PETA’s Got a Bone to Pick With Carnivores

Ever since Walt Disney humanized animals with the creation of Mickey Mouse, we’ve been in love with creatures lower than us on the food chain.

Mickey was followed by a whole bunch of the kinds of beasts we normally eat, including Babe, the cutest pig since Porky, and those heroic hens and roosters of “Chicken Run.” Only sharks and grizzly bears have thus far failed to qualify as cuddly.

The result of this romance with animals has been the growing power of PETA, an organization, you might say, of living things concerned with other living things. It has become the meat industry’s biggest pain in the haunches.

In just 20 years, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has grown from a lone vegetarian in a Maryland apartment to 750,000 members worldwide, if you include actors and others who will do anything for a little notice.

Disgust and confrontation have been among the chief weapons in PETA’s arsenal, including a billboard that recently went up in L.A. It was what got me going on this. The billboard says: “Beef. It’s what’s rotting in your colon.”

The purpose of the message is to offend those of us who prefer pot roast to a soy bean casserole and to call attention to the treatment of animals on their way to the cooking pot.

“We would rather go too far than not far enough in alerting people to the fact that when they’re eating meat, they’re protecting animal abuse,” says PETA spokesman Sean Gifford in justifying the gross nature of the organization’s assault on our human sensitivities. I’m not sure I want to know what’s rotting in my colon, whether it’s a cow or a carrot.

Gifford went on from there to explain that among the abuses animals suffer prior to slaughter are overcrowding and starvation, which are situations not unknown to humans around the world. The difference, however, is that humans do not have their beaks cut off to prevent them from pecking one another to death and are generally not cooked and eaten thereafter.

Through its campaigns, PETA has managed to bring both McDonald’s and Burger King to their knees. They haven’t stopped selling meat and chicken parts, but they are more conscious about how animals are treated en route to becoming colon rot.

“Wicked Wendy’s” is a current target, with attendant raucous demonstrations and the jailing of a celebrity. Who he is doesn’t matter, it’s the celebrity part that counts.

Shouting and picketing, however, are mild stuff compared with what PETA is truly capable of. Recently, its members displayed buckets of dead animals outside the headquarters of Discovery Communications to protest a proposed TV series that supposedly encourages people to obtain pets from breeders rather than animal shelters.

But disgust has its limits. The organization was forced to withdraw an ad that was a parody of the dairy industry’s “Got Milk?” campaign. It depicted New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has prostate cancer, with a milk mustache next to the caption, “Got prostate cancer? Drinking milk contributes to prostate cancer.”

Giuliani, who didn’t think it was all that amusing, threatened to sue, and PETA, deciding he was probably right, ended the campaign with an apology.

With 33 Web sites and an $18-million annual budget, PETA keeps rocking and rolling us with campaigns aimed at both animal abuse and people who eat meat. A perfect world, by PETA’s measure, would be a man and his pig dining together on McVeggies at you-know-where. That is, until those people who believe that plants have souls intervene, and then I don’t know what the devil we’d eat.

By the way, that rotting-colon ad is only one of four PETA billboards in L.A. Two others blame meat for obesity and sexual impotence, and another targets the use of animal skins for clothing. It features a naked actress painted like a reptile and could hint that sex may join disgust and confrontation as PETA’s newest propaganda weapon.

Meanwhile, with gross movies currently popular in America and animal love temporarily popular among celebrities, PETA is living, you’ll forgive the expression, high on the hog. In the past year alone membership has increased by 100,000.

As long as we keep humanizing food animals, the likelihood is we’ll continue to worry about how they’re treated and eat them in diminishing amounts.

Pork chops, like pet rocks and the Nehru jacket, could become things of the past. No one’s going to want to eat anything as cute as Babe. As for me, I’m not about to become a vegetarian, but I just saw the movie “Cats & Dogs,” and I swear I’ll never eat one of them again.

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