PETA — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — probably needs to fire their entire social media team, and maybe their marketing and PR teams. Truth to be told, as good as their intentions may be, PETA needs to do a lot better at all things in general. Just a couple of weeks ago we reported on their insanely ill-timed attacks on the late Steve Irwin (on what would have been his damn birthday, to boot!), and Dan also reported about their comical takes on the “homophobia” in phrases like “bringing home the bacon.”
What PETA does ranges from honestly good and praiseworthy to utterly horrific and pseudofascist. But what they posted yesterday falls squarely in the category of, “WTF?!”
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Apparently there are some people out there who are so worried about the rights of animals that they’re offended by humans drinking cow’s milk. Now, look, I’m not a cow. I have no idea if cow’s are offended by us drinking their milk, but I get what PETA’s concerned about, I guess. They’re worried about the techniques and practices of the big dairy farms that provide us with said bovine lactation.
Typical to PETA’s whole thing though, they didn’t try to make some rational argument about the treatment of dairy cows. Instead, the opted for the stupid and/or bizarre. They tweeted…this…whatever this is…
Looks weird right?
It's what you're doing if you drink cow's milk ✋ Raise your hand if you know that humans shouldn’t be drinking cow’s breast milk. It was made for their babies—not you!
Art by @choicebison @freebison 💙 pic.twitter.com/D8QcJnyfUG
— PETA (@peta) March 28, 2019
Maybe PETA thinks farmers should get consent before grabbing a cow boob and squeezing some milk out? In the #MeToo era, I guess that could be a good thing. I still think there are probably six million or more things to be more worried about in life, but hey, unto each their own. For sure though, trying to make their point with a ridiculous cartoon like this isn’t going to help.
I’m not a member of the milk advisory board, and milk does insanely bad stuff to my insides these days, so I’m not some paid milk shill…Shillk? I’m just a guy who thinks this kind of marketing and imagery is exactly why people have a very hard time taking PETA seriously. Humans are kinda at the top of the above-sea level food chain, and our bodies can digest, generally, the milk of other mammals. Again, if PETA is trying to make some larger point about dairy farming, it’s completely lost in how stupid their tweet’s image is.
Needless to say, Twitter did what Twitter does best, and they dragged the living hell out of PETA’s tweet. At current count, there are over 14,000 comments but only 3,000 retweets, and about 7,800 “likes” of the tweet. That’s what they call a “ratio” in the Twittersverse, and it’s usually indicative of the community taking turns bashing you pretty well. The best part about the thrashing took is that it was from all sides of the political spectrum; a truly intersectional beat down.
There were of course the folks who played on PETA’s decision to equate a human breast to a cow’s utter. I’m always a fan of jokes about sexy cows.
Ross O’Donnovan was curious to know if PETA is a “furry.” In case you don’t know, furries are people who enjoy dressing up as animals for sexy fun times. The joke here being that if PETA’s got some weird thing about cow’s utters, maybe there’s something more sensual going on just under the surface.
Is PETA a furry???
— RubberRoss (@RubberNinja) March 29, 2019
Then you had people being much more direct about their implications that PETA was trying to sex up cows to sell their anti-milk campaign.
— Hedge (@The_Backup_Ant_) March 29, 2019
There were others who used this as an opportunity to explore the feelings the image had awaken in their pants. They were joking, of course.
What exactly PETA was thinking with their overtly hypersexualized cow image is anyone’s guess. I’m sure they would tell you it was effective because it got people talking and thinking about commercial dairy farming. So, you tell us, is any press good press?
Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook and Instagram, but not Twitter because he has a potty mouth.