Carol J. Adams is a globally renowned animal liberationist and author of the seminal text, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. I ask her which particular Peta campaign enrages her more. "Whichever is its current campaign that uses women's almost naked bodies, women stripping, women being debased on behalf of animals (in cages, cut up like meat), and women being used sexually to communicate a message about animals — that is the one that is the most offensive."

Shock tactics can be justified — if they are relevant. I remember the days when Peta's promotional material contained sickening and horrifying images of animal testing. It would appear that the visibility, acceptance, and funding of Peta has vastly increased since they exchanged monkeys with half-open skulls for Pamela Anderson wearing lettuce. I have spoken to feminists who are angrier at Peta than at Playboy or Hustler.

But Peta has never been known to apologise to its critics. Recently Peta sued one animal rights organisation that publicly criticised it — Friends of Animals — and effectively shut it down. 

"Peta seems to be waging a war on almost everyone but their own members," says a former US employee, who tells me that he regularly received threats on his blog for criticising Peta. "They spread hatred — towards parents who let their kids eat meat, to people who work in factories out of total necessity. They are like a cult."

"You can see how much like a cult they are by the fact they can so easily persuade their employees and volunteers to take part in the most ridiculous stunts," another former female US employee told me, "often in the baking heat, semi-undressed, or just looking like total idiots while most of the general public walk past thinking, ‘There go those Peta idiots again.'" 

Peta makes a virtue of bad taste and its founder Ingrid Newkirk boasts of being a "media slut". But she went beyond mere vulgarity when she compared the killing of animals for food with the Holocaust: "Six million people died in concentration camps," Newkirk declared, "but six billion chickens die each year in slaughterhouses." This is the woman who claims to have left a will stipulating that her skin be turned into wallets, her feet into lamp-stands and her flesh eaten. Under her leadership, Peta has adopted the fanatical language and methods of a cult. Campaigning against inhumanity to animals can never justify inhumanity to man, and especially woman.