Last night, I told Marty about PETA going after Obama for swatting the fly, and H.o.p. overheard. Now, I’ve never said a word about PETA, and H.o.p. loves animals, but it was immediately apparent that somehow someway this eleven-year-old had educated himself about PETA on the web, I didn’t know when or why, but he had, and he turned out to know everything there was possibly to know about PETA, and being the animal protein-enriched carnivore that he is, the mention of PETA set him off. So much so that he got up this morning talking about PETA and about how don’t they know that animals eat animals?! Even cells eat cells, of course not like animals eat animals ROWLF but deceptively, like hugging them, and then they consume them. Really, they do! “It’s called food! We had to have food in order to evolve! Instead of burgers they want us to eat veggie burgers! Don’t they realize that plants are alive, too?! What’s with them? What do they know about nature if they think that eating is evil?” He ranted on, and lord knows where he gets that from though he was vaguely reminding me of how his confused, frustrated mother raves about the wild world and her just not understanding ever why it does the things it does.
Finally, when I was ready to tune out and go make him breakfast, he said…
“Now, I do think pigs should be kept in bigger sties before they’re turned into pot stickers. But PETA is just messed up.”
I stared and then I laughed. I stifled my laughter and opened my notepad. The bit about pigs needing bigger sties before being turned into pot stickers, that one had gotten me and I wanted to write it down.
He was nowhere done.
“They compare eating animals to the Holocaust! It’s like riding a skateboard and going off a ramp, someone’s going to get hurt! In this case, Jewish people. That must really hurt them to hear eating animals compared to Adolph Hitler and the Holocaust! If people want to know what animal cruelty is, they should go to the ASPCA! They know all about it and don’t show horror films that are intended to scare little children!”
When he had wound down a little, I asked him, “So, tell me, how did you learn about PETA?”
“I was trying to look up pita bread on Wikipedia.”
“You must have misspelled it.”
“Yeah.”
“Why pita bread?”
“Because I wanted to know its history.”
Oh, OK.
“Why did you want to know the history of pita bread?”
“Because I like to eat it.”
“What do you want for breakfast?”
“Chili. But don’t tell PETA.”
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