elephant journal

Naked Aggression: Factory Farming. Naked Compassion: PETA interns. [NSFW]

by Waylon Lewis, elephantjournal.com on Oct 3, 2008

I don’t care what Alex says. After seeing the below pics, I wanna intern for PETA.

Finally, animal rights, being vegetarian or vegan & compassion is NSFW.

I’ve been a vegetarian for six plus years (yes, I think I’m morally superior to you and my former factory farm meat eating self—as a famous philosopher says, mercy is the greatest and least used human attribute, and the most precious quality that distinguishes us from the animal realm.

Still, I don’t like to talk about why I’m vegetarian come dinner-time—I encourage my staff and friends to know whether their meat is free-range or sustainably harvested, and hopefully relatively clone, GMO and mercury-free. But beyond that, I don’t get all up in their faces, as (most infamously) the crazies at PETA do. PETA is your classic strident, we’re 100% right and you’re 100% wrong unless you agree with us 100% organization (I happen to agree with them 100%). So it’s with open arms that I welcome their more fun, less gruesome (check out their videos, if you eat meat—you’ll never order non-free-range again) attempts to get the animal compassion message across. They’ve taken care of Vick’s abused dogs, they’ve helped huge chains (all of ‘em: KFC, McDonalds, Wendy’s…) improve the way they source their meat and they’ve exposed some truly horrible practices (dumping male chicks in trash cans, throwing them away; stripping animals of flesh or dunking in hot oil while still alive; you have to see it to believe it).

Still, it’s with mixed feelings that I see their use of nudity, mostly female, to get across the mercy message. Do we really have to sugercoat the bitter eat-no-meat pill with sex to get folks to change their ways? The answer is, sometimes, yes.

That said, I have no mixed feelings about posting this. I know it’ll get lots of traffic (from 12-year-old vegan boys?), bringing in new readers who, hopefully, will go on to read our less sexy, equally worthwhile content.

Let the naked protests begin:

[galleria]

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