BoingBoing, Bubba, and the Acronym Wars

The U.S. Navy's NR-1 nuclear research
submarine was attacked by a lobster.
(This artist's rendition of the sub,
along with photographs of it,
are available from the FAS
Military Analysis Network.)

I was surprised to see that my reporting on large lobsters and my musings on Bubba, the late 22-pound leviathan, caught the attention of the blog BoingBoing ("A Directory of Wonderful Things"), which ran several postings on Bubba. An astute BoingBoing contributor noted that Bubba wasn't all that large compared with one of the monstrous lobsters described in my book. (Hint: she was referring in particular to a scene in the Prologue, when a lobster threatens to attack a US Navy nuclear submarine full of marine biologists.

Ever since the Bubba story surfaced, I've been intrigued by something the Associated Press reported: that a group calling itself "People for Eating Tasty Animals" had apparently offered a hefty sum for Bubba (he was worth several hundred dollars at local market prices), presumably for the right to boil him up for dinner. The group's acronym, PETA, is, of course, the same as that of the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. That's sort of like Al Qaeda deciding to go by the acronym "USA."

Curious, I decided to look for People for Eating Tasty Animals on the web. Before I relate the results of that search, though, for the sake of convenience let's distinguish between the two acronyms. Thanks to some emotionally clever logo designer, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals styles its acronym with a lower-case "e" -- PeTA. Somehow the acronym seems softer, cuter, and kinder that way, doesn't it? People for Eating Tasty Animals goes with the straight-up all-caps form -- PETA. Grrr.

Now mind you, people aligned with PeTA have accused PETA of being a front for the meat industry. (I haven't tried to confirm this independently, but according to PETA the accusation was reported in that well-known magazine of international gastronomic controversy, Vegetarian Times.) So I expected to find a glossy, flush website that would inspire in me the same tantalizing tingles I feel when I stalk a really huge, industrial supermarket meat counter: prehistoric pleasure combined with a postmodern inclination to vomit.

Instead, what I found was this. It's run by a gentleman named Michael Doughney, and appears not to have been updated since sometime around 1996. Part of the problem is that PeTA sued Mr. Doughney under trademark infringement rules, as well as under something called the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (wow), to prevent him from using the domain name he'd registered, peta.org, to host his PETA site; the contretemps was significant enough to have been reported in Wired magazine.

Mr. Doughney, who clearly feels that PeTA has wronged him, appears simply to want to provide "a resource for those who enjoy eating meat, wearing fur and leather, hunting, and the fruits of scientific research (and more!)."

It seems to me that Mr. Doughney must be catering to a class of superhuman (and fabulously well-dressed) Renaissance men. But if you're the rare sort for whom this type of resource induces nausea, I suggest you visit another website run by Mr. Doughney: BARF.org.