Like most blokes, KFC management excepted, I was surprised and delighted to see the ABC news last week enlivened by a trio of topless girls in a cage protesting against KFC's use of factory-farmed chickens.
I'm a man, designed by nature to appreciate attractive women (although I'm a married man, so only so much appreciation is allowed), and I'm not judgemental if those same women choose to wear the minimum of clothing. Happily, there seems to be an unusual number of topless women around at the moment. Three weeks ago, I saw a couple outside Sydney's Wynyard train station. Like those in the cage outside KFC, the Wynyard women were PETA protesters gathering maximum attention, in this case against the live export trade.
[Edit: my memory was faulty. The Wynyard protest was NSW Animal Liberation against the fur trade - specifically China's treatment of farmed rabbits. They used a horrific picture of a live skinned rabbit.]
I'm somewhat chastised, though, by Josephine Tovey's point that these young women are just meat in PETA's public relations machine.
The point is well made, and says something about the nature of PETA that agriculture needs to watch. PETA is the PR equivalent of a terrorist insurgency. It has its own morality, its own shapely version of suicide bombers, and it relies on the element of surprise.
By comparison, agriculture's efforts to counter PETA's attacks are lumbering and ineffective. As the mulesing issue has highlighted, by the time an agricultural organisation has brought its guns to bear and piled the PR munitions onto a hot issue, PETA has skipped off and is attacking from another place.
If agriculture doesn't want to find itself spending the next decade giving ground to half-naked girls, it has to acknowledge a couple of things.
Firstly, that PETA is a superb PR machine. It's creative, gutsy, and highly effective at getting its point across. The farm sector shouldn't let its loathing of PETA's harassment interfere with its consideration of PETA's skilled manipulation of the media - and take instruction from each hit on how to deal with guerilla PR. One anti-PETA weapon might be wit: like most activism, PETA doesn't seem to have a sense of humour. But the most effective strategy must be pre-emption: be the first to get wherever PETA is going.
Second, that PETA has a point--and unlike fundamentalist Islam, it has a point that resonates with the general public everywhere. Agriculture shouldn't cause needless suffering to animals.
Some questionable practices have evolved out of equating agriculture too closely with a factory production line, and forgetting that farming's widgets are living creatures. Mulesing, a graphically bloody process, has proved a no-contest in public relations terms. Other practices will someday get PETA's undivided attention. Those sectors might be well advised to move first.
I've heard some say that to give ground to PETA is to empower a bunch of vegan facists who want to ban guide dogs because they are forced to be subservient to humans, and whose ultimate goal is strict veganism for all humanity. That is undoubtedly true of some in PETA, but it's not an ambition that's going to be realised.
PETA currently has the support of many in the general public who, on the understanding that they are helping stamp out cruelty to animals, have to do nothing more painful than not buy KFC or a woollen jumper. That same public is, on the whole, happily omnivorous. It won't buy into a vegan vision of the world. PETA will make its mark on agriculture while agriculture presents an easy target, but in the long run, livestock farming will continue, PETA will be a footnote in history.