If you’re vegan, you have to have an opinion on PETA. It will come up, guaranteed.

My take has always been that they provide a valuable role, because their outlandishness at least gets the issues of animal cruelty and compassion, as well as vegetarianism, on the nightly news and talked about. No press release put out by the Humane Society or any vegetarian group will get the same attention. The question is, though, does attention lead to results?

I just watched the recent HBO documentary “I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA” and found it a pretty compelling piece. You can call Newkirk crazy, but I don’t think you could watch this and doubt her sincerity. She truly believes in everything she is doing.

Watching a board room full of PETA members as they watch footage taken undercover at a Butterball turkey processing plant, and no one in this room is phoning it in. They are horrified and affected on a deep emotional level. At one point, Newkirk is driving her car while being interviewed. Suddenly, she sees a dove on the opposite sidewalk and immediately makes a U-turn. She says they are usually dead but, you never know. The bird is dead, so she gets back in the car and continues her drive, as though this was the most commonplace thing anyone would do in this situation.

As much as I admire the efforts of PETA (and let’s face it, at the end of the day we all have the same vision no matter how we arrive there), I just do not believe people will stop eating meat or being cruel to the animals that aren’t their pets anytime soon. Over the summer, I watched a BBC 3 show called Kill It, Cook It, Eat It,” which was a sort of reality show. Each week focused on a different animal, and invited guests would see the live animal enter a working abattoir. It would then be killed, processed, and butchered while the audience/diners watched every step of the proceedings. The meat was immediately brought into the restaurant side of the building, and a chef would prepare the minutes-old meat for the crowd to enjoy. Without fail, audience members said the same things each week, “I was impressed by how humane the process is.” Now, this was a high-end abattoir and not a factory farm without cameras running, so this meat was probably not what you’d be getting at your local supermarket, but even so, I found the comments telling in that they all spoke to a common understanding: I eat meat, I’m going to continue to eat meat, so I’m glad it is at least killed humanely.

That’s sort of the root of the issue to me. I don’t know that you can go up against “My dog is my friend and that cow is my dinner.”

The documentary also featured footage of Alex Pacheco, who founded PETA with Newkirk. When he first appeared, he immediately seemed to have a more level approach about him. By the documentary’s end, we find out that he had since left PETA and questions the group’s focus on media attention.

I don’t think this documentary will change too many people’s minds, and certainly not the people who already have a clear opinion of the group. But, personally, it did put them in a positive light for me. I respect them more because it let me see behind the publicity stunts and what I saw there was compassionate group expressing itself against almost an entire world opposing them.

As per usual, PETA Board member and comic Bill Maher cuts through the fog and does his usual no-bullshit spin. On the topic of whether PETA crosses the line, he said, “It’s not the worst sin in the world to cross the line. To me, a much worse sin is to never approach the line.”

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For more information on the documentary, visit
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/iamananimal/. And PETA, of course, is at http://www.peta.org/.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.