Yes, PETA really did protest the mistreatment of “Porgs” in “The Last Jedi.” Of course it did.
The Animal Crackers box has been re-designed in capitulation to a really silly campaign by PETA, though not silly by PETA standards. Mondelez International, the parent company of Nabisco, revealed the new packaging this week. The old packaging, which harmed no animals living or doughed, looked like this:
PETA (People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals, the all-time most unethical group with ethics in its name) has been harassing Nabisco over the box design since 2016. “Given the egregious cruelty inherent in circuses that use animals and the public’s swelling opposition to the exploitation of animals used for entertainment, we urge Nabisco to update its packaging in order to show animals who are free to roam in their natural habitats,” PETA said in a letter obtained by the New York Post.
I know, I know, packaging is redesigned all the time. The old Animal Crackers design was both clever—see, the cookie animals are in those boxes, just as real circus animals were kept in those wagon-cages long, long ago—and a touchstone with the past, something that the Left finds increasingly unbearable if values have changed and mind-control can be achieved. The new inoffensive design…
is self-contradictory. The animals are NOT “roaming free”; they are still in the box, or their cage. Of course, they are also crackers that are just shaped like animals, and only the mentally ill equate the treatment of cookies and other confections to mistreatment of real animals. I used to bite the heads off the animals first thing out of the box. (Chocolate bunnies too.) Does that mean I advocate the beheading of lions and hippos?
I don’t care what the Animal Crackers box looks like. I do care that corporations surrender to creeping ideological censorship and have no principles whatsoever. PETA should not be encouraged by the success of any of its fanatic protests. Neither should other groups that believe that they can shape the minds of humanity to their specifications by banning images, ideas, words, and statues. Companies have a duty to American society to stand up against the armies of enforced conformity in controversies significant and trivial.
This is trivial. Still it is a slippery slope. The forces of political correctness and mandatory thought never rest, and their fanaticism knows no bounds. It is irresponsible for any company, or any individual to accommodate their doctrinaire demands, even the least of them, because that road ends in the suppression of imagination, diversity, and liberty.
Does Nabisco really think that, now that they have been exposed as weaklings, cowards and patsies, the next PETA assault won’t be against the idea of making animal crackers at all? After all, it is wrong to eat animals, so even symbolic butchery is evil. It must be ended…or punished.
Ethics Alarms 
People
Eating
Tasty
Animals
Wait a minute! Where did the tigers and hippos go? Why did they get kicked off the box top? That is an outrage! I demand a redraw. All animals are equal!
But some are more equal than others.
O.U.C.H.
Nice one, valky
The elephant accidentally sat on the tiger. Oops.
Don’t know about the hippos — maybe they drowned?
As I recall, the packages used to have perforation on the bottom so you could pop out the bottom half of the “wheels” on the circus wagons to make the box more realistic. Clearly, that neat little feature is gone beyond redemption now.
And besides, aren’t the animals depicted still circus animals? They belong to Barnum as depicted in the circus-like banner across the top. Doesn’t that have to stop? And besides, there are no animals of color. They’re all doughy white. Shouldn’t at least thirteen percent of the animals be chocolate? And some should be Hispanic brown and some Asian yellow. But wait, can people of color be represented as animals? Isn’t that racist? What to do.
Please note, OB, that the ape and the elephant are sort of an off-=black gray, the lion is yellow and red and the giraffe has brown spots, while the zebra, totally unable to decide, is both black and white.. I would also wonder at the gender of the animals. The lion is obviously male, but the rest are indistinguishable . Oh, wait…it’s supposed to be that way, huh?
Hah. I was talking about the cookies themselves, d_d.
OK. I was looking at the labels, since that was what the post was about.
dragin_dragon, did you say the apes were black?
RACIST!
uh….
REVERSE RACIST!
-jUT
Thank you, JUT. You got the joke.
Banks issuing credit cards will soon be able to signal their virtue by advertising themselves as “NRA-free.” So, similarly, I hope that Nabisco will recognize market demand, and soon offer aperiodic, limited runs of “legacy packaging,” advertising it as “PETA-free.” (I write this from my Dan Quayle-free state of Texas, anticipating Vice President Mike Pence’s visit tomorrow.)
You Sir, are a monster.
Heads are meant to be bitten off: that’s why they stick out!
He certainly is…a COOKIE MONSTER!!!!!
Jeez, don’t bite my head off….
…is that the opposite of BITE ME?
Oh no….
The world has gone topsy turvy!
Geez, guys…all three of you, WELL DONE!!
Where are the baby animals? Ah, of course. Peta must have objected to the single-parent models.
I don’t care what the Animal Crackers box looks like. I do care that corporations surrender to creeping ideological censorship and have no principles whatsoever.
That these corporations do that is interesting and important. They have to keep their ears to the ground, as it were, to pick up the sound of the feet of their ‘clients’ or their subject-population. If their clients don’t like something, they are duty-bound (to their stock-holders?) to apologise for it, correct it, and otherwise make a statement. But it is mostly on superficial things, isn’t it? They need to keep their clients well-disposed to them and so they make concessions.
Can *they* (it?) be said to really care? To have thoughts or emotions or concerns? Do they have philosophies? Ideas? Objects that extend beyond the earning of money? I think it must be said that they cannot and do not.
Corporations (capitalized because the term corporation has emblematic status) have ‘interests’ and ‘objectives’ and these can be pursued, and are pursued, with a driven mechanical will. They are mechanisms, they are not ‘persons’.
These Corporations, however, have social-engineering capabilities that exceed that of government and even that of educational institutions. I think this is a rather simple fact. They can mold culture, they do mold culture. They have great reach and power. And yet those who design these influences remain always invisible. That is a curious fact to be considered as one mulls on ethics.
Consider the perspective of David Kupelian:
“The plain truth is, within the space of our lifetimes, much of what Americans once almost universally abhorred has been packaged, perfumed, gift-wrapped, and sold to us as though it had great value. By skillfully playing on our deeply felt national values of fairness, generosity, and tolerance, these marketers have persuaded us to embrace as enlightened and noble that which all previous generations since America’s founding regarded as grossly self-destructive -– in a word, evil.”
Who did this ‘packaging’ this ‘perfuming’ this ‘gift-wrapping’?
_______________
Such a confusion of values in our present! And I am left with the task of getting to the bottom of it all. With little help I should add …
Thanks!
You got off track early on, with your corporations-need-to-pay-heed-to-their-clients’-needs” concept. While this is generally true, it is doubtful that any card-carrying member of PETA is a consumer of those animal crackers. In theory, were Nabisco to ignore the PETA demands and keep the original box design and thus, PETA would no longer buy the product, who would know?
What are those things in the photo at the top that Disney is supposedly abusing?
What is ‘off-track’, for you, is ‘on-track’ for me. But I admit that the way I approach these issues is different than that of many. My effort is to understand *what is going on in America* in a larger sense. This microcosmic issue is related to a macrocosmic one. However, I can understand how my approach and my method might be irksome to you (and others).
However, if you cannot understand what I am getting at, and why, nor understand its importance (and you may completely disagree there is anything *important* there), I am pretty sure that I will not be able to help you. That is, my perspectives and views will be of no use to you at all.
Coming from you that figures! 😉
Jack wrote, “I used to bite the heads off the animals first thing out of the box. (Chocolate bunnies too.)”
I’ve bitten the heads off many Cadets and Privates in training. 😉
Yup, I had to go there.
PETA has gone crackers.
Nabisco is enabling ridiculous behavior from complete imbeciles.
That is not a picture of animals in their natural habitat. That zebra and giraffe should be bleeding out on the ground while the lion combs through their entrails.
While the elephant was munching grass very unconcerned and the ape would be on his mountain, watching, vastly amused.
Although truthfully, Isaac, males don’t hunt much. They’re perfectly willing to eat it, however, after the ladies kill it.
PETA really wouldn’t like the way I take my 3 year old granddaughter to the zoo…We take along a baggy of animal crackers, and she gets to munch the appropriate one when we get to corresponding beast’s enclosure.