NEW YORK (Reuters) - The activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, blocked from posting billboards in U.S. cattle country claiming a link between male impotence and eating meat, said Monday its plans have not stalled and it will make its point in public bathrooms.
"PETA's plans to erect billboards promoting vegetarianism have gone limp throughout cattle country where advertising companies have found the message too racy to run," the Norfolk, Virginia-based activist group said in a statement.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is known for its dramatic animal-rights protests. The group said it planned to buy space in bar and restaurant bathrooms and post the ads inside the stalls.
The proposed ads feature a shapely, bikini-clad, vegetarian woman dangling suggestive sausages from her hand and saying, "I threw a party -- but the cattlemen couldn't come. Eating meat can cause impotence."
"Many men care more about their manhood than their health. We're appealing to them on their terms ... hitting below the belt as it were," Bruce Friedrich, PETA's vegetarian campaign coordinator, told Reuters.
Friedrich said the group plans to post the ads by the end of June. He said PETA also has rented a "mobile billboard" to be transported by truck in Texas in the Dallas and Ft. Worth area. In addition, PETA hopes to place the ads in certain magazines and newspapers, he said.
PETA said it tried to place the ads on billboards in cattle-raising states, but advertising companies refused to lease the group space. The group said it tried and failed to buy billboards in: Dallas, Houston and Lubbock, Texas; Omaha, Nebraska; Kansas City, Kansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Colorado Springs, Colorado.
"The thrust behind PETA's provocative new campaign is research showing that fat and cholesterol in meat and other animal products clog up the arteries going to all organs, not just the heart," the group claimed in a statement. "So while Viagra has caused a stir in America's bedrooms, vegetarians have had a secret weapon in their kitchens all along: tofu and veggies."
"Choose a veggie burger in the kitchen for a whopper in the bedroom," added PETA president Ingrid Newkirk.
This latest campaign is somewhat of a contrast to another PETA billboard that claims "Jesus was a vegetarian."
The latest of those billboards was posted Friday in Atlanta ahead of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is scheduled to begin there Tuesday. The billboard sites included Pope John Paul II's travel route in St. Louis in January and one near Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, PETA said.
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