PETA "People Eating Tasty Animals.

Fishy odour as PETA lures hapless donors

THE stereotype of the harmless British eccentric, dressed, perhaps, in ill-fitting knitted clothing of his own design, was once a staple of comedy.

It’s a pity that today’s eccentrics are not as benign.

Take the nauseating international lobbying groups such as Greenpeace and more recently, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, which calculatingly target those in whose veins flows the milk of human kindness - and then siphon off as much of that milk as possible before the hapless donors discover they have been hit by professional leeches.

There is little Greenpeace will not do to raise funds from people whose only flaw is that they cannot comprehend that an organisation which boasts its good intentions would actually fabricate untruths and falsify evidence to bolster its extremist environmental campaigns.

It has been serially caught out with its fraudulent claims that certain industries have released dioxins, notably the Nu-Farm fertiliser company in Victoria, but linking the words “green” and “peace” triggers such surges of empathy among some, that they are blind to the global pressure group’s flaws.

PETA stepped in where Greenpeace stepped off, directing its campaigns at young women, particularly, who hoped to make their mark in the worlds of acting and modelling.

Few ploys are guaranteed to gain as much attention as naked young women, and despite PETA’s anti-fur demonstrations being little more than a blatant appeal to sexism, the feminist lobby was as silent about the unclad protesters as it has been about Islam’s treatment of women as lesser beings.

PETA was able to recruit a clutch of high-profile representatives from among the usual coven of semi-celebrities hoping to lift their magazine profiles from thoughtless banality to at least the level of fingernail clinic intellectualism to spearhead the push against mulesing of merino sheep.

Anyone familiar with the production of fine wool would be aware that the merino breed, which furnishes the world’s better quality suiting, has a wrinkly skin beneath its woolly fleece.

That skin is particularly vulnerable to fly strike, especially around the sheep’s breech, where the wool is more likely to be damp and dirty from urine and faeces.

Mulesing is the best means of protecting fly-struck sheep from a lingering and painful death.

Empty-headed fashionistas and animal liberationists do not know this however, possibly because merinos rarely make an appearance in the inner urban salons and cafes where latte is served.

The wool industry does though, and while working to find better solutions, is being crippled by mindless objectors who buy the PETA line but never see the dying and crippled sheep that might have been saved, but for PETA’s anti-mulesing campaign.

PETA has reached new heights, or perhaps, has submerged to new depths with its current anti-fishing campaign.

Not only do anglers around Australia face growing threats from such lobby groups as the NSW National Parks Association, a group that has taken it upon itself to offer gratuitous advice to the State Government about the need to quarantine vast areas of the coastal waters from all forms of fishing, and inhibit the recreational use of swaths of accessible waterways, PETA has now also plunged in to add its mite to the propaganda war.



Demonstrating that April is not the only month for fools to parade publicly, PETA last week launched a campaign to get the public to call fish - no kidding - “sea kittens”.

This is apparently intended to make the idea of a fish meal less inviting.

Admittedly, kits-and-chips does not have the quite same ring to it as fish-and-chips but fortunately, The Daily Telegraph’s readers were well ahead of the radical protest group and responded to the new ploy as they so often do, with typical Aussie humour.

In an e-mail to the lively Online page, Mick West wrote: “Sea kitten on the barbie, or PETA pie sounds good.”

Another reader, who suggested a juicy lamb meal, or a side of fallow deer, said he fully supported PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals.

It almost seems a shame that PETA’s anti-seafood campaign was launched as the number of shark attacks around Australian beaches soared.

As eccentric as it may have been, the PETA people were matched in their lunacy by claims from The Sydney Morning Herald’s ever-hysterical environmental cheer squad that a king tide yesterday would give Sydneysiders a foretaste of the perils of rising sea levels brought on by global warming.

While the good citizens of Balmain may have rushed to the bottom of their (fairy) gardens with their tape measures, to those who live and work around the waterfront, yesterday’s tide seemed no greater or lesser than the tides which normally occur about this time of year

Predictably, global warming’s rising tide failed to lift all boasts.