Baby for dinner: PETA serves up eeew for Thanksgiving
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At Thanksgiving, PETA ratchets up its efforts to create a world without (human) meat eaters and often manages to outrage and shock roasted-turkey fans nationwide. This year, it’s a (human) baby as the centerpiece of a Thanksgiving feast and a turkey-dog message aimed directly at kids.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals put its Thanksgiving baby feast up for display in Philadelphia and, most recently, on Tuesday in Baltimore.
‘They set up a table’ on a Baltimore sidewalk, PETA media coordinator Adam Miller told the Los Angeles Times, “like a Thanksgiving spread, with silverware and plates and stuff and the baby in the middle.”
Not a real baby but a doll, he said, and the display featured signs that read, “Everybody’s somebody’s baby.”
PETA says its point was that many turkeys aren’t even a year old when they’re killed for Thanksgiving consumption. Of course, the average lifespan of the domesticated turkey is 10 years. The average lifespan for a U.S. citizen is 78 years. If you do the math, a second-grader perhaps would have been more apropos as the main course.
The turkey dog has stirred up controversy with its aim directly at kids. Billboards featuring the turkey with a dog’s head and a provocative message -- ‘Kids: If you wouldn’t eat your dog, why eat a turkey?’ -- have been posted in seven states, some of them outside public schools. ClickOrlando.com quoted one parent:
‘The ad is inappropriate because the kids don’t make the decisions, the parents do. You’re just scaring the fudge out of the kids,’ said Christina Jimenez.
PETA admits that the ads are intended to speak directly to school-age children. These kids are ‘young enough to have open minds that animals are not food,’ said PETA’s Bryan Wilson.
Another memorable ad promoting veganism (see video below) was booted off airwaves in some cities in 2009. PETA had intended for the TV commercial ‘Grace’ to be broadcast during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
In the ad, a young girl sitting at a crowded Thanksgiving table prays, thanking God for, among other things, ‘the chemicals and dirt and poop in the turkey we’re about to eat.’ Four NBC affiliates broadcasting the parade banned the commercial.
The general manager of one affiliate, WNCN in Raleigh, N.C., said at the time that he chose to ban the ad in Raleigh and Savannah because it didn’t fit with the spirit of the parade.
ALSO:
2009 PETA ‘Grace’ video causes a stir
PETA sends girls in bikinis to visit Prince Harry
Thousands petition Target: Please, ‘Save Thanksgiving’!
-- Amy Hubbard
