Upfront
PETA Picks on Rudy Giuliani - That Sucks

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani talks about his prostate cancer. Photo, AP.
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New York, NY, August 27. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have added a sour taste to their Milk Sucks campaign. On billboards, posters and bumper stickers they feature the face of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani wearing a milk mustache. Exploiting the Dairy industry slogan Got Milk? the PETA ads ask, Got Prostate Cancer?

Evidence of prostate cancer risk from dairy products and calcium is significant. You can read up on it on our EatingWell pages. PETA has some excellent information. But picking on a man who has cancer sucks.

The radical issue here is Rudy Giuliani's status as a man with cancer. They should have hired a model or found someone else with prostate cancer who wanted to get this message across.

Of course that would have nullified this macabre impact. Yet this ad is too punchy to stay on a highway billboard. Taxis in New York will not display it. And it is not truly confrontational, it is flawed by passive aggression or indirect attack. It targets Rudy Giuliani as payback for a specific conflict.

The Milk Sucks campaign includes "Got Breast Cancer?" which uses a pink ribbon but does not show a woman with breast cancer. http://www.milksucks.com/breast.html If they used the face of political figure who has had breast cancer, they'd be chopped liver.

So why pick on Rudy? Ironically, his family history in one respect is actually on their side -- according to an unauthorized biography published this summer, during the Depression Rudy Giulian's Dad was jailed for armed robbery of a MILKMAN.

What bugged PETA about the Mayor of NYC is this. This summer NYC hosted an outdoor art show of 500 fiber-glass cow sculptures. On any bus ride you'd see these life-size cows fancifully decorated outside public buildings. PETA wanted to joined in, but their cow was impounded and labeled "profane," "graphic," and "inappropriate."

"Last month," says spokesman Sean Gifford, "PETA filed a lawsuit against New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the organizers of CowParade NYC 2000 after the charity's fiberglass cow was banned from the event." PETA's suit alleges that the rejection of the anti-meat design "constitutes a violation of PETA's First Amendment rights, as well as a breach in contract for the almost $10,000 cow."

Mayor Giuliani previously had censored a British art exhibit in Brooklyn that featured a painting of the Virgin Mary using a traditional African material, elephant dung.

PETA say that their cow sculpture "is designed like a butcher shop's poster cow, each section of its body containing a fact about how cows are killed for food and how eating them is linked to killer diseases like cancer, heart attacks, and even impotence." When you think about, people might want to see this.

"If the public feels uncomfortable reading about cows' being castrated and dehorned without anesthesia, they should go vegetarian," says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. "Instead of banning PETA's cow, they should prohibit hamburgers from entering the city limits."

So, putting the milk-mustache on the Mayor is pay back. But still Rudy is a CANCER SURVIVOR, not yet finished with even his first treatment. In fact this week he seemed to be in a funk over it, refusing to talk to the press like he did in the early days. Which is understandable.

This is the heart of the matter -- PETA has screwed up by making sport of a man who has cancer. PETA comes across as blaming a victim of prostate cancer. Their billboard image makes a sinister object of this man who has prostate cancer, portray him as MALIGN. Thousands of cancer patients might give at least a flicker of support if PETA apologized to Giuliani and radically rethought this campaign for health and against cruelty to cows.

PETA is right to raise red flags about cancer from over-consumption of dairy foods and excess eating all round. Some of us feel further that they are not wrong to do this for the sake of the cows. Our specific job, though, is neither to defend nor attack the dairy industry (let alone the art world) until we have stood up for the dignity and honor of people with cancer.

Some cancer patients do wish to advertise their opinions on possible causes for their disease. Quite a few men with prostate cancer may be happy to use a bumper sticker about calcium and PCa. Further, some men with prostate cancer believe that animal rights are as worthy a cause as human rights and want to help stop the mass slaughter and torture of animals.

PETA's shock tactics have captured national attention in a way that pharmaceutical company ads showing celebrities with prostate cancer have not. The upshot is complex.

With this one campaign, PETA took ad hoc charge of prostate cancer activism. PETA has stepped into a vacuum in the prostate cancer movement and created a campaign as aggressive as ACT UP campaigns for people with AIDs.

PETA has gotten attention at the cost of doing prostate cancer survivors and patients wrong. We should tell them so. Their concerns about health and also about pain, suffering and cruelty to animals should link them with people who have to deal with cancer.

Drug companies are paying for prostate cancer early detection campaigns and getting more younger men onto castration drugs. PETA for the sake of its own agenda is educating the next generation about some aspects of cancer prevention. Let's learn whatever we can from them while urging them do a more compassionate job in this field which we, unfortunately, know more about.