So laying eggs all your life and then getting plucked, stuffed and roasted is good enough for you, is it?

Before I type out what's about to follow let me get this out of the way - I love my animals, particularly my dogs.

Having said that -

Ingrid Newkirk of Peta is a scumbag.

Yes, PETA has done some great things in ending the use of animal testing in cosmetics but Newkirk herself is clearly a person of which the elevator doesn't reach the top floor.

I've disliked Newkirk for a long time. In college I wrote a letter to the school paper attacking Newkirk for her idiotic statement "Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses." In keeping with Newkirk's inanity I sarcastically compared Hitler to Colonel Sanders. I'm proud to say that my letter was one of the top 10 most despised letters to the editor that year. It was Eugene, after all.

Of course years later Newkirk and Peta elevated the concept of comparing the holocaust to the meat industry to an even more unimaginable level of absurdity in their Holocaust on your Plate campaign. Peta's faux-surprise at the predictable outrage that resulted just demonstrated once again that their organization seems to be largely composed of those that are only capable of empathy towards animals but, when it comes to their fellow humans, they could care less.

Call it species-ism, call it prejudice against animals, call it whatever you choose but I simply refuse to identify with the Newkirk and the people that make-up Peta. I am very much a Humanist. My sympathy towards PEOPLE informs and motivates my progressive politics. I would love to live in a world where the biggest issue we faced was the conditions of broiler chickens on their path to the table. That would be a world where every child was fed, armed conflict was a thing of the past and we weren't destroying the environment. Until that time Newkirk can bugger off.