PETA – and just those four letters together should alert most people to the fact that this is gonna be a doozy – has decided that the best way to convince people to stop eating fish is to rename them “sea kittens.”
There are Sea Kitten Facts. Many male sea kittens woo potential partners by singing to them. While this is not particularly easy to do underwater coherently, female sea kittens don’t generally seem to mind. And so on.
There is even an interactive web toy that lets you “design your own sea kitten” by giving it a Fu Manchu moustache, sunglasses or an elephant disguise, which are of course all things one associates with kittens.
The problem is thus: How do you even begin to start making fun of this? And the answer is that it is impossible to do so. You just have to stand back and respect their total insanity for what it is.
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The joke’s on them, because kittens is good eatin’.
Well, it’s a step forward from their “If Daddy goes fishing, he’ll eventually eat your puppy and maybe your best friend!” comic from a couple of years ago.
So all it takes to win people to your cause is naming something ‘X Kitten’?
Hmm, where do you suppose women’s suffrage would be if they’d started calling the ladyfolk ‘Kitchen Kittens’?
Okay, stop throwing things at me, dammit.
Out with the “Republican Party,” in with the Konservative Kitten Klub!
… This HAS to be an elaborate joke. My mind cannot grasp any other meaning.
Why waste time with bullshit like this and not devote their time to shit people could actually get behind, like taking animals away from scumbags who abuse them or finding ways to fish that don’t leave the oceans completely barren of all life?
One day PETA and Jack Chick will join forces, and that will be the day parody dies.
Andrew: Because that first one is what the SPCA does.
And the second still kills those adorable sea kittens!
On that web-toy, the non-Fu Manchu mustache is a big thick handlebar “German” mustache. Not wrong or anything, but interesting.
And I get what they were going for, but being able to give a fish a bowl of water just feels wrong. Same for the litter box, I guess.
Man, I don’t even eat fish, but now I’m hungry for some sea kittens.
I have a difficult time taking campaigns like this seriously. When I visited the website I half expected to see Paris Hilton or some other celeb-socialite petting a fish. Photo Op!
I’m more prone to listen to messages from the SeaChoice campaign and those who promote sustainable seafood. http://www.seachoice.org/
However, sustainable seafood programs aren’t as cute and cuddly and promote eating the little critters.
If we could somehow harvest the arrogence of PETA and turn it into foodstuff, the Earth would have enough food to last till Armaggeddon.
Ah, PETA. Without you, we’d have to laugh at things infinitely less retarded than you.
I desparately want someone to start a counter campaign. Call cats “land tuna” or as I like to think of it “Chicken of the sea of the land”. Provide a cool little app where you can submit recipes and learn fun facts like how Calicos are genetically modified to go best with a cabernet.
Quick, someone go register MeowthWateringGood.com or PurrrfectlySeasoned.org.
Heh. I read over the weekend that they got some restaurant to release some 120-year-old lobster back into the wild. Didn’t someone think, hey, this lobster is well past the age when most lobsters die, so even if it doesn’t die of natural causes, well, Darwinism, baby! It’s not like some young punk of a lobster predator is going to respect its elders.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: PETA is what happens when you staff a political action group with performance artists.
Someday we’re gonna find out that this organization was astroturfed top to bottom by the restaurant industry and the American Beef Council, I’m sure of it.
Disney better sue over that ‘Flounder’, given that it looks nothing like a real flounder and is colored just like the ‘Little Mermaid’ character.
The problem with PETA is that they feel that they have to be in the press. That is the reason they come up with this silly bullshit. They even admitted it once.
I’m with Will on this. There is no way on god’s green earth that PETA is a for realzy real on this. Not just this instance, but the combined instances of all of their ridiculous pants-on-head retarded moves point me in the direction of some batshit loco reverse psychology conspiracy.
Sea kittens to replace word that’s permeated every language in every culture since, oh, the dawn of man? REALLY?
@(Soulless) Dan: I am SO THERE. *Laughs and laughs and laughs, then rereads the phrases “land tuna” and “Chicken of the sea of the land” and laughs some more*
Lobsters actually don’t die of old age. It’s really crazy. They can technically live forever, shedding their shells and growing larger and larger until something actively eliminates them.
They’re kinda fascinating like that.
I had to see the website for my own eyes.
Its like a Sarah Palin interview. The best way to mock it is to repeat it verbatim.
The worst part is that PETA has all these awesome pamphlets and shit with actual, useful info about animal cruelty in different industry and what companies are testing on animals, etc etc. And with all the stupid fucking stunts they’re pulling, it’s starting to be like you just see the PETA letterhead at the top of the pamphlet and you want to laugh and assume the shit in there is nonsense, when it’s actually pretty good factually. So they’re torpedoing their own movement. Not to mention their whole ‘let’s shit on women’s rights for animal rights’ series of stunts. There’s a good number of feminists that are vegetarian, why are you fucking with your own target market?
Okay, why is there a resurgence of this all over the internet in the past day or two? This went up months ago.
BlackBloc, I’d say the worst part is that PETA itself is in the animal-killing business.
http://www.petakillsanimals.com
Oh PeTA and vegans have always been talking out their ass. Especially when it comes to ethical vegetarianism – those people who anthropomorphize animals to make it appear that we are so biologically close to one another that we must treat them like people as well.
Or worse, those that feel humans are herbivores because we aren’t nocturnal or our jaws are slightly different. Nevermind the fact that, with the exception of elephants, all mammalian herbivores either have chambered stomachs and the ability to chew cud or have developed cecums which break down cellulose and ferment broken down vegetation. Nevermind the fact that we simply do not have the enzymes necessary to break down cellulose (which is where most mammalian herbivores get their nutrition from).
PeTA has always felt humans could live as strict vegetarians and biologically, they’re just flat wrong.
So how are they going to convince kittens to stop eating fish, then?
@Zifnab: that’s -crazy-, and you just totally sent me all over the Internet, not to mention: back to my old physiology text books from college. Neat-o. Talk about memories.
It made me think, though: is ‘old age’ ever actually the cause of death? I mean, laymen might say so, but doctors probably say heart failure or suchlike as official causes, no?
Still, makes me wonder how old the oldest recorded lobster’s been. Gonna work out my Google fu tonight.
>>PeTA has always felt humans could live as strict vegetarians and biologically, they’re just flat wrong.
Sorry, no. That’s a ludicrously exaggerated position, and you don’t need to hold it to have an issue with PETA. Many people have lived a vegan lifestyle. You might have a point with raw foodists or fruitarians, but… seriously. The main issues with veganism are iron and vitamin B12, both of which are available as supplements And yes, the irony of the fact they’ll be living on more industrially processed food than if they were omnivorous (like *in nature*) is not lost unto me, but I’m a pro-science ex-vegan and I don’t care that I’m eating processed food. I would certainly eat artificial lab-grown meat over ‘real’ meat if the option was available and commercially viable.
Am I a bad person for wishing someone at SomethingAwful would photoshop up a package of kitten fillets?
I would like to add, that as a vegan, I rarely support Peta. Don’t get me wrong occasionally they do something good, but more often than not it’s something as intelligent as this whole “kittens of the sea”. *Sigh* I hate when these people make me look stupid by association.
The problem is thus: How do you even begin to start making fun of this?
You talk about an Elseworlds story where Arthur Curry watches his parents get shot in front of him after going to see the Little Mermaid. As part of Elseworlds rules, Selina Kyle takes up the name Sea Kitten.
No affiliation with Catfishman, natch.
Yet another thing that makes me want to grab Doctor Who by the collar and shake him while screaming “Why?? Why did you stop the Daleks from eliminating the stupid people??”
There is an “old age” effect that has to do with degradation of your genetic code. Your body is constantly fixing itself, and the process of copying cells that are – themselves – copies of previous cells, gives you that “copy of a copy of a copy” effect that, over decades, causes some loss of resolution and quality. The end result is “aging”. And when your heart or lungs or bones or whatever “age” to the point that they no longer work, you die.
So in that regard, yeah, it may technically be “heart failure” that kills you. But its not because of something you ate or because you got stabbed in the chest. You still died of old age.
I’d still hit that.
Look at this cuddly little sea kitten!
http://weirdseamonsters.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/grenadier-fish.jpg
katzedecimal: Oh, if only the Daleks only killed stupid people. They would be the greatest good in the Universe!
The problem with Sea Kitten as a codename is that it’s only one letter away from Sex Kitten. God, knows how well that would go over….this sounds like a job for Alan Moore!
“Lobsters actually don’t die of old age. It’s really crazy. They can technically live forever, shedding their shells and growing larger and larger until something actively eliminates them.”
I am Lobster McCleod. Of the Clan McCleod. And I am *immortal*.
I’m gonna preface everything I’m about to write by saying that I think this “sea kitten” idea is somewhere between ridiculous and sad, and reading about it was one of the few times I actually wanted to physically *FACEPALM* instead of just typing it.
Way to make people take you even less seriously, guys.
But you know what they say about stopped clocks…
Treat them exactly like people? No. But I’m totally against animal cruelty.
I’ve got no problem with eating an animal that was treated all right during its life and killed quickly and humanely. I wouldn’t even have a problem eating one of the turkeys shown in the background of that one Sarah Palin interview, provided that they hadn’t been kept in terrible conditions their whole lives.
The trouble is that a lot of animals that end up being used for food are kept in pretty terrible conditions; for example, this. That’s from Wikipedia, not anything PETA related, and it goes on to say “Female pigs used for breeding (called ‘breeding sows’ by industry) are confined most of their lives in ‘gestation crates’ which are so small that they cannot even turn around. The pigs’ basic needs are denied, and they experience severe physical and psychological disorders.”
You might laugh at the “psychological disorder” part, but if you ever had a pet dog then you know that a dog can be either happy or miserable, and if you cared about your pet dog then you didn’t want it to be miserable and you felt bad for it when it was.
Plus, when people heard about how veal calves were raised, a lot of non-vegetarians stopped eating veal. This is pretty much the same thing. So I don’t see why it should be different with adult pigs, or chickens, or whatever.
Fish? Sure, I’ll eat some kinds of fish, if it was caught in the wild. I sure as fuck don’t think they’re anything like kittens. I’d eat a deer that was shot in the wild if I knew where to get some meat from one and I knew it was taken down with one precise shot instead of being…I dunno, caught in a steel trap or something. You probably get the idea. I’m not opposed to killing animals, but I am opposed to breeding them just to treat them cruelly for their entire lives to the point where death is actually a release for them.
Exactly. PETA has proven that there’s absolutely zero truth to the adage that “any publicity is good publicity.”
Stephen Colbert brought it up last night. He also called kittens land fish
Ahhh…delicious, deep-fried land fish. I’m torn between that and a roasted leg of Bobby. :p
PETA have a tendency to sound like gibbering kooks when the HORRIBLE TRUTH should be enough.
Rob Brown – You might like a book titled “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”. it’s about food, and the issue of how to treat animals intended for food is one of the big topics. (Others include industrial farming, organic farming, and how Corn conquered the world. Very interesting book, for anyone who eats.)