A few years ago I stumbled across an Islamic fundamentalist execution video. Unfortunately, where there's one execution video, there tends to be links to many others. Morbid curiosity led me down perhaps the darkest road of the Internet: a long thread of graphic execution videos — all from either Eastern Europe or the Middle East — on badly designed sites that consisted of disorganized rants in foreign languages and links upon links of recorded human-on-human cruelty. I'll only say that the ones that involved guns were the nice ones.
That foolish inquiry into the Internet's omnipotent view of human extremes caused me to emerge sadder but wiser, in the form of a truth I already knew becoming reinforced: There is no substitute for the viewing of real violence, the unsimulated suffering of others, victims of sadism and apathy, justified by the emotional extremes of religion and ethnocentrism. Simulated violence, be it animated, acted or interactive, simply doesn't trigger what some overzealous behaviorists claim it does. I was playing "DOOM" at 2 years old, "Duke Nukem" at 5 years old and continue to merrily slaughter my fellow digital man — and consider myself to be adequately empathetic and aware of others.
Recently, though, a well-known organization has completely encroached on my right to close my eyes and not think about suffering and death. PETA — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — has a huge library of animal-abuse videos that have entered my awareness completely unwelcome. I've always known "Imma skin you alive" to be a folksy, almost affectionately exaggerating threat, as of a crotchety old woman yelling after a mischievous child but watching something actually being skinned alive is one of the most godawful, hideous things one can possibly witness. There was something more bizarrely terrible about it than even the worst of the human execution videos. Thanks, PETA.
PETA has its name on all kinds of these animal-cruelty videos meant to inspire outrage. Perhaps the most noble are the ones that promote awareness of how creatures are treated on factory farms, where absurd suffering really is the status quo. At meat.org, perhaps the least transparent PETA-sponsored video, Paul McCartney takes us on an informative journey describing how the amoral profit motive of huge, oligopolistic factory farms profit off of the chronic suffering of living beings.
Starting with chickens and going from cows to pigs and even to fish, he prefaces the detailed description of each species' special industrial hell with how intelligent, curious and personable the subjected creatures are. The video is simple and effective but skewing the intrinsic value of exposing an industry that does not want you knowing how dirty and vicious its methods are concerning the nature of what we regularly consume is a disingenuous, sensational rhetoric that is highly suspect.
Perhaps it's naive to act like it's a surprise that PETA is an organization whose primary goal is to provoke emotional donations by releasing emotionally charged videos and ad campaigns of animal suffering, while doing very little to alleviate it. What do you do when a harsh reality moves you a great deal, but the perpetrator of that reality is fraudulent? PETA banks on getting donations by seeming as idealistic and overzealous as possible, but meat consumption is not the primary cause of heart disease and obesity, nor is widespread veganism a responsible platform of industry change, nor do fish require the moral standing of more intelligent mammals. Eating a lot of cooked meat helped early man's cerebral evolution — we wouldn't be here to question the morality of eating animals if we hadn't devoured a great number of them throughout our species' history.
It's the factory farms that I never thought to take literally, my biggest concern being a conditioned fear of chemicals and the low quality of the food in general. But the very real hybrid of the most stereotypical automated, industrial assembly line with the massive processing of tens of thousands of dying, tortured creatures at a time is an absurdity that still leaves me kind of speechless.
The complacency regarding what we eat seems to have decreased a great deal due to documentaries like "Supersize Me" and "Food Inc." over the last short decade or so, but our ability to do anything about it, like have more options, is as much up to faceless food suppliers as ever. In light of such powerlessness, perhaps food quality preferences shouldn't be seen as a trite fashion statement. Maybe it's the only form of expression we have.
—Wiley Robinson is an undecided sophomore. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.