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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