...you know the ones - with the cute little furry and fuzzy baby animals? proclaiming how "sweet" those millions are? They're in our subways, on our city streets...at construction sites. Well, when they first went up, I knew something about them bothered me. But I wasn't sure what. And then a friend articulated my discomfort in jpeg form.
Which made me realize why the lottery ads disturb me: because they show only a snapshot in the life of an animal, one that the general public can feel warm and fuzzy about.It is a shallow response, to be sure - and for lottery tickets???
Just as people go to the grocery store to buy a package of bacon or the local fast food chain for a bucket of buffalo wings and don't make the connection between the pigs and the chickens that lived (in profound suffering, mind you) and the food on their plate, so people don't ask what becomes of the piglets portrayed in the lottery ads (or anywhere else), the bunnies, the puppies, the kittens - and not just what becomes, but where from (see puppy mills).
And who cares for the animals when they are no longer fuzzy and cute? no longer puppies and kittens and baby bunnies and little chicks (when Easter's over and the little fuzzies grow up)? Countless everyday heroes like the folks at Zani's Furry Friends, or Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary, or Animal Haven.
So the next time you see one of those lottery ads, take a moment to think beyond the shallow. And if the text in these ads make you uncomfortable, GOOD. THEY SHOULD.
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