By now you’ve heard about stupid made into tweet form by PETA.
The basics are that they don’t think we should use animal idioms that normalise violence against animals, likening phrases like “kill two birds with one stone” to homophobic and racist slurs.
They decided that “words matter, and as our understanding of social justice evolves, our language evolves along with it”. Coming from PETA, that’s a comment so rich that if you were seizing the means of production, you’d eat it. When they’re not killing pet dogs, they regularly engage racism, jokes about domestic violence and more to push their message of ‘compassion’.
While veganism does have its place in other rights movements (because food is political) this sudden concern by PETA is more faux than the steak in my fridge. Equating animal themed idioms with slurs, is like comparing apples with a raging trash fire of stupidity that has gained sentience, hungers for headlines, while professing loudly to be an animal rights organisation.
Let’s unpack this.
Just don’t be bringin’ home the bacon.
Much like the animals we eat today, PETA used to be okay. It wasn’t a perfect situation, but they were committed to exposing the wrongs of the world. They used to be a contributing factor in the decision to go vegan.
These days, PETA is like the factory farm of veganism. They’ve modified their vegan compassion to such an extreme it’s been stripped of the ability to be intersectional. Instead, under PETA, veganism is trapped in the sow stalls of poorly constructed arguments, bloated from the hormones of self importance. The result of all of this, is to leave everyone in the surrounding areas to struggle through the toxicity leaking out of every campaign.
They seem to have an attitude of ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ that powers the machine churning out their never-ending supply of stupidity sausages. Even more galling is the fact they must be vaguely aware that this bad publicity doesn’t work. Arguably the only time they do any measurable good for animals is when they’re shining a light on companies and people that perpetuate the suffering of animals. This creates bad publicity for those places and ACTUALLY helps people make the decision to go vegan. No one swears off bacon because of a fat shaming billboard, but quite a few people decide not to eat pigs after they’ve seen a slaughterhouse video.
Gross.
The worst part though is PETA were so close to making a decent point. But they’re PETA, so that’s not what happened.
Postdoctoral Researcher at Swansea University, Shareena Hamzah, has said that with the growing trend of veganism, words might change anyway. This makes sense to me because, as a vegan (I have to say that at least once, or the vegan police will get me) words are powerful.
Veganism is the one rights movement where you are the voice for someone who doesn’t have their own. You have to use language, when you can, to speak for them to people who don’t want to think about it. If I refer to an animal as “someone” rather than “something” it strikes a chord. (And typing “bacon” in the comments of this article is not an inoculation to that. You care about animals, that’s a good thing.)
Good hooman.
Getting rid of those idioms is like throwing away a key to opening a conversation. If someone uses a term like “to be a guinea pig”, I can use that to start a conversation about how, actually, a more accurate animal to use for that saying be would be perhaps a beagle because, according to The National Anti-Vivisection Society, they’re the most popular dogs to test on in a lab. It’s apparently because they’re so docile and small. Poor puppies.
There’s nothing wrong with switching up the idioms, but there’s nothing to be gained by handing down variations on a theme like they’re a decree. In other words, PETA, there’s more than one way to cut a potato, there’s more than one path to veganism.
But none of them are this.