In his Los Angeles Times column yesterday, Al Martinez took note of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which “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.” Martinez notes that the group claims an increase in membership of over 100,000 in the past year alone, which should give pause to those of us not ashamed to admit that we enjoy a good slab of meat now and then. “With 33 Web sites and an $18-million annual budget,” he says, “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.”
