Letters to the Editor
PETA has to
use shock factor to get attention
In response to the article about PETA published on Nov. 4, I think most
people would agree that many of PETA’s tactics are in poor taste.
Comparing milking cows to rape, or the slaughtering of animals to the
Holocaust and slavery is not polite.
Polite or not though, if you want to compare what happens to animals in
terms of people, you have to go to instances in history where people were
treated exactly like animals.
Now the analogies are certainly not perfect, but they are close and the
idea is to shock people into recognizing the problem.
There are human-animal interactions that are exactly equivalent to what
Hitler tried to do in the concentration camps, but even I don’t
have the guts to say them.
Really a lot of the things people do to animals have no equivalent in
history because what we do to animals is so out there it would never be
allowed in any society. No culture ever practiced cannibalism on the scale
of even a small cattle ranch.
If you want to think of a human equivalent to cows, look up “The
Time Machine” by H.G. Wells. The fact is if you fail to relate issues
back to people, people will (for the most part) ignore them.
Here is a twisted example: think for a second about our mascot the bulldog.
Bulldogs are derived from gray wolves, an animal 2.5 feet at the shoulder
weighing 120 pounds. Bulldogs are 1 foot at the shoulder and weigh 55
pounds. A human equivalent would be a race of people 2.25 feet tall, weighing
69 pounds, with no nose, massive jaws, and loose skin hanging off their
faces and shoulders.
If you want to see Frankenstein’s monster all you have to do is
look at a dog.
Brandon Hamilton
biology, senior
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