A new downtown Charleston billboard from the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) features a crab saying the words “I’m ME, not MEAT. See the individual. Go vegan.”
Unfortunately for PETA and the causes it supports, the response so far from most Charlestonians seems to like something from Homer Simpson.
As in: “Mmm…crab meat.”
And that should surprise precisely no one. Seafood has been a beloved part of the Charleston way of life from the city’s earliest days, first as a staple and now a delicacy for citizens from every walk of Lowcountry life. Of course PETA’s crustacean provocation elicited more pangs of hunger than pangs of guilt. What did these folks expect?
But this kind of predictably perverse outcome has been PETA’s stock in trade since its founding in 1980, when it first set out to use shock tactics, like last year’s Easter-themed “Baby Barbecue,” rather than constructive engagement to further its agenda.
Clearly, PETA’s strategy isn’t working, at least locally.
And that’s a shame in this case for two reasons.
First, whatever your view on the larger issue of animal rights, going vegan can have real benefits for human health. According to the latest research, a well-designed vegan diet can reduce the risk of serious health problems like heart disease and certain cancers, substantially lower the chances of Type 2 diabetes and help people maintain a healthy weight.
And second, the ruthless — and undeniably cruel — efficiencies of modern industrial farming really do raise serious ethical concerns that merit serious human attention. For instance, pigs on factory farms typically live their lives in tiny cages not much bigger than their bodies, never seeing sunlight. And chickens often face even more extreme conditions, as they’re birds rather than mammals, and thus are exempt from many states’ animal cruelty laws, including South Carolina’s.
But as we noted above, none of this — neither the benefits of veganism nor the horrors of factory farming — has served to reduce the human appetite for meat. Ongoing improvements in living standards around the world — one of the great unsung victories of the past 50 years — only continues to drive the production of meat upward.
Put simply, most people like meat and when they can afford it, they’re going to eat their fill. So the goal shouldn’t be to guilt-trip a few individuals into changing their diet. Instead, it should be to ensure that the meat we eat is harvested under conditions we can all stomach.
That’s why well-regarded animal welfare organizations tend to spend their time doing the hard work of researching alternatives to current factory-farm practices and reforming animal cruelty laws.
And it’s why PETA’s attention-seeking antics so frequently miss the mark. In the end, the cause of animal welfare is almost always better served by rational appeals to human decency than angry, snarky demands.
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