A recent PETA ad has gone viral after it made the insinuation that eating cats and eating fish are the same thing.
The advertisement went up outside a fish and chip shop in the British seaside town of Cleethorpes. The ad shows a woman dressed up as a fishmonger holding a cat. The caption reads, “Sea things in a different light. Respect all life. Go vegan.”
A BBC reporter on the scene chatted with a passerby, who said that they thought the ad was “a bit sick”. He explained, “It’s a cat. You don’t eat a cat.”
The argument also hopped over to Twitter and social media, with one person writing, “A cat is a mammal that’s soft and cuddly, most of the time, and interacts with humans while a fish is cold and has hardly any interaction with us.”
Someone else on Twitter said, “I’m speechless, respect for every animal is right, for example I’m a vegetarian, but I find this advertisement horrible and in bad taste… surely it could have been done better!!”
Another Twitter user pointed out, “… kitty cats are cute and i cant make the connection other than cats eat fish. but their argument is flawed as cats can not go veggi[e].”
“Sometimes I wonder if the world in which I inhabit, is actually, just a comedy series being played back to me, whilst I lie in a coma,” said yet another Tweet with a bit of joviality.
PETA’s Jennifer White spoke with the BBC about the poster. She said that it was “to remind people that all animals deserve protection,” and noted that the fishing industry is “biggest killer of animals on the planet”.
She claims that the poster’s controversy is all about “speciesism, which is the misguided belief that some species are more important than others — and this is how humans justify mistreating animals.”