We all have our off days, but a recent showing from one of America’s most high-profile animal rights groups is hard to defend as anything but a big swing and a miss: PETA just liberated five pig fetuses from a high school dissection lab and released them into a retention pond.
Yeesh, they definitely came up short with this one.
Whatever your opinion on the positions and tactics of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, it seems fair to say that a number of their past actions have undeniably helped animals escape some pretty fucked up situations, but sadly they failed to live up to those prior successes yesterday when three undercover activists infiltrated Weston High School disguised as janitors to spring several dissection-bound pig fetuses from the premises. The PETA operatives waited until a mandatory 10th grade assembly to slip into the science labs unnoticed, and once there they worked swiftly to load five pig fetuses into a secret compartment hidden within a specially constructed shop vacuum to avoid raising suspicion. They then rappelled out a second-floor window mere minutes before the fetal pigs would have been cut open as part of the biology curriculum’s unit on anatomy, and finally capped the mission off by releasing the fetuses into a small retention pond a few miles down the road and announcing their success on social media.
While a lot of planning clearly went into this operation, it’s hard to deny that the execution left a lot to be desired. For starters, one of the liberated pig fetuses was quickly pulled under by a big snapping turtle after being released into the retention pond, while another got carried off by a German Shepherd being walked off-leash minutes later. So at best only three of the pig fetuses got happy endings, and that’s pretty generously assuming that an uncertain future in a pool of stagnant water is for sure a “happy” thing for them at all. There’s also the fact that they only liberated five of a total 82 pig fetuses slated for dissection that day, which means that they didn’t so much stop the dissections outright as make a handful of students do their dissections in groups of three instead of pairs. And the operatives also ran over not one, but two little squirrels on the brief drive from the high school to the retention pond, so even taking PETA at their word that rescuing five preserved pig fetuses was worthwhile in the first place, it still undeniably came at the expense of other animal life.
It’s a far cry from their work on the Silver Springs monkey case, that’s for sure.
PETA is trying to do some victory laps on social media by posting pictures of happy piglets frolicking in sunny grass, but it rings pretty hollow given that these are obviously just stock photos and not the actual pig fetuses they freed from the school. Of course this doesn’t diminish the genuinely laudable work PETA’s done exposing and ending horrifying violations of animal welfare in the past, but reputation-wise, they’re gonna have to have to pull something like bringing down a puppy mill that tortures a couple dozen corgis to death per day to wash off the stink from this flop.
Man, PETA really dropped the ball on this one. No offense to the pig fetuses, but here’s hoping these activists do something a little more impressive for their next big undercover operation!
