ethics

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced a $1-million prize for whoever comes up with a commercially viable way to produce in vitro meat by 2012.

PETA's million-dollar prize is an occasion for irony -- delicious or repulsive, depending on one's perspective. About a decade ago, an urban legend claimed that the government had barred Kentucky Fried Chicken from calling its food "chicken," because it used genetically modified Frankenbirds, brainless and grown in jars, that bore no resemblance to chicken or poultry of any kind. That supposedly explained the rebranding of Kentucky Fried Chicken as "KFC" -- a government demand for truth in advertising. Needless to say, this idiotic myth contained not even a grain of truth. KFC continued to use real chickens, and to abuse them wantonly in the production process. PETA noticed and launched a campaign, "Kentucky Fried Cruelty," to draw attention to KFC's brutal methods. Now PETA's prize suggests the organization wishes the urban legend had been true from the start. One looks forward to clever PETA graphics featuring Colonel Sanders in a lab-coat, instead of bloodstained and sporting devil-horns.

Keepers of Knut, the baby polar bear whose antics warmed the hearts of millions at the Berlin Zoo, admit he has become a publicity-addled psychopath.

One of J. M. Coetzee's characters says the history of zoos is an extension of the history of warfare. The first zoos erected fences less to protect man from beast than to protect beast from man. Zoo-goers viewed the animals as POWs in a long inter-species war, on display to be jeered and attacked as representatives of the enemy. This hostility survives today in the sick exhibition of Knut, the cute bear-orphan who has been the object of exploitation for the first fifteen months of what one hopes will be a short life. MORE