The Great American Gerbil Debate

There are 87 varieties of gerbils in the world. There are Mongolian gerbils, fat-tailed gerbils, short-eared gerbils, Przewalski’s gerbils and southern pygmy gerbils, to name a few.

Some are pets, some are nuisances, some are food and some are, well, cannonballs. Let me explain.

An online computer company called Cyberian Outpost has been running a television commercial that depicts the small, rat-like animals being fired from a cannon at a hole in the wall some distance away.

The object of the game is to get a gerbil through the hole without hitting the wall. The object of the ad is, by its sheer absurdity, to call attention to the company’s Internet service, Outpost.com, and to otherwise entertain those who are amused by gerbils flying through the air.

As the chief executive officer of Cyberian Outpost puts it: “We want them to laugh their asses off.”

Among those not laughing their asses off is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization that can go postal over cruelty to a snail darter, much less the use of gerbils as ammo.

A representative of PETA calls the commercial irresponsible and warns that it encourages the psychologically unbalanced who might think it’s funny.

That would include me.

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In a country that celebrates violence to humans as the epitome of entertainment, the representation of gerbils as cannonballs seems only mildly objectionable, if at all.

And yet, PETA says, it is getting hundreds of complaints from those who see the commercial as a major instrument in turning kids into killers. Never mind that human heads are blown away in sprays of brains and blood on the big screen, fire a fake gerbil across the small screen and tears flow.

What am I missing here?

To begin with, I am not a rodent lover. They are small, disagreeable things best left as food for snakes or, perhaps, as trained performers in certain roadside rat circuses.

However, I can accept that you might adore the little suckers and I consider that your business, although adoration of something so low on the mammalian scale tends to reveal an emotional deficiency on your part.

It’s like loving a biker or a cowboy.

I happen to like my dog Barkley. He’s not actually good for anything except licking and wagging and flopping out in the middle of the kitchen dreaming of pot roasts, but I like him anyhow.

And while TV commercials do not generally depict dogs as cannonballs, if they did, I wouldn’t object. I would understand, you see, that the dogs were not real and that their use as ammo was so ludicrous it would be amusing. Barkley, wagging and licking, zooming toward a hole in the wall.

I would also feel reasonably certain that the kid next door, having seen a dog arcing toward the hole, would not necessarily run out and gun down his neighbors.

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“We weren’t trying to outrage anyone,” Darryl Peck said in a telephone interview from his office in Kent, Conn. He’s Cyberian Outpost’s CEO. “We designed the commercials to make people laugh, not to make them mad. My kids think they’re funny, but I won’t let them watch the evening news. That’s the real world and it’s ugly.”

A second commercial, also aimed in its oblique way at calling attention to Outpost.com, depicts members of a high school marching band being chased by hungry wolves across a football field. An amused actor, watching the chaos, turns to the camera and says, “Now that’s good stuff.”

Peck says in a tone of disbelief that parents of kids in high school bands have also been objecting. “Political correctness,” he offers with a sigh, “is a little out of control.”

The kind of commercial PETA likes, according to publicity director Lisa Lange, is one produced by Kodak. It depicts a little girl saving a lobster from her father’s barbecue. Moral but not memorable.

I asked the comic Shelley Berman what he thought of the gerbil commercial. “Animal lovers probably should protest,” he said, “but I don’t think they’ll get a million man march to D.C. out of it.”

Then he added: “It’s really a painless death. When you fire a gerbil from a cannon, it’s gone. It doesn’t know what hit it.”

And off it will go to gerbil heaven, where the angels are members of PETA and everyone loves rats.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com