PETA hates this vegetarian

I was initially much more excited when I walked into the newsroom yesterday and heard that PETA had written a letter to the editor attacking my lobster game story as a harsh joke on all of lobster kind. I thought maybe they were coming after me for glorifying this bar-based blood sport in print, or our video for the cruel and unusual use of the B-52s. Sadly, they were actually just issuing what reads like a form letter they send off to any time this particular item of offensiveness surfaces around the country:

It seems silly to have to point this out, but the Lobster Game that is turning up at local bars is needlessly cruel ("Love lobster? Here's a game that lets you grab one for yourself," May 24).

City officials in Key West, Fla., pulled the plug on a Lobster Zone game (similar to the Lobster Game) at a restaurant there, and police officers shut down the game at a restaurant in Irvine, Calif. As Officer Dennis Ruvolo explained, these games subject lobsters "to unnecessary, inhumane treatment."

PETA urges readers to stick to stuffed animals, not live ones, in their crane games. Turning an animal's death into a game has no place in a compassionate society.

Paula Moore

People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals
Norfolk, Va.

It is still mildly ironic that the only vegetarian on the news staff here would generate a letter of chastisement from the nation's biggest animal rights group. Oh PETA, if only you know it was your muckraking, thoroughly gross videos that drove me into life as an herbivore in the first place eight years ago. In fact, it was eight years ago this month that ate my last bits of meat (on purpose, at least). Scallops, at the Ground Round in Toms River, N.J. They were gross, and that was about it. But that's what I get for eating at the Ground Round I suppose.