Editor’s perspective

In a poster at VCU advertising PETA’s traveling display on animal suffering, an image of an African slave’s foot in chains was compared with that of an elephant. Below these images, a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. was used to make PETA’s case: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The quote underscores the importance of standing up against human suffering anywhere in the world – the same attitude that allows us to ignore injustice in one part of the world might someday make it more palatable for us to let it happen here at home. Or, as the ’60s pop/soul group Fifth Dimension once put it, “People everywhere just want to be free.”

PETA, however, would like us to take that same attitude and extend it to animals. Though the parallels are there, there is such a divide between how people view humans as compared to animals that the use of MLK’s rhetoric just doesn’t work on the same level without a great deal of explanation. Beyond that, there is the dubious rhetorical method of comparing minorities to animals when racism is far from over in this country, let alone elsewhere in the world.

If people everywhere were free and racism were a thing of the past, it might make sense to extend the crusade for human rights to the animal world in this way. People might not be offended at such comparisons, and PETA’s crusade to extend our sensibilities about human rights to the animal world might meet with more success.

But as it is, we are not far enough away from the pre-1960s injustices against minorities to show, for example, an African child next to a picture of a monkey.

Call PETA forward-thinking, enlightened, even avant-garde. But in its attempt to be controversial and provocative, PETA may have earned one more label: insensitive.

Let’s focus on ending injustice and racism among the human species first; only then might we have the luxury of taking the same fight for equality to the animal world. In the meantime, more lighthearted approaches such as PETA’s “Sexiest Vegetarian Alive” contest last year, which a VCU student won, might have a more palatable – and effective – appeal.

– Omar Yacoubi