So, I had a surprise waiting for me when I went out to get the mail today.

When I saw it, I thought it might be more stuff from Benny Hinn...but no.

A heavy envelope from PeTA!

I'm sure it doesn't seem thick, but it is...compared to the sort of stuff I'm used to getting.

...I wonder what this could be.

A whole fucking lot of stuff!

I just had to get a picture or two establishing exactly how much stuff there is. So -- I made the bed, because it was the best thing I could think of at the time.

For reference, the mattress itself is about 7' long, and 6' wide. I'm not sure how tall the headboard actually is.

As you can see, those stickers are actually a little longer than the bed, from top of the headboard to end of the footboard. That's a lot of stickers.

And here's a sort of closeup of the stuff spread out. There's two posters, just about a hundred stickers [48 on one strip, and I only counted the one]. Then there's either 48, 49 or 50 per bundle of those fliers -- I don't do well with counting things. Doesn't really matter -- we'll just round up to 100 for whatever....

Here. Have some scans --

This is one of the stickers. The pigsticker [as I've called it] is...well...it's funny to me. It's this pig telling me I should stop eating meat. Naturally, I'm all, "But why? So there's more for you, you fucking pig?"Newsflash: pigs eat meat. Pigs will eat other pigs. Let's be smart the next time we enslave some poor animal in our ad campaigns, and get a fucking herbivore....

Here we see a happy, happy picture of the world -- a world made of BEEF! If you ignore the strange blue Easter M&M Candy Shell, it actually looks pretty goddamn tasty, doesn't it?And, regarding the stupid, stupid question -- no, I've never thought about eating the way I eat and being an environmentalist. I use plastic flatware and paper plates, after all....

And that's the back of the flier, which I feel the need to respond to. I've copied it below....

Did you know?

Pollution
The meat industry causes more water pollution in the United States than all other industries combined because the animals raised for food produce 130 times more excrement than the entire human population--86,600 pounds per second. A typical pig factory farm generates a quantity of raw waste equal to that of a city of 12,000 people.

So...if everyone 'went veg' tomorrow, you'd be in favour of killing off all those animals no longer needed for meat? Or would their shit [and the piles upon piles of shit all other wild animals produce -- how bout their pollution, huh?] magically go from 'pollution' to 'fine and dandy, and totally not an environmental problem'?

Land
Of all agricultural land in the United States, 87 percent is used to raise animals for food. Twenty times more land is required to feed a meat-eater than to feed a pure vegetarian.

But if everyone went veg, we could use all that land as animal preserves!

Water
Raising animals for food consumes more than half of all the water used in the United States. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat, but only 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat.

Go veg. All these animals -- which must be set free, of course, because we can't just, say, kill them and let them go to waste -- will magically drink less water.

And I'd really rather eat that pound of meat than that pound of wheat, anyway. And, hey, how much water does it take to process that wheat into my premade edibles, huh?

Deforestation
Rain forests are being destroyed at a rate of 125,000 square miles per year to create space to raise animals for food. For every quarter-pound fast-food burger made of rain-forest beef, 55 square feet of land are consumed.

I don't know about Wendy's, Burger King, Taco Bell, or any other national fast food chain I've never heard of, but everything I've been able to find about McDonalds importing beef from 'the rainforest'--what I naturally assume means 'South America'-- is found on an urban legends website. Sometime in 2002, McDonalds did announce that they were going to start testing imported meats in a few of their stores, but these imports would come from Australia and New Zealand.

Why did they do this? Because there wasn't enough 'lean beef' here. Or something.

Maybe this thing is really out of date, or something. Maybe they've forgotten to update their crap to factor things like Mad Cow import/export bans, and all that.

Or maybe they just don't care about fact-checking.

Energy
Raising animals for food requires more than one-third of all raw materials and fossil fuels used in the United States. Producing a single hamburger patty uses enough fossil fuel to drive a small car 20 miles and enough water for 17 showers.

Which small car, and whose showers?

Animals
You can't be concerned about our environment without caring about our fellow inhabitants, the animals. They're made of flesh and blood, have complex social and psychological lives, and feel pain just as humans do. More than 25 billion are killed by the meat industry each year, and they're raised and killed in ways that would horrify any compassionate person.

People are animals, too.

Whatever...I've got a more important question....

So we're concerned about land, water, deforestation, energy, and pollution and all this other stuff....

How many miles could this small car drive on the fossil fuels used to fully produce and ship these stickers, posters and fliers?

How many acres of trees [which were, admittedly, grown precisely for this] died so you could produce these items? I bet there were animals in those trees. And my mailman could've hit a squirrel or two on the way to deliver my mail.

How much land is being used by your factories to produce these products, and how much of their waste is going into our water? How much water, for that matter, is used in the production of this propaganda?

I guess what I'm trying to get at is how, exactly, is my eating meat any worse for the environment than mass-manufacturing, -printing and -shipping high-gloss, full-colour paper items?

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