PETA wants to use Michael Jackson’s song “Ben” to help lab rats

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PETA had its share of quarrels with Michael Jackson while the singer was alive, but now the animal rights group says it wants to use his legacy to help animals -- namely, rats.

Jackson’s first #1 hit as a solo artist, ‘Ben,’ was featured on the soundtrack of the 1972 movie of the same name. The movie was about a rat...a murderous rat, to be specific. (‘A lonely boy, played by Lee H. Montgomery, becomes good friends with Ben, a rat. This rat is also the leader of a pack of vicious killer rats, killing lots of people,’ reads its Internet Movie Database synopsis.)

But you wouldn’t know about its horror-movie aspects from its sweet-sounding title song, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. (It lost to a track from ‘The Poseidon Adventure.’) At any rate, PETA would like listeners to forget about the movie’s plot and focus on the song’s lyrics (‘Ben, most people would turn you away/I don’t listen to a word they say/They don’t see you as I do/I wish they would try to’) -- and they’ve written the Jackson family asking for the rights to the song.

‘If more people could be inspired by his song to stop supporting the cruel and ineffective animal-testing industry, it would be a fitting and enduring tribute to this talented performer,’ PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reinman said in a statement. Others -- including Tippi Hedren, who runs the reserve that now houses Jackson’s former pet tigers, and the Center for Great Apes, where Bubbles the chimp now lives -- have also suggested that helping animals is a fitting way to honor the King of Pop’s memory.

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-- Lindsay Barnett