PETA Gets Roasted While Hot-Dogging

Whatever headway it may or may not have made on behalf of the world’s rabbits, pigs and kangaroos, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has reigned as a grandmaster of contemporary public protest.

Or rather, it did until 9:05 a.m. Tuesday, when the animal rights PR juggernaut ran head-on into the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile at a supermarket parking lot here--and ended up looking like road kill.

The Wienermobile stands 27 feet long, runs on six cylinders and seats four. It is at once the symbol of Oscar Mayer hot dogs and an American icon. Inherently cheerful, hilariously designed (by the late Brooks Stevens, who also designed Harley-Davidson motorcycles), the Wienermobile is widely regarded as pretty wonderful.

“It is,” conceded PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich. “It is very, very fun. Which is why it’s so invidious. It’s selling the idea that eating hot dogs is fun. When, in fact, it is a violent, bloody business, and it has got to stop.”

Driven by this moral certainty, the group has dogged the Wienermobile all summer, clearing the decks for a series of clashes between two titans of public relations.

“You know, there are 10 of them,” Friedrich said, meaning Wienermobiles. “And there are more than 400 stops nationwide.” PETA has marshaled resources sufficient to target 50 stops, including the one in a parking lot outside a Giant Food store in this blue-collar Baltimore suburb.

“Vegetarians Attack Wienermobile,” read the headline on the news release PETA issued in advance. In smaller type: “Company Uses Children to Promote Cruelty to Pigs.”

The children began arriving before 9 a.m., tots clutching motherly hands and climbing under the rope of colored flags tied around overturned shopping carts. They had come to sing the “Oscar Mayer Wiener Jingle” or the “Bologna Song” (their choice) in front of a video camera, as they were invited to do by commercials and print ads during the last two weeks.

Touring the country in a “talent search” for cute kids to star in commercials is the Wienermobile’s regular summer assignment. (Winters are spent doing goodwill tours and sports events.)

“Who wants to practice?” asked Mike Ballog, one of three all-American types in Oscar Mayer T-shirts who travel in the Wienermobile. A little boy hopped and clapped. “I do!”

Another boy stood at the microphone with his cap on backward. He was about to start singing when the chanting started:

“Cruelty we won’t tolerate! Get the slaughter off the plate!”

The sound began beyond the minivans. Four people were marching toward the assembled kids. Each carried a sign: “Did your food have a face?” One was dressed in a pig suit.

“Oscar Mayer is to blame! Exploiting children is a shame!”

The kids froze. Several stared at the ground. The boy at the microphone began to sing, but his words were drowned out. Two of the PETA people had bullhorns.

They marched up to the rope. Inside it, adults began to fume.

“Oh, that makes me so mad!” Angel Brown informed the mother next to her. “They’re doing more harm to these kids than any hot dog could.” She looked down at her daughter, Emily, 4. “Emily, don’t listen to this, OK?”

Emily did not seem to know what was going on. She asked her mother what “slaughter” means. Nearby, another little girl wanted to know why adults get to be so loud.

Brown, meanwhile, worked her way toward the protesters. She pointed at their feet. “Wait, wait!” she cried. “I do see leather shoes?” Brown clearly knew how to hurt an animal rights protester.

“I’m a vegetarian,” she explained. “Have been for 18 years. I don’t eat meat or meat byproducts.”

Emily does, though. “I’ve got no choice but to feed her meat, for health reasons,” Brown said. “Little kids need some meat. She can’t take a protein supplement.”

The protesters backed away a bit. And though the chants stayed angry (“Stop the torture! Stop the pain! Oscar Mayer is to blame!”), the chanters began to look a little uncertain themselves. The three television cameras that had arrived with them were now focused on the stricken faces of small children caught in some strange adult cross-fire.

The coverage, which PETA solicited, is a PETA specialty. In an era in which conventional tactics of confrontation have faded well beyond blase--homeowners’ associations march, schoolchildren picket; assignment editors yawn--PETA always has found some new bit of street theater to lure the cameras.

One Thanksgiving, while the president was inside offering the traditional pardon to a turkey contributed by the poultry industry, PETA found a tom that had been so zealously bred for breast meat that the bird could not stand. The turkey was set in a wheelchair outside the White House gate. It was a classic PETA event, combining cartoon comedy and guerrilla tactics with a jaunty flair calculated to overwhelm everything except the group’s point.

On July 10, Laurel, Md., resident Paul Martin climbed a billboard in San Antonio with a mock meat hook protruding from his abdomen. “Hooked on Meat?” read the 50-foot banner from which he dangled. “Go Vegetarian.”

With the Wienermobile, however, the group clearly bit off more than it could chew. The backfire wasn’t as bad as when PETA tried to take out ads invoking cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, but there was clearly a miscalculation.

“People really love the Wienermobile,” Ballog said.

Wienermobile workers--”hotdoggers”--see this constantly on the road, where the vehicle travels through a sea of smiles and happy toots. “It’s like being in a parade all the time,” said hotdogger Toby Jenkins.

Not even Oscar Mayer began to fathom what it had in the Wienermobile until 1986, when, to celebrate its 50th birthday, the company sent what was then the only surviving vehicle on a farewell tour. Wienermobile manager Russ Whitacre said the outpouring persuaded executives of the vehicle’s emotional power--a power that was still not evident to everyone in the Giant parking lot Tuesday.

After the protesters finally drifted away and a new crowd of children was assembling, Peggy Nemoff walked up.

“I’m the pig,” Nemoff said, now in street clothes. Her T-shirt read “Animal Liberation Is Human Liberation.”

“The parents were mad at us?” she asked. “Why?”