Bacon Literally Flies as PETA Protests L.A. Baconfest

PETA’s presence at Los Angeles’ Baconfest started off like any other demonstration. About 40 animal advocates and I stood at the main entrance to Paramount Pictures’ studios, positioned so that cars entering the event would pass our signs illustrating that friendly, intelligent, loyal pigs didn’t want to become bacon:

An hour before the festival ended, we gathered our things and set up shop near one of the exits. But as the event came to an end, and people—many of whom were fueled by “liquid courage”—began to leave, all hell broke loose. The bacon-wielding fans started shouting obscenities at us, taunting us with jeers, shouting “plants feel pain,” and even sticking up for slaughterhouses.

One man threw a bacon donut at us from a moving car while yelling, “Drive-by baconing!” Security guards even had to pull some of the rowdier crowd members away from us.

But I’d like to think we made PETA proud. We kept bringing the conversation back to the pigs: animals who love to play, who have families and emotions, and who value their own lives and don’t want to be scalded alive, hacked apart, and turned into bacon donuts.

For example, there’s Amy the pig, who is excelling in a dog agility class.

Animals don’t need us to be teary-eyed tissue-wetters, and they certainly don’t need us to trade jabs and obscenities with meat-eaters. What they need is for us to remind people, every chance we get, that they’re thinking, feeling individuals who only want the same thing we all do: to live freely and in peace.

Written by Matt Bruce