PETA

By Mira P.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is an extremely well-known animal rights activist group. Before I get to writing anything else, one thing I want you to know is that this is an opinion post, which means I may post something that you disagree with or are offended by. Please let me (Mira) know in the comments section if anything did offend you.

I am not a fan of PETA, at all. I think they are obnoxious, and they go too far. They once handed out (I think; if I got anything wrong, feel free to tell me) disturbing "happy meals" to children to show them the cruelties of McDonald's, or maybe just eating meat in general, I don't know. Then another time they handed out flyers to children going to see a play, I believe, who have mothers and fathers who wear fur. Now, I absolutely hate it when people wear fur, but jeez, don't traumatize the kid - it's not their fault.

And another time, a more popular instance, is when they made a billboard that said "Save the whales. Lose the blubber: go vegetarian", and depicted a large woman in a bikini. If it didn't mean to purposefully, it accidentally calls overweight people "whales".

They have a few other billboards, though the other ones I've seen are less offensive. There's one that says "Boycott the circus", which I mostly agree with. I'm pretty sure that the circus does not treat the animals fairly or humanely - the only weird thing is that there's a naked woman on it (she's covered by her legs and body position, but still).

They've also made "parodies" (if that's the word) of video games, like Cooking Mama and Pokemon. In the PETA Cooking Mama, in the first part, you're basically cruelly and strangely killing and cooking a turkey, in a very unrealistic way (with evil Mama). In the second part, Mama goes vegan and turns into Good Mama, and proceeds to cook a tofu turkey. So the moral of the game? If you're not vegetarian, you're an awful person.

The other one was Pokemon, as I stated before. Now, how you can think of Pokemon as they apparently did is completely beyond me, but they managed to think of it as abuse, I guess. I haven't researched it much, but that's what I remember. I'm definitely not a fan of Pokemon (excuse me for not being able to put the accent-thingy on the "e") but I always assumed that the Pokemon just shrunk when they went into the Pokeballs . . . I didn't think there was a full sized animal (or whatever Pokemon are) in a tiny ball like that.

So for me, PETA isn't good and is actually anti-helpful to the cause of preventing animal cruelty. I've seen way more "eating a steak for PETA" than "I think PETA's doing good". And why put other animals before humans? I don't think you should put humans before animals, but animals aren't worth more. We're all equal, in my eyes.