Do we really want to see what McDonald’s is made of?

As the world’s largest hamburger fast food chain by sales, McDonald’s serves around 68 million customers per day in 119 countries. Founded in 1955 by Dick and Mac McDonald, and later run by legendary businessman Ray Kroc, McDonald’s is the best known franchise in the world, with golden arches spotted from Lebanon to the Louvre.

McDonald’s history of controversies and lawsuits is nearly as old as the company itself. Since its founding, McDonald’s has come under fire for everything from environment to health to labor practices, inspiring terminology like McJob (a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement) and critical food industry documentaries like Super Size Me. What else would you expect from a restaurant founded upon and organized around factory assembly line principles?

McDonald’s latest marketing campaign addresses the quality of their ingredients, and more specifically, the people behind those ingredients. Under the headline “See What We’re Made Of,” the campaign, created by Omnicom DDB, is heavy on video, with feel-good “Supplier Stories” from potato, lettuce, and beef growers, as well as informative looks “Inside Our Kitchens” to see how staples like the Big Mac and Egg McMuffin are made.

“We thought putting a face on the quality of the food story would be a unique way to approach this,” McDonald’s U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Neil Golden told AdAge. “We acknowledge that there are questions about where our food comes from. I believe we’ve got an opportunity to accentuate that part of our story.”

But how much of the story is real, and how much is just marketing? Let’s look at some of the facts.

The Good

While McDonald’s certainly isn’t the poster child for corporate social responsibility, the company has taken a number of steps toward greater transparency and more sustainable business practices in recent years. Nutritional information and ingredient lists for most of their standard menu items are available online, as well as answers to frequently asked questions like “What do you feed the cows that the beef comes from?” (answer: mostly corn). In 2008, McDonald’s opened a pilot LEED-certified “green” location in Chicago, with energy efficient equipment and lighting, high efficiency plumbing, and permeable pavement and rainwater collection for irrigation. They followed up with a North Carolina location in 2010 and a LEED-driven sustainable overhaul of their Global Headquarters. McDonald’s has also tackled packaging, cooking oil reuse, and customer awareness campaigns.

With this particular campaign, it looks like McDonald’s aim is to tap into the fresh/organic/locavore movement by presenting its ingredients as fresh and its farming partners as real people, just like you and me. The farmers chosen for “Supplier Stories” are secondary sources, contracted through McDonald’s suppliers, and they represent a cross-section of backgrounds and locations.

The Bad

McDonald’s has long been criticized for working with large-scale suppliers who have questionable environmental and animal welfare policies. Just in November, ABC News revealed that Sparboe Farms, which supplied the majority of eggs used in McDonald’s popular Egg McMuffin breakfast sandwiches, was guilty of horrific violations related to animal cruelty and hygiene. Soon after, McDonald’s ended the supplier relationship, and Sparboe vowed to “do better.”

But McDonald’s has yet to take action in response to PETA’s recent “McCruelty: I’m Hatin’ It” campaign, which calls the corporation out on inhumane treatment of chickens by their suppliers.

Says PETA: “Chickens who are raised for McDonald’s are killed using an old-fashioned method that causes millions of birds to have their wings broken and many to be scalded to death in defeathering tanks. A less cruel slaughter method—and one that is already used by McDonald’s European suppliers—is available, but the company refuses to require its U.S. suppliers to upgrade to it.”

And those are only recent scandals in a long list of controversies.

The Questionable

“Supplier Stories” presents a romantic view of American agriculture, with soft lighting, panoramic shots, acoustic background music, and farmers who emphasize the values of hard work and perseverance. In the world depicted in these videos, conventional factory farming isn’t a practice that’s harmful to the environment; it’s the American dream. The feel-good nature of the campaign glazes over many of the issues involved in McDonald’s supplier relationships, like the pesticide and migrant worker issues in the Salinas Valley where lettuce producer Dirk Giannini farms.

Plus, while the base ingredients in McDonald’s meals may come from the fairytale farms depicted in the videos, what happens to them after they hit a McDonald’s kitchen cancels out all the purported purity. McDonald’s famous french fries, for instance, contain much more than just home-grown potatoes:

Potatoes, vegetable oil (canola oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor [wheat and milk derivatives]*, citric acid [preservative]), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (maintain color), salt. Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness). Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent. CONTAINS: WHEAT AND MILK. *(Natural beef flavor contains hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk as starting ingredients).

For McDonald’s to highlight the stories of the people behind their products is a step in the right direction. However, McDonald’s has yet to address in a significant way how its factory farm suppliers are harming the world they so romanticize.

EcoSalon celebrates its 5,555th post with something groundbreaking like this really weird 5,556th post.

This week marked our 5,555th post and at first, we thought we should run for cover when all those 5′s lined up. After all, freaky things happen when the shapely number rears its big, flat head: in Egyptian mythology people get beaten to a pulp, cylons in Battlestar Galactica get meaner than hell and let’s not forget the satanic pentagram in all its five pointedness.

To celebrate this major milestone, we decided to pull the strangest articles out from the woodworks that we could find. Here are some goodies we hope will make you keep reading EcoSalon until the end of the world happens on our 6,666th post.

This week we got to learn about a very sacred space in a woman’s drawer, the low income pantie housing section, where dreams and romance basically die and tragic revelations about self-worth emerge. In The Psychology of a Woman’s Underwear, we go to that comedic space and listen to the tale of our new writer Jane F. King-Doe.

What do chickens and Jesus have in common? Religion. And according to one eco-fashion blogger who was completely incensed by our article Jesus, Enough With The Chicken, we got a Letter to the Editor from her stating our stance on fast food chain Chick Fil-A was not only wrong, it was just pure blasphemy.

We can totally appreciate the work that PETA does to protect animals but some of their work borders lunacy. In 5 More Utterly Outrageous PETA Stunts, writer Mike Sowden documents PETA’s denial that fish exist, tries to wrap his brain around how dressing up like the KKK helps prevent dog breeding and wrings his hands over targeting children with profusely bleeding cows via video games.

Sexy, sexy, sexy, that’s what garlic is, and cardamom and of course just-out-of-the-oven steaming pumpkin seeds. They are so spicy sexy they can actually get your orgasmic motor running and in Orgasmic Organics: 20 Tasty Aphrodisiacs To Put Sizzle In Your Sex Life we gobble up all the information we can get before we set out to start our (cough) eco-friendly weekends.

If we can’t wear mink we should turn to something furry still like, say…nutria! New Orleans based Righteous Fur says this “colossal waste” of fur from rodents causing major coastal erosion should be recycled into fun hats, bags and other nutria-fur-based accessories. Maybe just clicking over to Guilt Free Fur to see the pictures will be enough for you to realize, fur, any way you slice it is just so, dead.

In the words of Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That sage advice may be familiar to those who find meat to be the anti-Christ of edibles, but for most Americans, meat is what’s for dinner. And it’s what’s in the news this week, too. Three stories:

Like your meats antibiotic-free? The FDA just made things a little easier for you. Giving farmed animals antibiotics is a widespread practice. It’s done to ward off illness and promote faster growth. But the rise in mega-viruses including dangerous E. coli strains has led the FDA to rethink this practice. The more drug-resistant microbes grow on the farms, the more they get passed along the food chain to us.

As the New York Times reports, “after decades of debate, the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to issue its strongest guidelines on animal antibiotics yet.” They would end the use of drugs to promote growth and would engage veterinarians to keep better oversight of the animals.

Like fish? Whole Foods is about to clarify your shopping experience. Msnbc.com reports that the store has create a new color-coded rating program that measures the environmental impact of its wild-caught seafood. A green rating means the seafood is relatively abundance and caught in eco-friendly ways. Yellow means there are some issues with the fish and how it was caught. Red means the fish is over-fished and the methods to take it out of the sea were also, fishy.

And finally, for all of us interested in flesh dresses that exist outside our nightmares, Lady Gaga showed up on a red carpet sporting a meat dress designed by Franc Fernandez. PETA went into convulsions, issuing a statement “Meat is the decomposing flesh of a tormented animal who didn’t want to die, and after a few hours under the TV lights, it would smell like the rotting flesh it is and likely be crawling in maggots – not too attractive, really.”

Some of us felt that Her Gaga-ness was wearing her dress an ironic political statement about how female pop stars and their bodies are objectified as meat. The Lady’s response? She told Ellen DeGeneres she wore the fillets as a sign of solidarity with the military’s stance on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Said Lady Gaga, “It is a devastation to me that I know my fans who are gay”¦ feel like they have governmental oppression on them. That’s actually why I wore the meat tonight.”

Image: specialkrb

Well, not so much.

PETA Steals First Lady When She’s Not Looking (January 2010)

Want to be endorsed by a celebrity? Now you can, with the all-new PETA marketing technique “Shameless Theft (TM)”. If your work is in a good cause and you like the idea of, say, First Lady Michelle Obama giving it the thumbs-up, simply steal her image and slap it wherever you please. When a fuss arises, clarify that you’re “honoring” your target by featuring their image (while furthering your own aims without prior permission). Oh, and when you finally back down in a show of “good faith,” be sure to point the finger at someone else. It’s the adult thing to do.

Incidentally, this entire post is personally endorsed by those huge blue aliens in James Cameron’s Avatar. No, really.

KFC vs. PETA: Flaming Silly to Monumentally Daft (January 2010)

As we’ve noted before, there’s nothing that PETA enjoys more than the smell of roasting Kentucky Fried Chicken – the company, that is. Their latest attempts to haul this fast food corporation over the coals? Firstly, PETA wants Indianapolis fire trucks to sign an advertising deal, the same way the fire department has with the finger-lickin’ folk – and secondly, a 5.5 foot tall statue of a gory chicken on crutches, artfully monikered “KFC Cripples Chickens”.

In both cases, local officials denied the requests, citing inappropriate context and legislation and, in the former case, the fact that “advertising on a fire truck could even lead motorists to believe a truck heading for an emergency was just performing a stunt.” Quite.

Lydia Guevara Picks Up Carrot And Keeps On Shooting (June 2009)

Did you know Che Guevara’s granddaughter is vegetarian? Before mid-2009, neither did PETA, but once they twigged they wasted no time in divesting her of most of her clothes, daubing her with camouflage paint and hanging a bandolier of carrots round her neck. “Join the vegetarian revolution” ran the accompanying tagline. Self-proclaimed nonviolent PETA associating itself with bloody Cuban guerrilla warfare? In the fight for animal rights, it seems the first casualty is your own core principles.

Sorry Old Boy, A Machine Could Do Your Job (November 2009)

Poor old Uga VII. The latest in the line of beloved bulldog mascots of the University of Georgia (Athens, Georgia) recently passed away, leaving his post temporarily open – and PETA leapt in with the suggestion of a robotic substitute. It’s a fact that bulldogs (originally bred to fight) are so famous for their health problems that the Kennel Club recently voted to change the pedigree standards to breed out its congenital ailments.

That’s PETA’s reasoning for the switcheroo (and we’re sure virtual pet makers Nintendo and Bandai are cheering them on). But why not encourage the University to seek a mascot from America’s brimming animal rescue shelters, guys? Our tails aren’t wagging.

PETA’s Unhappiest Side: Children Yet Again Considered Fair Game (August 2009)

Oh, PETA. However endearingly barmy your antics sometimes are…sometimes you’re just plain frightening. If the image of a throat-cut clown hung upside-down wasn’t graphic enough, PETA members have also been handing out “Unhappy Meals” to visitors of a McDonald’s in Albany, New York, comprising of a t-shirt (“McCruelty”) inside an imitation burger box spattered with fake blood. All this, to children.

Don’t Toy With Your Food: Flinging Fishmongers Catch It From PETA  (June 2009)

Wander through Seattle Pike Place Market at the right time, and you’ll see flying fish. The market’s fishmongers are famous for their sure-handed fish flinging skills, and are consequently much in demand as a dazzling spectacle for hire. When the American Veterinary Medical Association employed them for a motivational conference demonstration, PETA ticked them off in a letter that raged “it’s cruel enough to eat fish, but it literally adds insult to injury to use them as toys for silly stunts.” (Except they didn’t really mean “fish” there).

PETA are fed up to the gills with dead creatures being gruesomely displayed in public. So hey, what about living ones?

Your Name – It’s A Sin (April 2009)

British electronic music duo Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, better known as the Pet Shop Boys, are currently enjoying a revival of their iconic ’80s sounds. But what’s this? “Pet Shop”? Yes, you guessed it: PETA want them to relabel themselves the Rescue Shelter Boys.

If this attempt had been successful, perhaps rock legend Meat Loaf would now be called “Vegetable Terrine” – but thankfully Tennant and Lowe turned PETA down while graciously agreeing that the request “raises an issue worth thinking about” (and we tend to agree).

By no means are all of PETA’s actions founded on shock tactics, infringements on human dignity and general negativity. We like a lot of what PETA stands for – yet we wish it would grow up a little, because what it could do is surely too important to be ruined by what it actually does. That’s our view. What’s yours?

Images: sabianmaggy, ccharmon, mikebaird, sqeakymarmot, Mrs Logic, EatMeDaily, JasonDeRusha,

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) does not see fit to extend the same moral courtesy to human animals, specifically the female kind. In the organization’s latest sexist campaign for vegetarianism, an overweight woman in a bikini is faced with the emboldened slogan: “Save the Whales”. Beneath the words runs a helpful tagline: “Lose the blubber: go vegetarian.”

Come on gals, take a joke. What’s a little fat-shaming in pursuit of a good time?

There’s no shortage of adjectives (or profanities) that come to mind to describe such a mean-spirited billboard. And if you can get through the confusion of it – don’t be a whale! wait, save the whales! don’t be a whale so we can save the whales! whales are great, except you, blubber butt! – it’s also very telling.

A friend of mine, John Haslett, is a professional adventurer and author of the sea memoir, Voyage of the Manteno. In the book, he writes about the behavior of people in survival situations – that is, people under extreme stress. An inevitable few will rapidly decline into paranoia and eventual insanity. Some – many more than you would think, observes Haslett – simply give up. Some rise to the challenge, while others become childish or cheat. I think we can figure out which part of the life raft we’d find PETA hugging.

With admirably relentless energy, PETA has managed to jump from the margins of activism and enjoys frequent mainstream media attention. To the dismay of many vegetarians, when Newkirk speaks, people do listen. A group like PETA has just as much potential to wear at our social fabric as any loudmouth pundit. These are not just crazy tactics; PETA’s stunts are part of a carefully-woven, and unfortunate, strategy. Deliberately divisive, PETA is antisocial in a wide cultural sense. Desperate to win, they resort to the ridiculous and alienate those whom they hope to convert. What a dark, lonely world these small-minded people inhabit! I don’t know about you, but I don’t want anyone this stressed out trying to advocate for anything except another cocktail.

The woman who is concerned with social and environmental justice should be quick to leave PETA to the spiral it’s so enthusiastically sliding down. Sociologists explain that it’s common for oppressed groups to target each other as they jockey for autonomy. PETA abusing using women as a tool to achieve their goals is just one more example in a long history of horizontal violence. Not very original, is it? One can easily imagine that in the hive-mind of PETA headquarters, there is only room for the conflict view of reality: it’s either women for animals or women over animals. I guess PETA can’t conceive of women and animals, or at least not for the blubbery among us!

Any position worth defending can be done with integrity. If you have to take a cheap shot to score a point, you don’t belong in the game. Or put another way, when the end justifies the means, the means become the end.

Recommended reading on this topic: Feministing, Deceiver, Jezebel, Huffington Post, The Frisky, DoubleX

First up – is there really such thing as a green gadget? Answer: define “green”, says Wired. And is it really cheaper to recover gold from junked electronics than to mine it out of the ground? (Amateur gold panners, please form an orderly queue at your local landfill.)

Things doubling up as other things afterward – we like. So Paul Clark’s design for a plant pot doubling as a birdhouse – seen here at designspotter – is an intriguing idea (and perfect for my allotment-mad corner of the world).

A holiday with a difference – you’re stuffed into a sphere and slung into the trees. In fact, this prospect is far from nightmarish, as Twilight Earth explains.

Handmade goods are doing great: the economy, well, not so much. The Etsy revolution (and that really is beginning to look like the right word) currently represents around $90 million of commerce every year and growing. Clive Thompson takes a fascinated look at Wired, via Apartment Therapy.

Eco-friendly heater upgrades: brilliant idea. And lots of money up front. Ouch. So it’s nice to see the new administration is keen to lend a helping hand, in the form of very welcome tax credits.

Oh PETA. Why, PETA, why? Again and again, you make us feel older than our years. And now this? Can we get back to the business at hand, please?

Fashion websites should absolutely drip with style, yes? The same way dentists should have good teeth. Take a look at Smashing Magazine’s round-up of the most beautiful sites out there – via The Steel Closet – and attempt to resist their formidable charms. (Bet you can’t.)

You can do anything with LEDs. Even – prepare yourself – Extreme Sheep Art. You heard me. Or how about this?

We’ve been following Josh Dorfman – a.k.a. The Lazy Environmentalist – for a while now, and we were delighted to hear about his new book The Lazy Environmentalist On A Budget: Save Money, Save Time, Save The Planet – and he’ll be on the Sundance Channel this June, as Ecorazzi reports.

If you want to make your business sustainable – truly sustainable – it’s about utilizing creativity, cutting-edge business practices and more interdependency than ever before. It’s about facilitating small-scale “minipreneurs” so they can thrive. It’s a new business model for a new era.

Meet the latest tool in the fight against pollution – chickens! Or rather, what chickens leave behind. As Planetsave reports, it turns out that chicken poop seems to act as a catalyst for the breakdown of crude oil in the soil.

Where do you think you rate on the Global Rich List? Higher than you expect.

It’s the weekend – time to switch off the computer and get out into the “real world”? Except that line is getting awfully blurred. Do you Twitter? Use a Blackberry? So when exactly are you actually offline? As Max Gladwell quips, who needs Second Life when the everyday world is getting just as wacky and wired?

And lastly…true love has rarely had such dire consequences!

Image: masochismtango

Fluff and Nonsense: PETA Denies Fish Exist (October 2008)

Because much of the natural world is generally eww gross and lacking in cuteness, PETA are eager to helpfully rename the birds and the beasts so they’re more appealing. First to get a makeover? Fish. They’re now called Sea Kittens, and the official website plasters on the sentiment with a trowel, featuring a storybook containing heavily anthropomorphic fish suffering at the hands of evil humans. There are some good points here – such as how fish are generally a lot smarter than we give them credit for – but as usual, they’re buried in fathoms of uncompromising bluster. PETA wants to stop all fishing immediately, or ideally yesterday. But what would our cute, meowing “Land Fish” eat for their dinner?

It’s all so ripe for ridicule. So here’s some. Fin.

Breeding Trouble: A Canine Klan Clanger (February 2009)

The End Justifies The Means, right? During their protest at the recent Westminster Dog Show, PETA members dressed up in Klu Klux Klan garb while they handed out leaflets, equating dog-breeders to the infamous militant white supremacists and claiming that selective breeding exacerbates pet overpopulation problem. (PETA’s opponents have already labeled them hypocrites on this issue).

So how did the public react when it was approached by people dressed as hooded racists?

“Most passers-by seemed more puzzled than offended, though those who didn’t stop walked away thinking they really had seen the KKK.”

- AP, quoted in the Los Angeles Times.

Oh well. Any reaction is a good reaction, right? Best foot forward, PETA.

Shock PETA Advert Featuring Women Wearing Clothes (January 2009)

Sex sells. And in this case, it sells vegetables – or it would do, if NBC had agreed to air PETA’s sleazefest of a Superbowl advert. In it, young women don skimpy outfits and gyrate ecstatically around groceries, accompanied with the tagline “Studies Show Vegetarians Have Better Sex” (because they’re generally slimmer and healthier, the “logic” goes).

So how did it get onto Youtube and the like? Because getting it rejected was the plan all along, of course, and as soon as NBC gave it a thumbs-down, the PETA marketing machine sprung into action. Sexist? You bet - but it’s all in a good cause (and it’s not as if they were naked, because that would be grossly demeaning. Ah, right). Meanwhile, women across the world find themselves too embarrassed to be seen shopping for vegetables in public, and send the men out instead. Thanks a bunch, PETA.

Michael Vick Fails To Score: PETA’s Version of Redemption (January 2009)

For former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, it’s not been a good couple of years. In 2007 he was convicted of running a dog-fighting ring on his property in Surrey County, Virginia – and he’s currently serving a 23-month federal prison sentence. In 2008 Vick filed for bankruptcy (just two years earlier, he was amongst the top ten richest athletes in America), and his former employers recently washed their hands of him, scuppering his chances of continuing his career when he’s released.

Cue PETA. They offered Vick the chance to feature in an advert condemning dog-fighting – on condition he filled out an animal empathy test, marked out of 100. Vick agreed…and scored 73.5%. And we know this because PETA not only released the score, but published a pdf of Vick’s answers on their website. Sorry, Michael, you’ve been taken for a ride. It’s a stunt to further sully your reputation (if that’s possible). Meanwhile, we suspect PETA would rate poorly on our Contrite Human Being Empathy Test.

Cooking Mama Knows Best While PETA Skips A Key Ingredient (November 2008)

If you can’t get through to the adults, target the kids. There’s a game on the Nintendo DS handheld gaming console called “Cooking Mama” (Majesco Entertainment), in which the elements of meal-preparation (vegetable chopping & peeling, food preparation and so on) are turned into mini-games played against the clock. PETA’s beef (so to speak) is with the use of meat in the game – so they released their own blood-soaked, thoroughly disturbing version aimed at…er, well, we don’t know who it’s aimed at. Meat eaters will love it, that’s for sure. Majesco recently responded thus:

“{Mama says:] Like any accomplished cook, I create my recipes to appeal to a broad range of tastes and preferences…while Mama is not a vegetarian, she fully supports the humane treatment of animals.”

In other words, Mama advocates tolerance. Now there’s a message for our kids. Unfortunately, these five stunts are only the latest in a long history of ridiculous pranks from PETA.

Additional: By no means all of PETA’s actions are founded on shock tactics, infringements on human dignity and general negativity. (If they were, the stunts listed above wouldn’t be so frustrating.) Their recent positive action to buy up stock in traditionally meat-heavy fast food industries is something we’ll be following with interest, since anything that directly turns the American diet around gets our vote. More like this, please.

Images: jon hanson / -=RoBeE=- / zenera / nineball2727 / MoonSoleil.

Image: striatic

Let’s pretend we have a mutual friend. We’ll called him Peter.

There’s a lot to like about Peter: he’s deeply concerned about his impact on the environment, he donates time to local community projects, he’s thoughtful, charismatic and likeable. But there’s something odd about Peter, something deeply Out To Lunch – and every so often, this weirdness springs out of him. He builds a floodlit shrine out of recycled credit cards outside the local Walmart and surrounds it with pictures of flowers and animals. He paints all the streetlights green within a 20-mile radius. He throws miniature wooden oil-derricks at cars as he cycles to work. In short, Peter would be an admirable, inspiring pillar of the community…if he didn’t behave like an utter fruitcake.

It’s how we feel about People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Their investigations into animal testing and cruelty deserve our respect and our support. PETA’s principles? We admire them. PETA’s methods? Well, not so much. The organization has run more stunts than Evel Knievel – and while it’s always a blast to see what heights of lunacy they’ve scaled recently, we rather wish they wouldn’t. (Their work is just too important to be discredited by something ill-judged).

With that in mind, let’s look at 7 of their most notoriously awful publicity stunts.

Image: XWRN

A Grave Error: Playing Chicken With KFC (January 2008)

Upon discovering where Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Harland Sanders (above) is buried, PETA did what any of us might have done in a heartbeat, which was to purchase a plot of land within the cemetary, erect a fake headstone dedicated to someone who is in fact alive and well, and inscribe a poem on the stone which secretly spells out “KFC Tortures Birds“. Unsurprisingly this ruffled a few feathers: KFC described it as “a disgustingly disrespectful way to disgrace the resting place of the departed”. We sympathize. (Still, you have to admire their pluck).

Bull in a china shop: Winning New Friends in India (January 2008)

“PETA blindfolds Ghandi.” There’s a headline to make you spit your drink. Bypassing diplomatic channels and cultural respect, PETA went straight for the jugular in their protest against the Tamil practice of jallikatu or bull-taunting. While everyone was looking the other way, three PETA protesters leapt up and flung a blindfold round a statue of Mahatma Ghandi in Coimbatore‘s Ghandi Park. Local authorities took a dim view, throwing the book at PETA and blaming them for “creating religious ill-feeling, defaming the national leader, trespassing and also [infingements of the] Tamil Nadu Open Places Prevention of Disfigurement Act.” Meanwhile, the real issue (and there is a real issue) gets associated with fringe activists. Way to bring it to the table, guys.

Image: tanakawho

The Fur Flies: Coats Sent To Iraq and Given To The Homeless (2004 to Present)

While they’re most famous for their anti-fur stance, PETA have adopted the practice of giving away the fur that is donated to them. In 2004 this included fur coats sent to suffering people in Iraq. A similar measure – one deplored by other anti-fur protest groups – is PETA’s “fur kitchens” which give away coats to homeless people. You could argue this is a caring, humanitarian measure – until you factor in the following quote from PETA’s President Ingrid Newkirk: “When the homeless are wearing fur, you know fur has hit rock bottom.”

Streaking Ahead: PETA’s Naked Ambition

One of PETA’s trademarks is nudity. Nary a month goes by without somebody famous donning their birthday suit to highlight the cause célèbre of PETA vs. fur clothing. It’s a bit of fun, a bit of titillation and a lot of exposure (as it were) for the person stripping off for the public eye. It’s expected of them – and when it doesn’t quite happen, as in the recent case of Amanda Beard, it raises eyebrows. But for potential eyebrow height, it’s difficult to top the sight of naked PETA members lying in flower-lined coffins to protest against Avian Flu. However, this manages it.

Image: OiMax

Milking Controversy: PETA’s Ice-Cream Boob (September 2008)

Three months back, Swiss restaurant owner Hans Locher announced he would be preparing dishes using human breast milk. Spotting a bandwagon with room to sit, PETA then sent a public letter to Ben And Jerry’s asking why they can’t follow suit by replacing the cow’s milk in their ice cream with human milk.  Suspecting that their sales might suffer, B & J’s refused (known as the Ross Geller response).

Interning with PETA: It’s A Wrap (June 2008)

To work for PETA, you have to be ready to take life on the chin. In the case of an intern and a volunteer in June of this year, you have to be ready to be liberally spattered with fake blood, shrink-wrapped to a cardboard sheet and endure an hour in the baking (80 degrees+) midday sun. No animals were harmed during the production of this stunt, but volunteer Shawn Herbold noted that she was “in pain and feeling nauseated” halfway through her shift. Some people just love to complain.

Image: MikeLicht:NotionsCapital.com

$1 Million: A Chance to Shmeat New People? (2008 onwards)

Taking a firm stance against the way animal meat is produced for consumption (and we’re right beside PETA on this), the organization has offered a $1 million prize to anyone who can create vat-grown meat as an alternative (er…PETA, you go that way and we’ll go this way). It’s claimed that it will act as a catalyst for developing truly viable in vitro “shmeat”. Salon nicely outlines why this is sloppy thinking…and anyway, isn’t it yet another example of the curse of Things That Look Like Other Things?

PETA – please, enough.

(Oh, we’re not naïve. Articles like this one are exactly why PETA members make fools of themselves – all to get their message across. But do you think antics like these are helping that message – or hindering it?)