Likely Normal

Let’s discuss PETA – that well-meaning but perpetually out-of-touch activist group that somehow manages to make everyone uncomfortable, including the animals they’re trying to protect. This is the organization that will compare your turkey sandwich to the Holocaust while simultaneously operating shelters with shockingly high euthanasia rates. Their heart might be in the right place, but their methods often land somewhere between “tone-deaf” and “actively counterproductive.”

PETA’s greatest hits read like a parody of activism gone off the rails. Remember when they tried to rebrand fish as “sea kittens,” apparently unaware that children still understand that kittens are things you don’t eat? Or their infamous “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign that managed to offend genocide survivors and meat-eaters alike? Then there was the time they kidnapped a perfectly healthy dog from someone’s porch and euthanized it before the owner could even file a police report – a decision they defended by essentially saying the dog was better off dead than living with a poor family. Their logic often seems to operate on some alien wavelength where shaving a farmer’s pet sheep without permission counts as “liberation” rather than, you know, theft and animal harassment.

What drives this kind of activism? Some speculate it’s a desperate need for attention in an oversaturated media landscape. Others wonder if PETA is secretly funded by the meat industry as the world’s most elaborate anti-vegan psyop. Maybe they’re just performance artists who forgot they were pretending. Whatever the case, their shock tactics frequently achieve the opposite of their intended effect – instead of converting people to veganism, they just make everyone roll their eyes and order an extra-large pepperoni pizza in protest.

The tragedy is that buried beneath all this nonsense are some legitimate animal welfare concerns. Factory farming is horrific. Animal testing raises serious ethical questions. But PETA’s approach to these issues is like using a flamethrower to put out a candle – technically effective, but wildly disproportionate and likely to set the whole house on fire. At this point, the most ethical treatment of animals might be keeping PETA as far away from them as possible.