File this under You Can’t Make Stuff Like This Up.
Just when I think People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) can’t get any more zany or ridiculous in its never-ending battle against meat eating, it comes up with a gem like sending a request to the jail where a cannibal killer is being held requesting a vegetarian diet for him:
Sheriff’s officials were astounded Thursday by a letter requesting the man accused of murdering his girlfriend and possibly participating in cannibalism be placed on a vegetarian diet to keep him from being “involved in any senseless killing” while incarcerated.
The letter was faxed to the Smith County Sheriff’s Jail from the national headquarters of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Thursday morning.
The Tyler Morning Telegraph received a copy of the letter before officials and notified Sheriff J.B. Smith.
“You have to be kidding me, right?” was his initial reaction to the news of the letter asking the jail to feed Christopher Lee McCuin, 25, a special vegetarian diet and no meat.
McCuin is jailed for the murder of 21-year-old Jana Shearer and authorities have said, in previous stories, that when McCuin was taken into custody there was an ear boiling in a pot of water on the stove and a plate on the kitchen table with what appeared to be human flesh and a fork.
“It is up to you to prevent McCuin from contributing to any more suffering and death by placing him on a healthy, humane vegetarian diet,” the letter by PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich reads.
Personally, I think this has to be some bizarre piece of performance art on par with PETA’s infamous “Holocaust on a plate” that shows that PETA has a tin ear when it comes to the utter tastelessness of many of their ad campaigns, just get a load of the justification:
In a phone interview with the Tyler Paper Thursday, Friedrich responded the letter was serious and was not intended to be funny nor take away from the brutal death suffered by Ms. Shearer.
“Like humans, animals are made of flesh, blood, and bone. They have the same five senses that we do, and they have the same capacity to experience suffering and fear. And all animals share the desire to live their lives free of pain and to avoid a violent death,” he said.
And:
When asked how eating a hamburger compared to cannibalism, Friedrich said all meat is from a corpse. He further stated he believes McCuin could become violent if he ate meat and could kill.
“Only in a culture where people routinely kill and eat living, feeling beings would anyone even think to kill and eat a human loved one,” he said.
Because, according to PETA apparently, eating meat makes you want to become a cannibal. Sure, on a strictly physical basis meat is meat, but somehow the vast majority of people who routinely eat meat manage not to become cannibal killers. This is just another example, along with PETA’s opposition to the use of animals in any way in medical research, that just goes to show how PETA makes no distinction at all between animal and human. Of course, that doesn’t stop PETA from killing animals itself in its own “no-kill” animal shelters (warning: graphic images in link).
Tasteless, stupid, and hypocritical, PETA routinely hits the trifecta of despicability.
