Animal rights group PETA are back in the news after a new and typically controversial ad campaign caught the eye of UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after receiving a number of complaints about the graphic content.
The outdoor ad popped-up recently in the UK seaside town of Cleethorpes in the country’s east (right near the local fish and chip shop) and basically said there was no difference between eating fish and a domesticated cat and urged everyone to go vegan.
The ad came with the slogan: “Sea things in a different light. Respect all life. Go vegan.”
Repulsed by the prospect of eating cat flesh?
Extend that compassion to fish and ALL other animals 🐟#endspeciesism #govegan pic.twitter.com/Rt1nd1GlIG
— PETA UK (@PETAUK) April 26, 2023
In a blog post accompanying the ad, a PETA spokesperson wrote: “From one angle, you may see a smiling fishmonger holding a dead fish, but from another, she is holding a dead cat.
“This unsettling sight has been erected by Peta to provide locals with food for thought.
“Fish – like cats and other animals – are intelligent, sensitive individuals. If you wouldn’t eat your animal companion, go vegan and don’t eat sea life.”
People soon took to social media to roast PETA who’d seemingly forgotten that cats eat fish and would die if they didn’t!
One person wrote on Twitter, “A cat is a mammal that’s soft and cuddly, most of the time, and interacts with humans while a fish is cold and has hardly any interaction with us.”
Another Twitter user said: “I’m speechless, respect for every animal is right, for example I’m a vegetarian, but I find this advertisement horrible and in bad taste… surely it could have been done better!!”
A passerby told a BBC reporter that they thought the ad was “a bit sick”.
“It’s a cat. You don’t eat a cat,” he said.
For its part, ASA said it had received 10 complaints about the ad’s content.
Apart from the distressing nature of the advert, complainants also questioned whether the ad was “responsibly targeted”, given it was in a public place – near a fish and chip shop – where “children could see it”.
In its defence, PETA said of the claims that the ad was intended to “promote veganism by challenging the societal tendency to treat animals merely as a means of fulfilling human desires”, and that it sought to “question the widespread assumption that certain species were more deserving of compassion than others”.
The charity also argued that kids “frequently encountered dead animals in everyday contexts”, giving the supermarket as an example.
In refusing to ban the ad, ASA determined that “the cat’s portrayal was not graphic and had been carefully designed to minimise any risk of distress”.
ASA said: “[We] acknowledged that some viewers would find the ad unsettling or distasteful. However, we considered that viewers would understand that the ad was for an animal justice charity, promoting the vegan diet, and that it aimed to challenge societal norms regarding the moral significance of meat consumption.
“We considered that the cat’s depiction was neither gruesome, nor shocking, and was unlikely to be considered particularly realistic by most viewers. On that basis, we considered that viewers, including children, were unlikely to regard the image as relatively mild.
“For that reason. We concluded that the ad was not excessively distressing, or likely to cause serious or widespread offence, and had not been irresponsibly targeted.”
