PeTA

We don't know how the precise mental or physical make-up of any individual human may lend itself to eating or not eating this or that foodstuff.

We share a lot of genes with other animals, about 96% with chimps, we don't however tend to eat chimps, we share about 60% with chickens.

Maybe this is where zoomorphism comes from, it's also the tendency to view the behaviour of other animals in the terms of our own, and more pertinently in this case the other way around.

Human people always use what they eat and their thoughts around this as some kind of reflection of their inward identity.

This applies whatever the diet they adopt. Whether they eat 'health' food, foods that are expensive or rare, foods of their ancestors, foods that are not from other animals, eschew food groups, or substances such as sugar, fat, etc. You can bet that this diet makes them purer and better or gives them qualities unavailable to those who don't follow it.

The exchange of spontaneity, for rules and strictures seems to lend itself to this compensation of moral superiority. PeTA, the controversialist animal rights pressure group's latest offering, is an attempt to persuade fat people to become vegetarian, on the promise of weight loss .

It may be because I was never called a "beached whale", but I can't be offended by having this aimed at me. I find whales to be very impressive. Check them out and see one leap, propelling their palpable physical gravitas into height, before gracefully dropping back into the water. Inspirational; no less to those of us who've experienced such disenfranchisement from the true physical state of our (fat) bodies, that we are shocked and surprised by fat people doing the most basic physical feats and humiliated, at the realisation that our minds might have talked ourselves out of seeing what we could do.

I am not offended by being compared to a whale, elephant, hippopotamus, even a pig. I see humans as animals, no really, I've always thought of us as animals who don't quite understand ourselves too well and have trouble coming to terms with this. A lot of that shame brings a leaning towards moral vanity which obscures from us our true feelings and motivations. Leaving us to scramble around trying to find out what the hell we are doing and why. Often, it's not what we fancy we should, as human units, be doing/ achieving.

PeTA and others like them trade in the idea that the trouble with us humans is we need bringing down a peg or three. By comparing us to other animals, they seek to shock us out of our complacent assumption that we are the best of all the species, although we can't tell whether other creatures share that sensibility themselves, PeTA helpfully assumes they do not.

This arrogance is why we use/eat animals and it's shattered by stating that we are no better than other species.

And yet.

If that were so, why would we wish to stop eating/using them, when it would be like any other creature, a matter of survival, inclination, desire?

Surely the only reason why humans should not eat other animals, is because of our superior moral consciousness, real or imagined?

Without the assumption of betterness, why would we feel bad about other animals, what is PeTA appealing to?

We must cut down our pedestal whilst remaining on it.

I've noticed the cruelty of factory farming in the same way I noticed the cruelty of especially, child humans working in sweat shop conditions. I didn't like it and did not need animal rights activists to make me feel something is not right or sustainable about factory farming. Similarly in factory living for humans. Where we live to be used up in soul destroying meaningless toil and try to squeeze other bits of life in the gaps, if we can manage it.

Maybe free range humans might instinctively extend that principle more easily to other species, although I wouldn't necessarily want to play zero sum on that.

I will or will not be thoroughly vegetarian-in a sense I am vegetarian until I consume animal products/flesh- for the same reasons animal rights people are; because I want to, because I feel like it.

If I was to become overwhelmed by an ethical sensibility that I must not eat other species, my health would be a close second to that. I hope I would be prepared to risk myself for my beliefs. In a sense, this is the real insult, that I would only become vegetarian, to save my fat neck. Don't appeal to any possible abstract sense of-this is who I am and this what I stand for, just appeal to my sense of shame and lowest common denominator self preservation.

Why don't PeTA see if there's a link between fat phobia and animal cruelty, oh what?! Maybe I might want to draw together any threads, then again, maybe not, but I wouldn't know, because peta, doesn't want to get beyond the image of a fat brain dead wobbling mass of fear and anxiety, clutching an ice-cream in each fist. So yeah peta, just play on those fears to gain compliance, just like everyone else.

We are here for your use, to project on as you wish, (ring any bells?).