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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has gained itself a lot of attention by sponsoring on ongoing campaign against the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile. The Weinermobile is a 27-foot long vehicle shaped like a hot dog. Oscar Meyer sends it to different cities to promote its products and audition kids for an upcoming ad campaign. And at almost all stops it's been met by animal rights protesters.
Carrying signs with slogans like "Pigs are friends not food" and occasionally featuring protesters in pig costumes (how appropriate), PETA recites its litany about the supposed health risks of eating meat, the "torture" that animals slaughtered for food are forced to undergo, and occasionally attacks on Oscar Meyer for "exploiting" kids. Much of the rhetoric, in fact, resembles the rhetoric used against the tobacco industry. As PETA's Bruce Friedrich put it, "The Weinermobile is the meat industry version of Joe Camel enticing kids into a practice that may well kill them later in life."
A typical example of the heated rhetoric was provided by Brenda Sloss, a director of the St. Louis Animal Rights Team, who told reporters when the Weinermobile visited St. Louis,
They [kids] deserve to know the truth. The truth is Oscar Meyer is in reality a dead pig that has gone through torture ... Every time you bite into a hot dog you are biting into pesticides, animal feces, ground-up animal parts and antibiotics that have been pumped into the animals.
Friedrich seems to think that the Weinermobile campaign is "raising awareness" and he's probably right -- like PETA's recent claim that milk is a racist drink, however, the effect is probably to alert the public to just how extreme PETA's agenda is. As Claire Regan, manager of corporate communications for Oscar Mayer put it,
Kids love it [the Weinermobile], and we do the auditions like Hollywood. Hot dogs are fun food; they bring people together at cookouts, fairs and ballparks. People are out there to have fun. What happens is that parents get upset when activists yell at them. Parents don't want someone making their child feel guilty because they don't believe in a vegetarian diet, and they don't want their kids yelled at. Parents feel they have rights to choose how they live.
Well said.
Source:
What's The Beef? St. Louis, August 1998.