Put the breasts away, Peta. Your cheap stunts do nothing for animal welfare | Phoebe-Jane Boyd | Opinion

Put the breasts away, Peta. Your cheap stunts do nothing for animal welfare | Phoebe-Jane Boyd | Opinion

It happens differently for everyone, but the moment I knew for sure that I would go meat- and animal product-free was upon seeing a smiling lady in a bikini giving out bowls of strawberries and vegan cream at Wimbledon. She was just so amenable and almost-naked about it, you know? I knew from the moment I saw her incongruous semi-nudity that regular cow cream was never going in my face hole again.

I gave up eating meat without the aid of tits

That wasn’t actually the moment I went meat-free, in reality, but was that the reaction the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) was hoping for when sending their swimsuited volunteers out with dairy-free treats during Wimbledon? I don’t think they actually got that reaction from anyone, if you look at the replies to their tweets about it. It’s a sloppy and unfocused strategy. I see attractive people, and I see bowls of limp-looking fruit and sludge. What conclusion am I supposed to come to beyond: “I really love looking at beautiful women. Also, I wouldn’t want to eat those strawberries.”

Peta says the stunt “helped prove that there are delicious plant-based alternatives to every dairy-based food you can think of”. Yet to me, and many others who happen to love dessert and/or barely clothed women, it was a reminder that Peta’s marketing efforts are usually insultingly cheap and poorly executed.

‘A smiling woman wearing less than you while being nice to you is an old-hat marketing gimmick.’ Photograph: Dinendra Haria/Rex/Shutterstock

As usual for Peta (which has many theories that animal lovers, including me, do not support) the Wimbledon stunt was met with irritation followed by a half-hearted trickle of media attention. And then it was on to the next stunt for the group and their associates â€" topless people dressed as bulls in Pamplona. This one featuring the favoured Peta tool of fully exposed breasts, albeit with a mix of genders taking part (see, we can’t call them sexist if they do that). It almost keeps the message away from their tiresome “female bodies are literally meat, get it?” gimmicks, but we’re still not quite at “animals deserve to live without being hacked at or turned into ground chuck”.

I gave up eating meat without the aid of tits. Well, one tit helped. I stopped about a minute after seeing Bear Grylls crunch his posh teeth through a live crab in the name of what he calls “survival” (and what everyone else calls “ratings”). I was disgusted and so sad that he’d crunched that little guy up for entertainment, and that I’d taken part by watching him do it. He probably wasn’t even hungry. He probably had a pack of Jaffa Cakes in his back pocket the whole time. It stopped me thinking of animal cruelty in terms of degrees and I quit meat entirely. Whether you agree with vegetarianism/veganism or not, no one’s last moments on earth should be in Bear Grylls’ mouth.

Which is not to say that there should be more televised baby crab deaths at the teeth of TV presenters. Vegetarianism usually happens without that, but even more so without the alluring promo-model-types that Peta favours. Everyone comes to their choice a different way, but I’m yet to hear anybody say they needed the animal cruelty cause to be linked to human sexuality in order to understand it.

A smiling woman wearing less than you while being nice to you is an old marketing gimmick that brings less and less return on investment as time marches towards better things. Today, the gimmick’s ubiquity at conventions, for example, is met with as much head-shaking and mockery as it is dribbling. My own interactions with promotional models at these things have never ended in increased brand awareness, but rather with a feeling of discomfort at the expectation that I’m to treat the women like walking, talking product shelves with boobs instead of human beings.

It’s a grubby and grasping tactic, and people are telling groups like Peta that they don’t want to see it or engage with it any more. It’s time to listen to our voices because we’ll be more inclined to listen to your message if it’s put forward properly. How are more people supposed to come around to the idea that animals deserve our kindness and respect, if Peta won’t show enough respect to the cause to share it effectively?

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