PETA Rails Against Thanksgiving in Ad Featuring Baby as Part of Holiday Meal

From the same masterminds that brought you the “sexy vegetable” TV commercial that was rejected by the Super Bowl (Caution! This commercial is highly offensive) comes another pro-vegan campaign destined to convince absolutely no one to stop eating meat.

In order to spread their vegan message, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has constructed a few displays of a Thanksgiving feast featuring a human baby as the main course in Philadelphia and, most recently, in Baltimore.

Rest easy: it’s not a real human baby. It’s just a doll.

"They set up a table" on a Baltimore sidewalk, PETA media coordinator Adam Miller told the Los Angeles Times, “like a Thanksgiving spread, with silverware and plates and stuff and the baby in the middle.”

In an effort drive their message home, they also prominently displayed a large sign that reads: “Everybody’s somebody’s baby.”

“PETA says its point was that many turkeys aren’t even a year old when they’re killed for Thanksgiving consumption,” writes the Times.

However, given this fact, it would appear that the imagery of an infant being served as a main course doesn't quite make sense. As the Times points out: “the average lifespan of the domesticated turkey is 10 years. The average lifespan for a U.S. citizen is 78 years. If you do the math, a second-grader perhaps would have been more apropos as the main course.”

But wait! There’s more!

PETA organizers have also released a “turkey dog” ad campaign aimed directly at children:

Obviously, some parents are unhappy that children are the direct targets of the slightly disturbing ad campaign.

"The ad is inappropriate because the kids don't make the decisions, the parents do. You're just scaring the fudge out of the kids," said Christina Jimenez in the Times article.

PETA has no qualms with admitting that they children are targeted by the ad. As PETA's Bryan Wilson said: the ads are intended to speak directly to school-age children. These kids are "young enough to have open minds that animals are not food.”

However, these most recent efforts to protest Thanksgiving shouldn't really come as a suprise. PETA's done this before.

Recall that in 2009, PETA put together a TV ad that was supposed to be aired during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Much like their rejected Super Bowl ad, this one was also turned down by several affiliates for being, for a lack of a better word, tasteless.

See the rejected 2009 Thanksgiving PETA ad:

It’s not really difficult to see why some station executives thought that an ad featuring an adorable girl giving thanks to God for "the chemicals and dirt and poop in the turkey we're about to eat" didn't quite "fit with the spirit of the [Macy's] parade.”

(h/t Newser)