PETA, an animal rights organization, constantly receives national attention and a certain shock value using powerful and distinct images to expose their messages of animal suffering. Starting in 1980, many of their campaigns have attempted to use powerful visuals with the use of celebrities to address the issue of animal cruelty and to persuade people to convert to an animal friendly lifestyle. Their campaign, I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur, is PETA’s most recognized yet controversial anti-fur campaign. This campaign is an individual behavior change campaign that tries to change and promote behaviors that lead to improved individual or social well-being. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur campaign’s ability to convey effective messages on animal rights to the public using powerful visuals and celebrity icons. Two theories that can be used to successfully analyze this campaign are the theory of planned behavior and the social cognitive theory.
Literature Review
There was a combination of different literature found that easily pertains to the issue addressed in this paper. This broadly classified literature includes the history and background of PETA’s organization, an analysis of the use of celebrity icons in the anti-fur campaign and the different perspectives and criticism depicted in their messages.
Historical resources
A large amount of information relating to animal rights disseminates from the many websites PETA is associated with. These websites are a key factor to attract supporters and publish information that will help advance its activism. These two PETA websites that were very useful for researching this paper are www.peta.org and www.furisdead.com. These websites ...
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Every year over 100 million animals die in the US; the cause for these deaths, animal testing. This injustice to animals involves testing products such as medical drugs or makeup, on poor imprisoned animals that don’t have the ability to stand for their own rights as most of us do. Animals used for testing are given products that may result in burning, poisoning, or death. These animals are forced to live in confined spaces where they wait until the next horrible experiment. They are, tortured beyond imagination as they are sometimes even cut open while they are alive (know as vivisection), either with expired analgesics or even without them.
In the article “A change of heart about animals” author Jeremy Rifkin uses rhetorical appeals such as ethos, logos, and pathos to persuade humanity in a desperate attempt to at the very least have empathy for “our fellow creatures” on account of the numerous research done in pursuit of animal rights. Rifkin explains here that animals are more like us than we imagined, that we are not the only creatures that experience complex emotions, and that we are not the only ones who deserve empathy.
In a society dominated by visual activity, it is not uncommon to be faced with images meant to render a specific reaction. It is the intention of industries to provoke a reaction whether it is mental, emotional, or physical and specifically through the use of ethos, pathos, and logos. Both images displayed, the first by the PETA organization or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the other by UNESCO or the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization share similar tactics in which they influence their audience’s reaction. As an American animal rights organization that campaigns for the “ethical treatment of animals”, PETA’s most dominant mode of persuasion is especially exemplified by the use of pathos. In an attempt to induce sympathy from the audience, specifically from animal rights advocates, PETA uses the representation of a woman with the pattern of a tiger’s stripes.
Four journalists named Helen Jones, Larry Andrews, Marcia Glaser, and Fred Myers thought it would be a good idea to create a nonprofit organization to help animals that have are treated cruelly by either abuse or when they are left alone. The Humane Society has been helping animals since November 24, 1954(2). Their mission since the beginning has been celebrating animals and confronting cruelty. There are a great number of things that the Humane Society has been doing for the animals, like saving them from people who want to harm them. The list of animals that the Humane Society helps is very long, because they don’t just help the household pets that you might have thought. The conditions of the Humane Society change due to the types of animals
Linzey, Andrew. Introduction. Animals on the Agenda. Ed. A. Linzey et al. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
In 2008, Prop 2 in California was supported by groups such as the HSUS and other groups. Prop 2 has enforced “… Packer/processors, grain producers, suppliers and those in the business of selling food, must recognize this, the organization focuses on different types of animals, such as: dolphins, whales, cats and dogs (Lovvorn & Perry, 2009).” Prop 2 was a law concerning animal holdings. It declared that animal holdings, such as cages, must be large enough for the animals to have room to extend their legs, move around, and not be cramped.. The Humane Society of United States and PETA supported the organizations to inform the people on the sidelines about the different tactics one could take to save the animals. The Humane Society of United States used the ability to spy as a tactic. Therefore the organization used a small pen sized video camera. In the The Barnyard Strategist, “The HSUS released the video in San Bernardino County, district attorney, the story made national headlines.” This can be related to the movie we watched in class “The Cove,” in which a group of men broke into a slaughterhouse of dolphins and whales to catch the ones who were slaughtering the animals. They did not know about the cameras. This helped provide footage to show how the animals were actually treated. The HSUS used merging different organizations such as the smaller animal welfare groups together, this was able to help the organization increase their money to help the company be able to inform others about animal abuse. Pacelle’s strategy consisted of creating a ballot measure that will allow those who are vegetarian and vegan to help reform the ballots. They use media to help get their point across by using a male who is vegetarian who strokes...
... animals in technologically intensive economies and threats to the very surgical of wild animals species” (Fellenz 74-77). Even after all this, the number of animals used in agriculture and research grows by the billions every year, in the United States. “Many animals have financial value to humans. Livestock farmers, ranchers, pharmaceutical companies, zookeepers, circus trainers, and breeders are among the many people who have a financial interest in the animal trade. If humans were to stop using animals, these people would be out of work. Many others would be deprived of their favorite sport and leisure activities” (Evans). Thanks to the many efforts done, by the many people in England and the United States, many other counties began creating animals rights as well, like Asia and South America. Still to this day, do animals rights organizations flourish worldwide.
As an advocate of animal rights, Tom Regan presents us with the idea that animals deserve to be treated with equal respect to humans. Commonly, we view our household pets and select exotic animals in different regard as oppose to the animals we perceive as merely a food source which, is a notion that animal rights activists
The Case for Animal Rights. Routledge, London-New York, 1988. Regan T. The Struggle for Animal Rights. International Society for Animal Rights.
Abuse towards animals is recognized by many in the commercials shown on television, including the Sarah McLaughlin song and the pictures of animals starved and beaten. The commercials are shown quite regularly and give viewers a small look into the world of animal cruelty. What the commercials do not show, however, are the countless cases of people getting away with violence, as well as the hundreds of thousands of animals whom did not live to make the commercials. Television, radio, and internet ads often depict and portray the lives of animals living in shelters, and ask of the public to donate money each month for the cause. Without a doubt, this is the extent of what many people can say their experience with animal cruelty consists of: pictures and short video clips of half-dead dogs and cats left to die in over-crowded housing.
By encouraging women to take off their clothes so that they can sell nonhuman animal liberation, PETA has associated female activism with pornographic exploitation and rendered invisible other types of activist roles women adopt. To further demonstrate this, PETA’s website has offered a series of online games for visitors to play. The games have ranged from shooting tomatoes at “old hags” who wear fur to shaking “Hairy Kate and Trashley Trollsen” as hard as possible while recordings of violent screams play in the background. PETA’s 2015 “Games” section included “Breasts, not Animal Tests” and “Commando Chicks: Stick-a-Chick”. The first game required players to grab as many female breasts as possible without accidentally grabbing any nonhuman animals. In the second game, players had to keep a “flying” packaged chicken from entering into their grocery cart; otherwise, the player’s family would die of salmonella. It is unclear in these games how aggressively shooting tomatoes at women (the term “hag” is defined in Merriam Webster’s dictionary as an ugly woman), physically harming Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, grabbing women’s breasts, and making sexually violent references suggestive of rape (“Stick-a-Chick”) can help liberate nonhuman animals. What is clear, however, is PETA’s assumption that reenacting violent acts and sexually exploiting women are effective advocacy techniques. Ironically, these games exemplify “a structure of overlapping but absent referents that link violence against women and nonhuman animals”. According to Adams, “it is through the structure of the absent referent that patriarchal values become institutionalized”. Through phrases like “stick a chick” and games that ask players to grab women’s breasts, the experience (rape) and
A. A. “The Case Against Animal Rights.” Animal Rights Opposing Viewpoints. Ed. Janelle Rohr. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1989.
PETA has made groundbreaking advances for animals who are abused by corporations, governments, and individuals throughout the world, and these successes have led to dramatic improvements in the lives of millions of individual animals. Whether by working with universities and government institutions to implement non-animal test methods, sparking a boom of “cruelty-free” product marketing and a nosedive for the U.S. fur industry, or promoting the mass availability of meat alternatives at grocery stores and gourmet restaurants, PETA has been the driving force behind many of the largest successes for animals in the last 25 years
21 Sept. 2011. Freeman, Carrie. The Packwood. " Framing Animal Rights in the "Go Veg" Campaigns of U.S. Animal Rights Organizations.
Imagine being beaten to near death and being painfully skinned alive. This scenario seems as if it would only happen in a horror film, but in reality it occurs on a daily basis. Looking at a fur coat through a store window or in a glossy magazine one may not realize that animals were beaten, electrocuted, crammed in filthy wire cages, or even hanged just to produce a simple fur coat. Every year millions of animals are treated wrongly and even killed for the fur on their backs. Society may think twice about wearing the corpse of an animal when one knows what really happens in the name of fashion. An immeasurable amount of suffering went into every fur trimmed jacket, leather belt, or wool sweater hanging in ones closet. To eradicate the unnecessary suffering of animals for fashion, wearing fur must be made illegal.