PETA yearns for a spot on border fence

If, one day, a Mexican day laborer smelling of tofu and alfalfa sprouts hurls a bucket of paint on your mink coat, curse not the country's broken Immigration system.

Instead, you can thank the good people who brought you the $1 million artificial chicken contest and sang the joys of pleather.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (better known as PETA) sees the wall being built at the U.S.-Mexico border as both a futile attempt to stop a complex, intractable problem and a blank slate to win over new soldiers in its war against meat.

Last week, the organization offered to buy ad space on the wall anywhere along the border, at whatever the going rate might be.
Directed toward those presumably scaling the wall, the ad would say, in both English and Spanish: "If the border patrol doesn't get you, the chicken and burgers will. Go vegan."

An answer from U.S. Customs and Border Protection is forthcoming, said PETA spokeswoman Ashley Byrne.

"We're very serious," Byrne said, dismissing the various cheers posted by supporters on the organization's Web site, peta.org. "We just wanted Mexicans and other immigrants to know that, if they cross into the U.S., they're putting their health at risk by leaving behind healthier stable diets of corn, tortillas, fruits, vegetables, beans and rice.

"America is no longer the land of the free and home of the brave; it's becoming the land of the sick and the home of the obese," Byrne added, in what might make for a good, and true, second ad slogan.

There is one problem that PETA may not be aware of, however: Mexicans love meat. Those beans? Usually cooked by any self-respecting Mexican mother with pork lard and, maybe even, bits of bacon. The tortillas? Best served with a grilled flank steak or chorizo.

And given that scores of people die every year trying to cross illegally into the United States; that many are fleeing starvation; and that survival, not healthy eating habits, is their most immediate worry, it seems hard to imagine the advertisements would have much impact.

But, even faced with all that, Byrne seemed undeterred.

"The fact that Americans eat far more animal flesh per capita than the Third World would explain why Americans have a higher death rate from coronary disease and other problems," she said.

If the ads do eventually make it up on the wall, and PETA does gain converts among the newly arrived, the immigrants can ponder the evils of meat while working furiously at their jobs—particularly if the job is at a farm with livestock or at a slaughterhouse.
Original here