If an ad campaign launched by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals works, lentil soup may replace the cheeseburger in Boston campus dining halls.
Last week, the animal rights organization began a new effort to convince students to “Go Veg.”
As PETA unveiled its ad campaign, student activists at Boston University, Harvard Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Suffolk University, the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Weston College began covering their campuses with posters showing a newly hatched chicken and the words “Pro-Life? Go Vegetarian!”
After its Boston debut, PETA plans to take its meat-free message to college campuses nationwide. PETA also intends to expand its campaign to include paid radio and direct mail advertisements.
Aaron Gross, a Harvard Divinity School student and College Action Campaign coordinator for PETA, described the initial response to the posters as “very positive.”
According to Gross, PETA is attempting to convince students that eating meat is incompatible with pro-life beliefs.
“There’s nothing pro-life about munching on the corpses of slaughtered animals,” Gross said. “Anyone who’s committed to the sanctity of life should be committed to the sanctity of all life.”
Boston University student Loren Francis, a College of Communication junior and PETA activist, said the animal rights organization seeks to show the discrepancy between pro-life views and eating meat.
“The point of PETA’s campaign is to show the inconsistency of pro-life advocates who support torture, aging and death every time they sit down to eat,” Francis said.
According to PETA’s website, the animal rights organization does not have a position on abortion. However, the organization does urge pro-lifers to join its cause.
“We are not pro-life or pro-choice as an organization,” reads PETA’s statement on abortion. “However, we have pro-life members and this message is brought to you by people who care about all life. We are asking people who feel in their hearts and souls that taking the life of an unborn child is wrong, to also consider the lives of other wonderful beings who do not want to die.”
Since its founding in 1980, PETA has gained the support of such celebrities as Eddie Vedder and Pamela Anderson, as well as a reputation for radical, some say extreme, politics. The organization’s recent “Milk Sucks” urged college students to drink beer instead of milk to protest the treatment of dairy cows.
Asked if he felt the ads would offend students, Gross said, “We’d rather go too far than not go far enough.”
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