Editorials

What Annoyed the Internet This Week?

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24 February 2019

By Bronwen

PETA must be one of the most frustrating animal rights organisations to exist. On the surface, its intentions are honourable; it wants to end all forms of cruelty towards animals including cosmetic testing, the meat and dairy industry and habitat destruction. For the most part, everyone can acknowledge that animals suffer unnecessarily because of humans and so you’d think PETA would be fairly well supported. However, every few weeks, the PETA Twitter page tweets something so utterly ridiculous that the whole internet can’t help but be annoyed. This time, PETA has tried to come for everybody’s favourite Aussie conservationist, Steve Irwin, who died in 2006 after being stung by a stingray.

To celebrate Steve Irwin’s 57th birthday, Google created a Doodle to honour his legacy of conservation.

As usual, PETA has taken exception to something that literally no one else has an issue with.

Following on from tweet, PETA added: “Steve Irwin’s actions were not on target with his supposed message of protecting wildlife. A real wildlife expert & someone who respects animals for the individuals they are leaves them to their own business in their natural homes. It is harassment to drag exotic animals, including babies taken from their mothers, around from TV talk shows to conferences & force them to perform as Steve Irwin did. Animals deserve to live as they want to, not as humans demand––the #GoogleDoodle should represent that.”

As you may be able to tell from the proportion of likes/retweets/replies, Twitter was enraged.

Despite his death 13 years ago, Steve Irwin is still famous across every generation for his contributions to public education about wildlife. His wife and children are still carrying out his mission to protect the world’s animals. All PETA seem to contribute to the world are preachy ‘teaching resources’ about why we shouldn’t say ‘kill two birds with one stone’.

We agree, Ross.

PETA do know exactly how to get everybody talking and they do it by tweeting out deliberately controversial and borderline offensive opinions.

Anyway, forget PETA. Here’s Steve’s son, Robert Irwin’s tribute to his late father:

We’ll likely be writing about PETA sometime soon for another instalment of What Annoyed the Internet This Week?

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