Since we biologists were just bizarrely accused of being like a bunch of animal rights activists, I am surprised that when I read that PETA opposes experiments on gay sheep, I find myself opposing PETA and thinking that the experiments sound cool and interesting and informative. I’m also a little disgusted with the way PETA finds it necessary to lie in their criticisms.
The Next Hurrah has a thorough take-down of PETA. Particularly amusing is the statistic that the research involves 18 sheep a year, while meat-packers butcher 4 million per year…so which one do the kooky extremists of the animal rights movement go after? There is an entirely appropriate quote from Mark Twain that applies here: “To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.” Research that studies cute little lambs and can be tied to homosexual shibboleths of both the right and the left sounds like the perfect scapegoat to lead more people to contribute to their cause; damning lamb chops and mutton just doesn’t push the right buttons.
Hmmm, reminds me of The Arrogant Worms’ “Carrot Juice is Murder”. Lyrics, better when heard however.
Are you claiming PETA don’t go after and haven’t gone after meatpackers?
I don’t think that’s right, and you probably shouldn’t make it appear like you’re claiming it after accusing them of lying.
AFAIK, PETA doesn’t ask biologists to come up with the single most important issue facing their field, or single most promising line of inquiry, and then wonder why all the biologists aren’t focusing on that to the exclusion of anything slightly more arcane.
Criticize their lies, but it’s not real fruitful to try to paint them as obsessed with the insignificant when they could be obsessed with instead.
Especially when the example used is manifestly something they do, in fact, deal with.
Lettuce, I think he was questioning their proportionality of response (or rather, their lack thereof).
Yeah, PETA is all wet on animal research, but that doesn’t justify claiming that they don’t put out tons of press releases and mount campaigns against meatpackers and such. They do. All the time. Their SIN is actually precisely about their consistency in this regard: trying to pretend that all use of animals is by definition unjustified and abuse without making any important moral distinctions between, say, veal pens and humanely treated lab animals.
I remember during the initial BSE scare in the USA (damn those Canadians for actually testing their cattle – don’t they realize that it ruins the statistics?), when a prominent PETA organizer went on record threatening to spread the disease intentionally.
What better way to save the cows from slavery then to infect them with a pathogen that slowly turns turns their brains to jello before killing them?
“Lettuce, I think he was questioning their proportionality of response (or rather, their lack thereof).”
If so, that’s not a very strong criticism either. People, including science advocates, highlight small, almost anecdotal cases all the time without consideration of whether they are THE most important thing going on at the moment or do the most harm. There’s time to eviscerating some crackpot creationist who has no power to do anything even in the midst of fighting real political struggles over schoolboards.
And I’m sure nice fluffy cute “sheep” (rams) are definately a plus in terms of PR. But there’s nothing particularly disreputable about that: again, everybody picks cases to highlight that have the most public appeal when they are trying to catch the public’s attention.
“What better way to save the cows from slavery then to infect them with a pathogen that slowly turns turns their brains to jello before killing them?”
Heh. Since PETA is so fond of comparing the plight of animals to slavery, I wonder if we’d favorably remember an abolitionist who tried to “help” the slaves by deliberately infecting them with some horrible contagious disease. Somehow, even if this campaign had been successful, I’m not sure they would be remembered as heroes.
You mean that when those right wingers eat rack of lamb it might be GAY rack of lamb?
there’s proportionality, and then there’s proportionality. The PETA home page displays as many featured stories about “gay sheep” as it does about becoming vegetarian (1 feature each). There are 200,000x more sheep killed for meat than by this lab.
The only analogy I can think of would be something like (1) noticing your neighbor runs his A/C when he’s not home, (2) putting out press releases claiming that he’s running it on the blood of orphaned puppies, while (3) the rest of the city drives around in SUVs.
Sorry, it still just seems like a pretty lame criticism. Pick any organization you support and see if your “proportionality” standard holds up very well for them. I tried with some of mine, and it doesn’t. Again: advocacy organizations take time to highlight individual cases that they think will be compelling all the time. Given that they also unqequivocally oppose factory farming and have mounted several multi-million dollar campaigns against it (most of which backfired on them in a head-slappingly predictable manner), it just seems silly.
Oho– I always thought there was something fishy (swishy?) about Shari Lewis’ “Lambchop,” who was allegedly a ewe, and yet… ? This could explain a lot.
Pardon the compulsiveness, but that prob’ly shoulda been Lewis’s.
PZ, it’s not the meat-packers; it’s the meat-packing sheep that have PETA in a tizzy.
;)
I’m not sure how these claims actually follow:
I suppose the desire to understand how sexuality develops and is controlled necessarily means these researchers are advocating a “cure” for homosexuality?
At a guess, I’d say they’re probably parsing it as:
rather than:
just a guess, though, as I certainly don’t know for sure–I’m having that “alien mind” experience from them that PZ described earlier.
cute little lambs… homosexual shibboleths… the perfect scapegoat…
That’s a lot of Biblical metaphors in a single sentence.
When you live in a country like Mexico, where you can see animal heads literally decorating markets and food carts, or you can eat tacos made of eyes, you don’t feel like protesting against experiments with sheeps. Actually you feel sort of hungry.
When you live in a country like Mexico, where you can see animal heads literally decorating markets and food carts, or you can eat tacos made of eyes, you don’t feel like protesting against experiments with sheeps. Actually you feel sort of hungry.
Scott Eric Kaufman, they don’t (that’s the point) except that the researchers did make reference to humans in one sentence of their (approx. 30-page-long) NIH grant application.
RavenT, I’d read it as “understanding the {development and control} of {sexual motivation and mate selection}”, with {development and control} meaning they want to know (1) how X arises and (2) how X is maintained; and {sexual motivation and mate selection} being the X. And if that ain’t alien language, I don’t know what is. (On the other hand, I’ve seen worse science writing.)
Frankly, I am more intrigued by the selection process. Who gets the joy of sitting around a farm waiting to see which rams are gay? Do they send out requests to all of the local farmers? Perhaps the overall gay sheep population is much higher then I imagined. Does the population include lesbian sheep? If so, how do they identify them. Finally, I am curious how many fundies would be willing to pony up funding for a possible solution to ending the dreaded homosexual “problem” we are facing today.
One of these days the bioconservatives on both the left and the right are going to realize that they have more similarities than differences. What a sad day that will be for science.
PETA is an insane org- bent on violence and banning house pets…
Educate Yourself!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7562800910863882593
Who isn’t against the harsh and cruel treatment of animals? I suppose, its the same people who don’t oppose similar treatment of human beings… or ‘product’, as they call us.
Nitus claims
….a prominent PETA organizer went on record threatening to spread the disease intentionally.
Could you back that up?
Maybe the world doesn’t need PETA to expose cases of animal cruelty. Fur farms and cosmetic companies and zoos can just do their thing and no one will be the wiser.
Let’s all just stick our heads in the sand.
Some current PETA Action Alerts (from the UK site):
Stop Barbaric Baby-Seal Slaughter
Tell Bearskin-Hat Makers to Stop Taking Blood Money
Show ‘Magic’ That Animals in Ads Are Not Good for Business
URGENT: Help Stop the Construction of a Huge Fur Farm in Norway
Circuses in Ireland: Speak Out
http://www.peta.org.uk/
As far as I’m concerned, those are good causes.
I felt a definite bias so I went over to the Peta page. There are some disturbing things there. On a cursory read through they seem to be interested in FAR more than 18 gay sheep. I’m sure there are extremists among them but does that make them “terrorists”? Go have a look, especially the circus stuff. Some of you may be relying too much on media reports. Be skeptical, be very skeptical.
without making any important moral distinctions between, say, veal pens and humanely treated lab animals.
They don’t make critical moral distinctions between lab animals, house pets and seeing eye dogs, why the frack do you expect them to make distinctions between veal pens and labs? Seriously, you need to look past the puplic face of this organization at the words and actions at the top. They have public records indicating “loans” to the families of people that blow up research labs, their top leaders have stated that their is *no moral difference* between violence and peaceful solutions (which I assume means they are only worried about the “legal” issues of the former), they are noted for often killing more animals they “save” from various places than the places they “saved” them from, etc. While convincing your grandmother that the $100 she donated will go to save a puppy from a bad owner, instead $10 of it going into a “loan” to some bomber, $50 of it to a refrigeration truck and the last $40 to pay someone to steal the puppy, so they can give it a lethal injection and dump the corpse in their new freezer. All done quietly behind the scenes, where the general public has todig through public records to find the truth.
Sorry, but the only thing about PETA that surprises me is that they can manage to dupe so many people into blindly thinking that their public face is real, and not a mask for complete madness. Personally, all it took me was about 30 seconds to decide I didn’t trust a damn thing they do, after asking myself, “Does it really matter if someone thinks humans are ‘less’ worthy of rights and life than animals, as long as the majority of stuff they do is beneficial?” Try phrasing the same thing in terms of say… fundamentalist Christianity, where most Christians have no association with them past the name and the “presumed” similarity in theology, and where the nuts are more than happy to point out everything from the $10 given to a parishiner in the ‘nearly’ Unitarian church to the rabid nut on a radio talk show trying to equate toothpaste with pedophilia, as “proof” that their version of religion has created vast benefits to society. PETA does the same thing. “Please ignore the insane lunatics running things at the top, what matters are the thousands of things the clueless and ignorant do in our name that *do* benefit society!”
Several times “religion” has been described here as something centered on a person or idea, to the exclusion of all rational thought, and it has been pointed out that things like Stalinism where “religions” by such a definition. So is PETA. And as with all religions, to those that believe in them, there are thousands of examples of how the religion has maybe made the world a better place, albeit through the people that follow it, not the lunatic theology of the people on the top, who just want as many converts as they can get their hands on. Beneath the surface, in every case, as an ugly morass of strange, or even completely insane, ideas, which drawn to their logical and “desired” conclusion could and would undermine and obliterate every scrap of “improvement” that incididental association with the more reasonable principles they claim to have has brought about. Principles that are agreed with, often, by organizations that PETA itself has actually apposed, such as the Humane Society. See, its OK for PETA to save thousands of animals by killing them, but not OK for HS to adopt out thousands of animals into what PETA claims is slavery, minus a few dozen that are unadoptable and are put to sleep in the *exact* same way PETA “saves” them.
Its doesn’t matter how “good” the causes are, if the people running the puppet show have an agenda that equates every single person that is helping them, but doesn’t think that having a goldfish is a sign of Nazi thinking, with some sort of disease that, in a truly just world, would all be wiped off the face of the earth. Leaving, one would presume, a lot of crazy people living in caves, all scared to death to dg roots out of the ground, on the off chance they might “offend” a gopher.
I wrote two letters to the editor last week in response to the latest attack on biomedical research by PETA. One to the local gay rag entitled ‘Just Out’ here in Portland, OR, and one to ‘The Advocate’. The Just Out letter will be published next week.
I find it quite sad and hypocritical for any homo to support an organization whose ultimate goal is to stop all animal experimentation including that which will lead to treatments and cures for AIDS and breast cancer. It’s pathetic.
PETA? People Eating Tasty Animals?
I’m all for it.
I should also add that I am a post-doc in the lab next door to Dr. Roselli. He was part of the interview process for the position I currently hold. He is certainly not homophobic since I was out during the entire interview process.
Talk about extreme. I’m certainly not going to support this bill sponsored by James Inhofe:
Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (Introduced in Senate)
[…]
Sec. 43. Force, violence, and threats involving animal enterprises
`(a) Offense- Whoever travels in interstate or foreign commerce, or uses or causes to be used the mail or any facility of interstate or foreign commerce–
`(1) for the purpose of damaging or disrupting an animal enterprise; and
`(2) in connection with such purpose–
`(A) intentionally damages, disrupts, or causes the loss of any property (including animals or records) used by the animal enterprise, or any property of a person or entity having a connection to, relationship with, or transactions with the animal enterprise;
`(B) intentionally places a person in reasonable fear of the death of, or serious bodily injury to that person, a member of the immediate family (as defined in section 115) of that person, or a spouse or intimate partner of that person by a course of conduct involving threats, acts of vandalism, property damage, trespass, harassment, or intimidation; or
`(C) conspires or attempts to do so;
shall be punished as provided for in subsection (b).
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.1926:
My favourite animal liberationist anecdote is when AL in Australia complained (during the first Bush gulf war) about sheep being endangered by being sent through a war zone. Why were they travelling through the war zone? So their throats could be cut in one of the Gulf States.
It is just as rational as complaining about us raising especially bred, fed, innoculated and protected grazing animals instead of allowing them proper natural selection by predation. (Or letting them starve by keeping them away from our crops). These people should be seen for what they really are, anti-rationalists. If they concentrated on ensuring that we deal with all animals as humanely as possible for our sakes they might have my support.
People who are gung-ho about eating meat should at least make an effort to support the people who work in slaughterhouses:
A Jungle For Meatpackers
By Eric Schlosser, The Nation
Posted on September 5, 2006, Printed on September 6, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/41076/
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. Its depiction of unchecked greed and exploitation in the American meatpacking industry unfortunately remains relevant.
A few months ago the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a December 2000 ruling by an administrative law judge at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The case involved the behavior of the Smithfield Packing Company between 1992 and 1998 at its plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina–the largest hog slaughterhouse in the world. According to the appeals court, Smithfield had violated a wide variety of labor laws and created “an atmosphere of intimidation and coercion” in order to prevent workers at the plant from joining the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union.
Here are some of the details: Smithfield threatened to close the plant if workers voted to join the UFCW. It harassed workers who supported the union and paid other workers to spy on them. It forced union supporters to distribute anti-union literature. It fired workers for backing the union. It asked workers to lie during their testimony to the NLRB and refused to hand over company videotapes that the government had subpoenaed. During a union election in 1997, two UFCW supporters were beaten and arrested by security officers and deputy sheriffs. The chief of security at the slaughterhouse–who also served as a local deputy sheriff–carried handcuffs and a gun on the job. Between 2000 and 2005 he ran a company police force, operating in the plant and staffed with other deputy sheriffs, that arrested almost a hundred workers, including UFCW supporters.
One of the most remarkable things about Smithfield’s behavior is that it was criticized by a branch of the federal government. Since George W. Bush took office in January 2001, the meatpacking industry has wielded more power than at any other time since the early twentieth century. The Bush Administration has worked closely with the industry to weaken food safety and worker safety rules and to make union organizing more difficult. The US Department of Agriculture now offers a textbook example of a regulatory agency controlled by the industry it’s supposed to regulate.
The current chief of staff at the USDA was, until 2001, the chief lobbyist for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Meanwhile, the sort of abuses criticized in the NLRB’s Smithfield decision are still being committed. A recent Human Rights Watch report on the US meatpacking industry found “systematic human rights violations.” Lance Compa, the author of the report, teaches labor law at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Compa interviewed many workers at the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel. What’s happening there, he says, is “a modern-day version of The Jungle.” [continues]
http://alternet.org/module/printversion/41076
So, should everyone go over to their site and send the letter to OHSU, with, of course, a bit of editing to note that this is a load of codswallop? Or does that improve their statistics on the number of angry letters they got people to write?
Well, if the latter, who really cares or will listen? Just imagine if somebody actually had to look at some of this stuff PETA is sending, what a comfort it would be to find a lot of the messages to be attacks on PETA instead.
Of course they’ll spam you, but what’s a spam filter for, anyway?
Besides, filling out their form made me realize what my first name is. Camberwell Porlock, Jr. sounds rather distinguished, no?
“(B) intentionally places a person in reasonable fear of the death of, or serious bodily injury to that person, a member of the immediate family (as defined in section 115) of that person, or a spouse or intimate partner of that person by a course of conduct involving threats, acts of vandalism, property damage, trespass, harassment, or intimidation; or”
So, um, you’re against people who make death threats being punished? Really?
I remember during the initial BSE scare in the USA (damn those Canadians for actually testing their cattle – don’t they realize that it ruins the statistics?), when a prominent PETA organizer went on record threatening to spread the disease intentionally.
IMNAB (that is to say, I Am Not A Biologist) but I think that I’ve got a pretty good handle on disease vectors.
But tell me, just how do you persuade the molecules of a brain to improperly fold themselves?