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Contributors
Doug Gamble- Contributor
Doug
Gamble is a former writer for President Ronald Reagan and
resides
in Carmel. [go to Gamble index]
 Farmers
One - PETA Nothing
California
State Supreme Court keeps
the cows happy…
[Doug Gamble] 4/27/05
Whenever
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) goes down
to defeat I consider it time to celebrate
with a big steak. The radical organization last week failed in
its two-year attempt to have the popular “Happy Cows” ads
taken off the tube.
The award-winning
campaign is sponsored by a state agency, the California Milk
Producers Advisory Board, which credits the
ads for record-level sales of California cheese and boasts two
billion pounds of production last year. But PETA contended that
the ads’ tag line, “Great cheese comes from happy
cows. Happy cows come from California, was, well, bull.
Its lawsuit claiming
most California dairy cows are kept in miserable conditions
and therefore the ads are “unlawfully
deceptive” was thrown out of lower courts, and the state
Supreme Court has now refused to consider it. That means we can
continue watching such hilarious scenes as two bulls checking
out an alluring cow with one asking, as the
lady walks by, “Hey, do you work out?” How California.
I’m no agricultural
expert, but while PETA charges that most California cows are
treated terribly, the ones I see are
just like their counterparts in the commercials. On regular drives
from the Monterey Peninsula to Southern California and back along
Highway 101, I observe mile after mile of lush pastureland inhabited
by cows that look much happier lazing in a field than I am navigating
through traffic.
Also, again from
a layman’s perspective, it would seem
to make sense that keeping cows in horrid conditions would be
self-defeating for farmers since contented cows would be more
productive. And in any event, California cows have to be better
off than their Wisconsin cousins who freeze through Midwestern
winters.
While PETA’s udderly ridiculous crusade against the California
cow ads is amusing, it’s also one of the few times its
actions have stopped short of evil. These are the fanatics who
provoked the anger of Jewish organizations, and others, by drawing
a direct parallel between the killing of chickens and the slaughter
of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. They referred to chicken
dinners as “the Holocaust on your plate.”
PETA has also declared that if a cure for all diseases resulted
from the death of a single laboratory rat it would be wrong,
that it would oppose animal research even if it resulted in the
elimination of AIDS and that theft, arson and property destruction
are fair game in the pro-animal cause. And Republicans are called
extremists for supporting tax cuts.
So outrageous are
PETA’s rants, I once believed the whole
thing was a gigantic hoax, the verbal equivalent of crop circles
that pranksters lay down in fields overnight or film of Bigfoot
which only exists because someone puts on a hairy suit. But no,
it really exists, headquartered in a building in Norfolk, Virginia.
According to a recent
report on PETA in a Virginia newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot,
the organization’s elevator features
a poster showing a pig and the caption, “He died for your
sins,” touting a web site called JesusVeg.com. Apparently
this Christian-offending outrage is meant to show that PETA is
an equal-opportunity defamer.
The fact that PETA
employees are screened for emotional stability is not only
ironic but hilarious, given that it is made up of
some of the strangest birds this side of “One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest,” minus their charm. The Virginian-Pilot quoted a PETA staffer as saying she would not buy a Jennifer
Lopez CD because the singer is “going to go out and buy
mink eyelashes with the money from it.” Cue the “Twilight
Zone” theme.
PETA’s raids
on research labs, throwing fake blood at people wearing furs,
setting fires on the steps of state Capitols
and other similar acts amount to domestic terrorism. At least
the time they wasted trying to convince Californians that our
cows are unhappy may have distracted some of these lunatics from
plotting more outrages for awhile. tRO
California-based Doug Gamble contributed speech material to
Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and writes a twice-monthly
column for the Orange County Register and CaliforniaRepublic.org.
Copyright
2004 Doug Gamble
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