Please enjoy this article from the latest issue of our magazine, PETA Global. To begin your subscription, become a PETA member today!
By Lisa Lange
Senior vice president of PETA’s Communications Department
I may be the only PETA employee whose job interview was conducted in prison–the Schuylkill County Prison to be exact, where mining agitators the Molly Maguires had been hanged decades earlier. I’d traveled to a tiny Pennsylvania town to protest a horrific annual pigeon shoot–like a clay pigeon shoot but with real birds. Event organizers trapped the pigeons in cities such as Philadelphia, trucked them to the site, stuffed them into wooden boxes, and then released them to be blasted away by the frequently drunk men in attendance. Young boys would run out onto the field and twist the heads off injured birds or slam them against trash cans.
Every year, hundreds of people came to protest this abomination–in time, we outnumbered the participants. Some of the protesters, like me, ran across the field in front of the shooters to create a distraction while others freed the birds from the boxes. We did this knowing full well that we would immediately be arrested by what must have been every police officer in the county. I was put in a cell block with Ingrid Newkirk, PETA’s president. We spent our first night sleeping on the cold floor, as the prison was too crowded to accommodate all of us. Rather than pay bail money to the city that sponsored the shoot, we spent 12 days “inside.” That’s where she hired me–more than 26 years ago.
Eventually, persistence paid off, and the pigeon shoot came to an end.
I may be the only PETA staffer hired in jail, but I’m not the only one who has gone to jail to call attention to animal abuse. PETA employees have been arrested for storming fashion show runways to protest fur, staging sit-ins at laboratories where animals are tortured in experiments, and even “pieing” Ronald McDonald for peddling hamburgers. Last year, during a protest at SeaWorld, the company’s head of security threw me to the ground and sat on me while bending my arm backwards. Trappers have spat on me. Hunters have called in to radio talk shows that I’ve been on, saying that if they see me on the street, they’ll shoot me.
Perhaps that’s why, when a taxi driver recently told me that he was interested in going vegan but was worried that it would be difficult, I thought to myself, “No one is stopping you from going vegan – no one is spitting on you, threatening you, or arresting you.” But out loud, I said, “There’s no need to worry about it. It’s as easy as saying, ‘I am going to go vegan right now.’ It’s as easy as walking into a supermarket and picking up a package of vegan fish, chicken, or burgers. Just do it!”
You don’t have to go to jail to help animals: Sometimes, all you have to do is care enough to make some changes.
Visit PETA.org/GetActive to download PETA’s smartphone app and get started taking action for animals.
