the name of undermining cisheteronormative cisheterohegemony amongst the audience, then!
Amongst several other extremely bizarre-sounding papers, Mr. Mills has also written a learned discourse exploring potential anti-pig racism in old episodes of Doctor Who featuring evil aliens of stereotypically porcine appearance, and another revisionist-sounding piece entitled ‘Jaws: From the Shark’s Point of View’. Far from being an ordinary humble academic scribe, is Mr. Mills secretly also the head of PETA or something? Actually, he seems to have mixed feelings about the charity himself, yet does appear to share the group’s apparent overall goal of extending weird Leftist intersectionality dogma outwards into the animal world, at least to judge by this 2010 comment he placed online about an article criticising some of the charity’s sillier stunts:
The most interesting difference between Mills and PETA, of course, is that, whilst Mills has in the past complained (in a creditably amused fashion, it must be said) of being misrepresented in the media, PETA’s whole PR strategy appears to be based on such a thing happening.
Pet Causes
Has PETA ever done anything useful? Yes, of course. But people of PETA’s broad intersectionalist mindset also appear to waste an awful lot of time doing things that are utterly pointless too, like worrying about the allegedly alarming ‘sexual ethics’ of wildlife documentaries or the highly ‘perverted’ phrase ‘ants in your pants’. Surely the group would be much better advised to stop all the strange woke posturing, attempts to hyperbolically link animals rights to racism, sexism and the ‘climate emergency’, and instead focus upon some real problems facing the planet’s fauna instead?
Honorably, for example, alongside all the manifest idiocy, PETA’s website also carries a campaign against cruel and outdated Islamic methods of halal slaughter of cattle – not very intersectional, but undoubtedly highly factual, for once. That kind of unpleasantness never used to have any place in Britain at all, but it certainly does now. Hating wooden animals as PETA do, maybe their next campaign should be against Trojan Horses, not carousel ones? I’m sure a friendly celebrity face like Morrissey would be happy to lend a hand.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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“All very silly and pointless, but probably mostly harmless?”
Far from harmless. If you believe the moon is made of cheese, and even perhaps try to convince others that this is so, but you do not hold that those that do not are “morally deviant” or worse try to suppress their views, censor them, get them sacked from their jobs, then you are harmless. That’s not what this lot are about. They want to tell everyone else what to think, say and do, and they want people who do not comply to be sanctioned.
We’re in an epidemic of bossiness. Too many people are arming themselves with some self declared moral superiority and launching into telling everyone else how they must behave. Like religious zealots.
This is why I despise Dawkins and all his fellow aggressive atheists. As an evolutionary biologist he should have realised that religion must have an evolutionary purpose. In fact I recall that point being made to him by someone in a debate and the idiot that Dawkins is admitting that it must – because every society has created some form of deity – but not knowing what that evolutionary benefit is. And yet the moron aggressively promoted atheism ridiculing religion.
It’s basically like a surgeon removing some part of the body that he doesn’t like without knowing whether it serves any other function.
In our country by the late 20th century, Christianity was completely tamed as a religion. It was perfect. It provided a broadly accepted moral compass while being very tolerant.
With that gone, the desire to believe in something is being expressed once again in the most obnoxious and destructive ways.
Completely agree.
Your surgeon analogy reminds me of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence
Chesterton was an abusive idiot drooling out anti-German hate propaganda during WWI. Swap fence for German in the text, than he’ll be perfectly happy to declare that it’s better to kill it despite not knowing what it might be good for.
Perhaps. But the idea is a good one. I know it sucks when someone who is perhaps on balance not great comes up with something good.
The idea is not – in fact – a good one. I know this from software development where a very prominent Never touch existing code! You don’t know what it’s good for!-religion exists, this being the reason why software becomes ever fatter and slower over time: Problems with the existing code base are never repaired. Instead, workarounds get added and then, workaround for the deficiencies of the workarounds and so on, until the whole abomination collapses into a singularity under its own weight.
Reality is, if humans put it there and it doesn’t seem to make any sense, the chances are very good that it actually doesn’t because humans (this obviously includes me) do stuff which doesn’t make any sense all the time. It’s far better to remove or change it and deal with whatever breakage this causes (if any) than to stare at it paralyzed with awe because of its utter incomprehensibleness.
Chesterton’s advice sounds very much like “Never touch my stuff! You don’t know why I put it there!”, betraying the usual egotistic hybris of those who believe that they are – as opposed to all other humans – free from faults and hence, their doings mustn’t even be questioned, let alone altered. Not much wisdom is to be expected from someone who once, with all of the tone of authority he so easily mustered, stated that only a Prussian militarist could come up with the outlandish idea that there’d be something wrong with murdering Prussian militarists (paraphrase of a quote in the Wikipedia article in franc-tireurs).
I wonder if you’ve read the idea properly. It doesn’t say don’t touch anything. It says only remove something when you know what it does.
That, btw, applies to software development. If you just rip out a piece of code that you have no idea what it does, then be ready for problems.
The clunkiness of old software is of course related to that but precisely because you can’t rip out bits willy nilly. Well maintained code is constantly rewritten and retested, not recklessly but carefully and deliberately.
I wonder if you’ve read the idea properly. It doesn’t say don’t touch anything. It says only remove something when you know what it does.
I wonder if you read my comment which plainly states
if humans put it there and it doesn’t seem to make any sense, the chances are very good that it actually doesn’t because humans (this obviously includes me) do stuff which doesn’t make any sense all the time.
When something doesn’t make any sense, it won’t be possible to know what it does because it doesn’t do anything (sensible). This implies that your position can only make sense when it’s assumed that humans never do stuff which doesn’t make sense which is obviously absurd. They do.
BTW, the baseless assertions about my professional abilities (or rather, lack thereof) were quite uncalled for and only serve to demonstrate that you have no arguments to support your absurd position.
Obsolescence? How about things that once made sense but later don’t, or make less sense?
But then that’s exactly an argument used by atheists, that primitive cultures needed religion but modern man, with his scientific knowledge doesn’t need God to explain things.
In any case they’re clearly wrong. Things that appear useless or senseless aren’t always what they seem.
Where exactly do I make any assertion whatsoever, let alone baseless ones, about your professional abilities? I haven’t said anything about you.
This starts to become increasingly bizarre (to me). Chesterton’s statement was basically that something which exists shouldn’t be altered or removed just because it doesn’t seem to be good for anything. This is not really sound advice because many things exist which are actually not only not good for anything but often detrimental as well. An example would be the former mask mandate in public buildings. At the height of this craze, people in favour of that actually tried to paint keeping it as the conservative, play-it-safe choice.
I used a different example than this one, namely, accumulation of cruft in codebases due to the tendency of the people working with the code to avoid changing old code, no matter how useless or broken, in favour of adding more code to work around the known deficiencies of the already existing code. A brilliant example of that I remember was a comment in some SuSE init.d script complaining about having to work around bugs in some other SuSE init.d script. The idea to fix the bug instead of working around apparently it never crossed the author’s mind. I additionally wrote that is usually more sensible to act on the presumption that what doesn’t seem to make any sense actually doesn’t make any sense as this will often be the case due to human nature, ie, due to humans being prone to doing stuff which doesn’t make sense.
In reply to that, I got a pretty patronizing Working with code 101 lecture or What someone believes about working with code 101 lecture, actually. Constant rewriting of existing code may be the norm in some OSS projects, although in larger ones, like Linux, there are necessarily huge areas of the code no one ever touches (>17,000,000 lines of code). It’s certainly not what’s being done in proprietary development, at least not the one I’m familiar with.
That’s brilliant.
“…not knowing what that evolutionary benefit is.”
That’s the norm in evolutionary biology: you find a function, and make up a plausible just-so story about why it’s there.
It’s easy enough to say that giraffes have long necks to reach higher branches, but it also happens to be tosh if you study the animals rather than Kipling. Imagination must multiply if you want to explain why oak leaves are different from beech leaves, and you’ll still be wrong.
Yet because Dawkins didn’t want religion to be beneficial, it got missed out of the evolutionary story-book.
I am sure someone once said the same of the Trans religion and look at us now.
Indeed. The “slippery slope” is not a conspiracy theory.
It’s interesting to trace the slippery slope of, say, transgenderism to the top. One place to start is Simone de Beauvoir’s unsubtantiated claim in the early 1960s that sex differences are entirely cultural, leading to John Money’s perverted application to children, and hence on through the academy to the operating table.
Indeed. I really don’t know why people get so hung up on sex differences. It seems blindingly obvious that they are not just cultural but also blindingly obvious that this doesn’t really matter for all practical purposes. Just treat people as individuals.
PETA is essentially run by people like this:
“It occurred to me that French people do something very weird with sandwiches that I think you guys would find strange,” she says at the start of the clip, which has over 163,000 views. Rollins proceeds to bring a slice of butter up to the camera. “This is butter,” she said. “What they do, it’s like a classic sandwich. It’s ham, cheese, and butter.”
‘No mayonnaise, no mustard, just butter,” she adds, breaking out into laughter.’
https://www.tiktok.com/@americanfille?lang=en
They know nothing about anything. A bunch of numpties well worth ignoring.
The French (I lived in France for 20 years) tend not to use butter on the bread for sandwiches, Dijon mustard certainly.
Since cheese is fat and mayonnaise is fat, they think it very strange to put more fat on fat.
As with croissants which are made with butter, the French don’t put butter on them to eat.
Butter, made from grass fed cows, has a lovely taste, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it by adding cheese. And the same is true of adding butter to cheese.
Eh, ——–I think I will give this jumble of crap a miss.
Yes, it’s important, but it’s why I pay a subscription, to relieve my conscience, and just skim the article.
Is there a rolling eye imoji? I want to use it as a micro “for f#@ks sake!” expression
It’s high time to draw attention to saladism¹ and stonism. Salads have a life of their own and don’t exist for the purpose of PETA activists prolonging their useless abusive existences by eating them alive. And while the existences of stones seems to be an entirely passive one, what do we know about the eternal agony of those who’ve been force-glued together with other erstwhile free stones in order to make walls? Stonist attitudes like believing it would be ok to kick or throw them around can’t be allowed to persist. Emphatize with a stone today by trying to imagine it would have been you who had been thus abused!
¹ Not to be confused with salafism.
And what about roasting stones in fireplaces or around camp fires?
Never debate a lunatic, observers might not be able to tell the difference.