The PETA women showered nude, right there on Douglas Street.
It was on the front of Saturday’s paper: two of them, young and slender. Set up a portable stall outside the Bay Centre, peeled off and scrubbed down, smiling as though the odd snowflake wasn’t alighting on bare skin.
It was a protest against the amount of water it takes to raise livestock, though that point might have been lost on a few rubbernecking young bucks and the one short guy who nosed right in for a close-up, peering over the curtain.
Apparently the women were wearing shorts and strategically placed bandages, but I didn’t get close enough to find out. (Journalistic integrity be damned; at some point it’s just pervy to look.)
In fact, most passersby passed by without gawking. It takes more than public nudity to get a Victorian’s head out of his BlackBerry. Naked protesters are to the capital what gun nuts are to Texas. We’ve got anti-poverty activists doing cartwheels starkers on the legislature lawn, an annual Naked Bike Ride with more white buns than McGavin’s and the Human Body Project folk baring their wobbly bits with the regularity of the No. 30 Royal Oak bus.
Never mind, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals rarely pass up the chance for a publicity stunt. Just before Christmas the group rented a Pat Bay Highway billboard depicting a hybrid cat-turkey and the message “Kids: If you wouldn’t eat your cat, why eat a turkey? GO VEGAN.”
Last Thanksgiving, PETA reps dressed in poultry costumes and handed out free Tofurky downtown. Earlier, the group asked that Victoria’s new sewage plant be named after Stephen Harper until he “finally washes the blood of baby seals from his hands.”
In the U.S., the group once bought a Kentucky cemetery plot near that of Col. Harland Sanders. The headstone was engraved with a poem that, when read vertically, spelled out “KFC tortures birds.” After Barack Obama was filmed snatching a housefly out of the air, ninja-like, in 2009, they sent the president a Katcha Bug™ Humane Bug Catcher.
It’s surprising PETA didn’t also rip Obama for his admission that as a boy in Indonesia he occasionally ate dog meat. (Jimmy Kimmel’s line: “The president’s two favourite steaks are rib eye and seeing eye.”)
Or maybe that’s just a North American hang-up, the idea that it’s OK to eat cows but not canines. Rover is on the menu in a number of Asian countries. In certain parts of Switzerland, farmers eat both dogs and cats. To PETA, an animal is an animal, so Obama chowing down on a chow chow is no worse than him scarfing a cheeseburger.
What we deem proper to eat often has less to do with nutrition than culture. On Vancouver Island, vegetarianism is a popular choice, but when I grew up in Kamloops it meant you were a lousy shot. Victorians treat urban deer like sacred cows; in the Interior they (the deer, not the Victorians) hang from the carport rafters, strung up by the heels like Mussolini.
Ditto for roadkill. In the capital region, Mainroad hauls car-croaked critters to the Hartland landfill, but in northern B.C. the edible ones go to the food banks. (Actually, activists camping in protest against the Bear Mountain highway interchange in 2008 were reported to have stewed up deer, raccoons and other fender fodder from the Trans-Canada Highway.) In the U.S., PETA supports roadkill-salvage legislation like that passed by the Montana state Senate this week.
The European horsemeat scandal is another example. More than one commentator noted that as squeamish as people may be about eating Trigger, they should be more concerned about the mystery bits that go into their ground meat as filler. (“Our secret ingredient is our people” read an unfortunately worded sign outside a fast-food restaurant.)
That’s the real issue for many people — not eating meat, but eating meat that doesn’t contain slaughterhouse floor sweepings mixed with fixings more suitable to a meth lab. It’s why consumers will pay a premium for locally raised livestock.
That’s the naked truth: Some people don’t want to eat any food that has a face, but others just want to see its birth certificate.
