SALON

Katharine Mieszkowski

Monday, Oct 21, 2002 10:15 PM UTC

“Cut class, not frogs”

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' new Web site tutors teenage animal-rights warriors how to resist dissection in biology class and mystery meat in the cafeteria.

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It’s a Web site that probably even the most autocratic of high school principals wouldn’t think to censor in the school library. But they’ll wish they had when newly minted 15-year-old pleather-wearing, fact-sheet-waving PETA activists start lecturing them on the horrors of amphibian dissection.

The new People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals site for teens makes fighting for animal rights into a game, awarding points to the members of its “street team” for taking direct action. Order a few hundred “Cut class, not frogs” stickers, for 200 points. Plaster them all over your notebooks and locker, and send PETA a picture of your sloganeering handiwork: 1,000 points.

Oh, and when the other kids in your class are butchering pickled green once-hopping things, all in the name of learning, the site suggests spending the day at a nature preserve “observing frogs in the wild.” Try feeding this line to your biology teacher when he asks why you skipped class: “You can learn way more from living frogs than from cutting up their carcasses.”

On the site’s message boards, kids swap fashion tips about vegan skateboarding-shoe companies and how to get your school cafeteria to serve vegetarian lunches.

“I’ve been a vegetarian for almost two weeks now ” brags one poster on the bulletin boards of the PETA2 Web site for kids. But her mom is still serving pork chops for dinner. “Is there any way I can make my parents believe that I’m doing this for me?” she laments. The other denizens suggest bringing some PETA fact sheets about vegetarianism to the dinner table.

An interview with the grand-daddy of pop vegetarianism, Morrissey, Mr. “Meat Is Murder” himself, reveals this inspiring gem about why he went vegetarian more than 30 years ago: “If you love animals, obviously it doesnt make sense to hurt them.” He says that there is no good argument for eating meat, including “It’s tasty,” because “its only tasty once you garnish it and you put salt and pepper and you cook it and you have to do 300 things to it to disguise its true taste. If you put garnishes on a chair or fabric it would probably taste quite nice.”

Next time Mom serves up pork chops, just tell her you’d prefer a piece of the sofa with your ketchup, thanks.

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Katharine Mieszkowski is a Bay Area journalist, who covers science and
the environment. A Salon senior writer from 2000 to 2009, she
chronicled the dot-com boom and bust as a technology correspondent and co-founded the Broadsheet blog.

Her Salon stories have been anthologized in "Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity,"

edited by Michael Lewis, and "The Best of Technology Writing 2007," edited by Steven Levy. (You can read those pieces here and here.)

A Yale grad, Katharine has also written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, MS, Rolling Stone, Glamour and Reader's Digest, while her commentaries have appeared on National Public Radio's "All Things
Considered." In 1994, she joined her first Internet start-up, Women.com, then known as Women's Wire. Since then, she's also been a writer for Fast Company magazine covering Silicon Valley and a columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian investigating local subcultures. In 2001, she was named one of the Top 25 Women on the Web by San Francisco Women on the Web.

Katharine, who grew up near Houston, now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughter. You can sign up for Twitter updates from her here.

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