from www.globeandmail.com http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet...07//?query=PETA

'What were these people thinking?'

Animal rights' billboard stirs outrage from missing women's families

By ROD MICKLEBURGH
With a report from Canadian Press

UPDATED AT 2:49 PM EDT Wednesday, Apr. 7, 2004

VANCOUVER -- The latest billboard campaign by a militant animal-rights organization that specializes in radical tactics has shocked relatives of the slain and missing women from the Downtown Eastside.

The ad by the U.S.-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals shows a young woman and a pig and the slogan, Neither of Us Is Meat.

The billboard appears to refer to the recent disclosure by B.C. medical health officer Perry Kendall that meat from the pig farm owned by Robert Pickton, who is charged with 15 murder counts in the missing women's case, may have contained human remains.

"It's absolutely disgusting," Lynne Frey, stepmother of missing sex-trade worker Marnie Frey, said yesterday.

"I'm so upset. What were these people thinking? Where the hell is their brain?

"This is so traumatic for all the families. We don't even have a burial certificate or a memorial for our daughter. I'd like to see them walk a mile in our shoes so they will know what it's like for us. This is totally unacceptable."

The billboards went up this week in Toronto and Edmonton. Next month, PETA plans to put up 1,000 posters of the ad in Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver.

PETA campaign director Bruce Friedrich said that the point of the ad is to remind people that animals experience the same pain and suffering as humans.

"Canadians . . .should think about the fact that there appears not to be a difference in taste between pig flesh and human flesh," Mr. Friedrich said.

"A corpse is a corpse, whether it formerly belonged to a pig, a cow, a chicken, or a human."

Ernie Crey, brother of Dawn Crey, whose DNA was found recently at the Pickton farm in Port Coquitlam, accused PETA of exploiting the missing women case.

"This is a cheap stunt on their part to use the grief and pain of the surviving families to advance their own interests," he said. "It's offensive and downright disgusting."

PETA, which includes B.C.-born TV star Pamela Anderson as one of its supporters, is dedicated to exposing and eliminating abuse of animals, particularly killing them for meat.

An earlier billboard in Boston called "holocaust on your plate" compared the suffering of cattle to that of Jews under Nazi Germany, evoking a storm of public outrage.

Deborah Jardine, mother of missing woman Angela Jardine, said PETA activists have clearly lost all their compassion.

"They obviously have not taken our feelings into account. But how can you stop it?"

Benita Ho of the street workers advocacy group PACE said the organization will ask for an investigation into the billboard campaign.

This is absolutely disgusting, unethical, and socially irresponsible. Not only is it impossible to compare the death of a person to an animal, but heartless to even attempt to humanize death by comparing the two.

Another unethical and poor decision made by PETA.

Martin says anti-meat ads 'unacceptable'
Last Updated Wed, 07 Apr 2004 13:52:51 EDT
VANCOUVER - Prime Minister Paul Martin on Wednesday condemned an animal rights campaign linking the eating of meat to the murders of women in British Columbia.

Billboards in Toronto and in Edmonton paid for by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals show pictures of a woman and a pig accompanied by the slogan, "Neither Of Us Is Meat."

The allusion is to the women who disappeared during the 1990s in the Vancouver area. Port Coquitlam pig farmer Robert Pickton has been charged in the deaths of 15 women.

Human remains found on Pickton's farm may have gone into sausages produced there, provincial authorities speculated recently.

The Canadian Press quotes Martin as saying there are ways to support a cause, but this isn't one of them.

Relatives of the dead women were also dismayed.

Rick Frey, whose daughter Marnie's remains were found on the farm, said the "terrible" ad gave him nightmares.

The Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres called the ad "grotesque and exploitative in the extreme," reported the London Free Press.

But Pat deVries, another victim's mother said she was not upset, according to The Canadian Press.

PETA argued it was making the point that both animals and humans experience pain.

The group plans to put up about 1,000 posters of the ad next month in Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver.

This is sick if that's what it refers to.


I wonder if PETA realizes that the more it attempts to shove their views down people's throats, the less effective they are and the more people resist?

You are aware that humans are animals, correct? Just wanted to make sure.

I think this campaign is another poor attempt by PETA to convert people to vegetarianism. It shocks more people and moves them away from veganism than it does educate them, and that's not a good thing.

It's actually a very good thing, given that veganism is an unnatural and unhealthy way of eating. You're very correct in saying that PETA does the vegetarian cause much more harm than it does good. Humanity evolved on meat; it's absolutely impossible to refute that. We were meant to eat it, and it's neither immoral or unhealthy.

PETA really alienates those middle-grounders who might believe in some of the same things it does. I personally eat the way I want to, and don't care what others eat. I don't even mind hearing about it from those who mistakenly believe that a proven unnatural diet is better for me than the one that's saved my life. I have no particular fervor for a low-carb, meat-heavy diet other than the fact that it's so amazingly effective and so healthy. It's a method. I just don't see eating as a religion, which is what you see from many vegetarians.

"PETA campaign director Bruce Friedrich said that the point of the ad is to remind people that animals experience the same pain and suffering as humans."

No, they don't.
The insane sociopathic insistence on equating the highly sophisticated developed human nervous system with that of primitive animals and insects is why PETA will always be disregarded as extremist lunatics.

While I am sure a pig experiences trauma and panic during the act of slaughter, how can you compare what a pig brain experiences to what the human brain is capable of experiencing? Our "intelligence" is merely a product of our minds having a greater capacity to perceive and understand our environment and our experiences - good or bad. How can any compassionate person compare what an animal feels right before the blade drops in a slaughter house, to what a murdered young woman must have felt during her the events leading up to her death (first the abduction, the fear, the dread, wondering if she will ever see her loved ones again...knowing her fate the entire time before her murder... ). It's absolutely sickening that peta would trivialize and dehumanize her very human emotions by comparing them to the instinctual reactions produced by a briefly traumatized pig.

Sometimes I really believe these PETA people don't love animals, they simply hate other humans. They just can't understand why people hold human beings in higher regard to pigs and ants. I almost feel sorry for them, until they pull a stunt like this that is so sickening that I am reminded how their presence is so deleterious to the world.

"They obviously have not taken our feelings into account. But how can you stop it?"


Well, if PETA didn't have a model release signature for the photo of the woman, then you stop it with a lawsuit. Even if a news agency holds the copyright to the photo, the model has to agree to publication, especially for advertising.

<waiting to see how the PETA supporters are going to justify THIS.>

Today's instalment, from http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet...08//?query=PETA

talk about hoisted by one's own PETArd (hey, I've ALWAYS wanted to use that expression somewhere--what a golden opportunity).
--------------------
Street teens hired to post signs linking meat, slayings

By ROD MICKLEBURGH

UPDATED AT 8:24 PM EDT Thursday, Apr. 8, 2004
VANCOUVER -- "Street teens" have been hired to plaster the city with controversial anti-meat posters linking the fate of 61 missing or slain women from the Downtown Eastside with the slaughter of pigs, after local billboard firms refused to rent space to the radical group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

PETA has hired Toronto-based Grassroots Advertising to put up the posters. "We've got a number of street teens in place to do it," Grassroots general manager Mary-Jane Owen said yesterday.

"Controversy gets people thinking, and these posters perhaps will make us reflect on the story behind the slice of protein on our dinner plate."

Meanwhile, the mastermind of the shock campaign that has already featured its message on billboards in Toronto and Edmonton is unapologetic about using the tragedy of the missing women to promote vegetarianism.

"We can't bring the victims back, but we can learn from this," said Bruce Friedrich, PETA's director of vegan campaigns.

"And what we can learn is that the adoption of a vegetarian diet is the best way to say 'no' to the continuing violence and suffering of animals."

The PETA billboard features pictures of a young woman and a pig, with the caption: Neither of Us Is Meat.

It refers to recent revelations that remains of some of the missing women may have been fed to pigs -- later butchered for meat -- on the farm of Robert Pickton, who is charged with murdering 15 of the women.

"If you're eating a corpse, you're eating a corpse, whether it's a human being or any other animal," Mr. Friedrich said.

That is sooo disgustingly sad and unethical. Un-bloody-believable! PETA is a sad group.

I don't see how they hold animals in high regard, since one of their long term goals is "setting all the pets free." As someone who rescued several from the street, I know this is doing them no favors.

I watched a show on National Geographic last night about cannibalism. Researchers turned up specific genes in 2/3rds of a representative sample of people from all over, M/V that protects against prions from eating brains, especially of our own species. About 10% have V/V which they didn't get into and the M/M people do not have those defenses against prions.

These were the letters mentioned on the show, they seem to have slightly different designations in the article.


Here is a link to part of the story.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...0_cannibal.html


Beth

Maybe once all our animal friends are "set free" to live into old age, PETA can care for them with the large bank roll they seem to have for advertising! Maybe they are thinking of relocation to a livestock asteroid!