An animal rights group called Tuesday for a North American theme park operator to cancel a competition in which people will try to break the world cockroach-eating record.
Theme park operator Six Flags Inc, based in New York, is staging the contest as part of a promotion leading up to Halloween in which it is also offering customers free entry or line-jumping advantages if they eat a live Madagascar hissing cockroach.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said it had been flooded with calls from children, adults and even anonymous employees of Six Flags opposing the record-breaking contest and the overall promotion.
“Insects do not deserve to be eaten alive especially for a gratuitous marketing gimmick,” PETA spokeswoman Jackie Vergerio told Reuters.
Competitors will try to break the current world record, which is held by Ken Edwards of Derbyshire, England, who devoured 36 Madagascar hissing cockroaches in one minute in 2001.
Six Flags spokesman James Taylor said the only complaints the company had received were from people who did not have the opportunity to sign up and eat a cockroach because only 12 of its 30 parks in the United States, Canada, and Mexico were participating in the promotion.
Of course, sooner or later, guess who ends up eating whom?
OFTLO, your wasting your time with this person. Must be associated with one of the cosmetic firms. Probably does the testing him/herself.
I have to wonder about the mindset of the people (and I use that term loosly) in those labs that would do this to an animal while it is screaming in pain. The thought makes my stomach churn. People steal pets off the street and sell them to these labs. It was news in Virginia a few years back. Anyone who could do that would also harm humans. Whats the first early warning of a serial murderer? The torture of animals.
#33 – I don’t know Mark… I read that as them saying medical testing was justifiable and that I said it wasn’t… and I might have misunderstood that, but I’m at work, so i have a lot of time to write 🙂
I think it is important to the conversation at large to draw the distinction.
Here’s where I put in a gratuitous plug about my book in which a big part of the plot involes animal-rights activists who take to serious violence to achieve their aims (no pun intended).
http://www.smartalix.com/cyberchild
Alix, I look forward to reading your book. I’ve admired your enthusiastic wit and writing style for some time now, I look forward to your fiction.
Aw, shucks.
OFTLO –
Sorry for not clarifying; the thing about animal testing wasn’t a shot at you or anyone here, just an expression of exasperation at the wide-eyed naïfs who have bitten PETAs toxic apple. When the subject of medical testing on animals comes up just about anywhere in media, there’s this stock Earnest Young Person, often a highschooler, who parrots the “We don’t need to do tests on animals, we have computers!” line, as tens of millions of computer scientists, users, programmers, &c all slap their foreheads in unison and say “Damn! Why didn’t we think of that!” (And similar numbers of lab-smocked, monocled, leering lab scientists (think Dr. Mel) with vaguely Mittel-European accents say “But you fool, how can you torture a computer??”
To make that idiot statement requires the egocentrism of an 7-year old, blithe ignorance of the glaringly obvious fact that it is certain that many, many very clever people have already been considering it, for practically as long as we have had such a thing as computer models – and therefore since it still isn’t done, maybe that’s because it can’t yet BE done.
Mark – I couldn’t agree more. And one of the vanishingly few positive things PETA has done is exposing some sadistic psychos, who, If I Were King, would spend their remaining days (if any) in foul dungeons. Unfortunately, fanatical animals-rights propagandists and terrorists would have the gen pop believe that all scientists who use animals in research are Hannibal Lector wannabes, which is a foul (and idiotic) slander, something only a truly deluded person could take seriously.
I’ve said nothing regarding cosmetics testing, which is far harder to justify – and a good deal of it is clearly unjustifiable. But it serves as a nice reminder of just how far some people will go in pursuit of profit… Greed is one of our fucked-up society’s biggest motivators, innit?
It’s amazing the guilt and anguish the readers feel on this site. Every time John posts something about PETA or animal rights or protecting animals, everyone goes crazy.
Just like Mark Foley sat on the Commission to Protect children from Internet Abusers while secretly abusing Pages by sending them lude messages, I have a feeling most of you are closet vegetarians who feel extreme guilt about having living beings killed for your pleasure (how many of you actually kill your own animals?) , although you have no problem adoring similar living beings as pets.
I’m sure most of you in the 1700 and 1800s would have said that Africans are “just property.” Like animals today are “just meat.” I think many slave owners felt we “needed to use slaves” for labor, or our economy wouldn’t survive, much as many of you say we “need meat” to survive.
Would love to see how many of your support the war in Iraq.
Chad, you’re a hoot, y’know that? “Guilt and anguish,” indeed. So, I suppose that indifference and apathy are what you would have everyone feel when topics related to life and respect for it are raised, eh?
“Closet vegetarians.” There’s another rich one. Let me share with you a term you apparently missed in Psych 101:
PROJECTION
…
11. Psychology.
a. the tendency to ascribe to another person feelings, thoughts, or attitudes present in oneself, … relieving the ego of a sense of guilt or other intolerable feeling.
Ahhh, I hate to break this to you, but domesticated pets, y’know, cats ‘n dogs? They’re not (as you slyly but dishonestly slipped in there) “similar living beings” except in the sense of being animals. Maybe I’m unusual, maybe I just don’t get out much, but I’ve never known anyone who keeps a chicken or a cow as a household pet, or what we call nowadays, a ‘companion animal.” Do you? And conversely, I also know no one who eats dogs or cats.
You see, you are a wonderful example of the simplistic, black-and-white thinking I referred to earlier.
Cow=animal
Dog=animal
Therefore, eating a cow is the same as eating a dog. QED.
Sorry, chum, but it doesn’t work that way. I suspect you’ll find that most of us are fully capable of recognizing and comprehending the highly significant differences between food animals and domestic pets, not the least of which is that our pets are far more closely related to humans than the ones we eat.
Repeat to yourself until you grasp the concept: A cat is not a cow is not a chicken is not a lobster is not a human. Human lives matter more than ape lives. Ape lives matter more than dog lives. Dog lives… &c. &c, ad infinitum. I realize that some people have tremendous barriers to being able to make distinctions, but if you work at it, the time may come when you are able to comprehend that different species have different roles in the tapestry of life, and that the more highly evolved a creature is, the more care, respect and concern that creature merits.
You live with and care for cats & dogs. You eat cows and chickens. Even kindergarteners understand the difference, but brainwashed adults who never learned how to think logically, sadly do not.
So Sayeth The Ghoti