I was known as an “animal lover” as a child. My favourite films — Free Willy, Homeward Bound, Beethoven — were animal-centric, and when I watched Babe at age five I became a vegetarian, horrified that I could be responsible for that dark opening scene where the mother of the titular character is taken away to be slaughtered. The link between the dead animal in the slaughterhouse and the dead animal on my plate was easy to make, but the inherent cruelty of eggs and dairy didn’t come ’til my teens — when the perception of veganism was beginning to veer from the hippie to the absurd, when the Animal Liberation Front and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals were performing highly-publicised (and reviled) stunts to bring attention to animal rights and the media hit back.
In one particularly enduring episode of South Park, Stan visits a PETA compound, where the inhabitants “love” animals so much that they form romantic bonds, marry, and breed with them to produce human-animal hybrids. It’s hyperbolic for gross-out comedic effect, which South Park has directed towards establishments and individuals across all political, religious, and personal beliefs over the decades it has been on the air, and such a divisive and media-forward organisation as PETA is easy fodder. However, the episode exaggerates (in its usual fashion) the stereotype that PETA, and by extension animal rights activists, and therefore vegans, are taking things too far; that the mainstream affection we feel for our pets has been extended to cover non-pet animals and that affection warped to something unnatural, in that if we are not killing them we might as well be marrying them, that in fact their lives matter more than the members of our own species.
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