Notes

Savannah Mosley
Ms. Willocks
10th Grade AP Language
18 October, 2018

The hasty generalization fallacy present in PETA’s ad, regarding obesity as a whole and its relation to eating meats, is one that lacks any visible data or research to back its claim and inadequately provides a sensible visual that represents meat-eaters as a whole. The visual itself relates solely to the child’s obesity, the key reason she was chosen to be the model, and focuses primarily on the food being given, rather than the real issue: she is overweight. While her weight is certainly put on display, it is not addressed as significantly as the food item she is eating, thus leading to the assumption that whatever she is eating is much worse than the more dire issue at hand. This ‘guilt-trip’ factor is one that is negatively impactful in this ad, but still lacks any data that directly relates obesity and child abuse directly to eating meat.
Advertisements possess many purposes, but most correlate with one another in more ways that one; they are to make a statement, and make a statement that is memorable, negatively or positively so. While most advertisements will aim to create an ad or slogan that is far from controversial to avoid any sort of heat, PETA disregards this greatly in this specific ad, evident through many visual choices, accident or purposeful. In their advertisement, PETA attempts to use an appeal of pathos to parents of meat-eating children by effectively guilt-tripping them into making their children go vegan. They do so by correlating eating meat to childhood obesity, obvious through their strategy of using an overweight child rather than an adult or a more fit model. The pathos, however, backfires painfully so, as many parents would not want to be considered a child abuser simply for choosing what to give their child, thus turning away from the ad. Visually, the yellow arrow in the ad is one of the first things that is visible, due to its bright hues that contrast against its background. Naturally, the eyes will follow the arrow, catching the words ‘CHILD ABUSE’, then will be lead to the burger the child is holding and eating. Above these letters are the highlight word ‘Meat’, but the exact opposite, ‘Go Vegan’ is directly below it but in smaller print. This is a visual specifically chosen for one to associate child abuse directly to meat, that being the natural flow of the advertisement, even though ‘Go Vegan’ is in the same color, font, and is generally close to the ‘CHILD ABUSE’ claim.
This advertisement exhibits hasty generalization for many reasons. The more painfully evidential reason would be that there is no scientist research available on the ad to directly associate the issues of child abuse and obesity to eating meat. Without any possible data visible, this claim is one that is not effectively backed and has a flimsy structure, for it is only based upon pictures of overweight children eating meat. This ‘logic’ can be destroyed by introducing pictures of overweight children eating vegan foods. To further the accusation of a hasty generalization present in both the visual and writing, the young girl in front of undoubtedly obese, but the child heavily blurred in the background appears to be somewhat of a healthier weight even though it appears he is eating a hamburger as well. This carelessness present in both the advertisement’s visual and the absent data showcases a faulty generalization.