At the last Video Music Award, Lady Gaga showed up with a garment (including hat) made out of meat. I read about the event in an article from Time. In this same article, Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) made some statements that I found just as outrageous as the singer’s outfit.

According to Ingrid Newkirk, “Meat is the decomposing flesh of an abused animal who didn’t want to die, and after being under the TV lights it would smell like the rotting flesh that it is and likely be crawling with maggots”.

Ingrid, here is some more info for you.

• Meat is not decomposing flesh. If it were decomposing, it would not be edible. Meat is flesh. Period.
• To get maggots, a fly is necessary, and it has to lay eggs and the eggs must hatch. That would not happen during the duration of the show.
• What the heat from the lights would do though is to stimulate the growth of bacteria. Bacteria are what cause decomposition.

I have spent quite some time with farm animals in my life and I really could not make any statement about  them having any sense of wanting or not wanting anything. They mostly follow their instinct and do not walk around with a plan. They may not “want to die”, and we may not want it either, but this is life. In the end, we all die. In Nature, it is about eating or being eaten, and herbivores are at the bottom of the food chain. Eating meat is not unnatural. The purpose of farm animals is to feed humans. They are not pets. Adding the word “abused” in her statement is only rhetoric. Like in every profession, there are slobs, but they represent a tiny majority. The overwhelming majority of farmers treat their animals with respect. Similarly, in slaughterhouses, animals are handled with care, because stress causes poor meat quality, which in turn causes economic losses for the processing companies. It is a well-established fact in the industry that proper handling of animals is the economically right thing to do as well.

Quite a bit of misstated facts from the activist who knows it all. But I will leave PETA and its extremist activism here, and get back a bit on Gaga’s “clothes”.

The singer is an adept of excessive and outrageous behavior. We all know this by now. Yet, using meat as garment is beyond bad taste. To produce meat, an animal must be killed. This is not a mundane act. This used to be referred to as sacrifice, which indicates its true value. Our urbanized consumption society (two concepts that defined the New Yorker artist) has made many of us forget about this, though. That meat spoiled because of the stage lights, and was surely discarded and thrown away. In a world where one billion people do not have enough to eat, and where already 40% of all food is wasted, the meat dress is an obscenity. I do not mind provocation, but I do mind vulgarity. Meat is for eating, not for wearing. The justification that Gaga gave for using meat was that she was making a case for gay rights is lame at best.

For me, the final score is a tie. Gaga: zero – PETA: zero.

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