How’d I miss this one?
Even casual followers of the whacked-out stunts dreamed up by PETA are well aware that the group has famously lobbied to “save the rats.”
Urban areas—especially coastal cities, such as New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.—that are overrun with the rapidly-breeding vermin have used various methods to control their rat populations, while PETA has argued that such programs constitute cruel and unusual punishment and must be stopped to spare the poor rats from further suffering and abuse.
Left unsaid was the fact that rats are serious disease vectors (does the Black Death ring a bell?), a major nuisance in sewer systems and subway tunnels and oh, yes—responsible for physical attacks on children and infants living in substandard urban housing.
As usual, PETA takes a contrarian stance that defies common sense; who knows if it’s even genuine?
Last year, though they went ’round the bend with a project that is a mind-bending mixture of brazen chutzpah, depraved indifference and utter hypocrisy.
“Sticking up for rats—who are sensitive, intelligent, and nurturing—has always been high on our agenda,” PETA announced last year, “although not everyone understands that these dear little mammals are worth caring about … yet.”
Here’s how the sickos at PETA plan to make sure you care about the little dears: By breeding genetically engineered rats with fluffy bunny-like tails.
Seriously.
“For the last 14 months, we’ve been funding two scientists at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) who are formulating a hybrid species that will make rats less despised,” the group’s news release stated. “Using the same zygote microinjection process (to which we still object!) that was used to create a glow-in-the-dark rabbit, these geneticists isolated the gene responsible for bunnies’ cottontails and then insert[ed] it into fertilized rat egg cells.”
“The results are truly phenomenal,” PETA’s news release gushed, producing what the activist group called “a genetically engineered rat who no one will want to harm.”
Why not? Because this new rat features a fluffy, bunny-like tail, replacing the “old, unappealing long pink tail,” the group’s statement noted in a story titled, “Genetically Engineered Rats: 10 Percent Rabbit, 100 Percent Cute.”
“People are almost certain to be kinder to a tiny mammal with a powder-puff tail,” PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk was quoted in the statement. “Not only would this pay off in cities that kill these animals with gut-wrenching poisons, it would also make it harder for lab assistants to force-feed toxic chemicals to them or for homeowners to watch them struggle in cruel glue traps.”
Comments (3) Leave a comment