Well, the folks at Six Flags Great America certainly got a lot of mileage out of their press release promoting their Halloween celebration dubbed "Fright Fest."
The offer to give a line-cutting pass to anyone willing to eat a live Madagascar hissing cockroach wasn't even in the first couple of paragraphs of the release, but within a couple of weeks, this hideously disgusting stunt was picked up by wire services and publicized nationwide.
Chowing down on one of the 2- to 3-inch horned cockroaches gets you a pass for four people to cut to the front of the line on rides from Oct. 7 through Oct. 29. You've still got to pay admission, though, like everyone else.
I'm with PETA on this one. I'm certainly not fond of cockroaches, and if I saw one two or three inches long, I'd want to kill it, but might be too petrified to find something large enough to attack it with. Sure, a business gets tons of free publicity to engage in such revolting displays, but at what cost to its reputation, and at what level of possible endangerment to their clientele? I don't even want to see a Madagascar hissing cockroach from a distance, even if it's dead, pinned to a board, and encased in glass. And I'm not sure I'd want to be in the same amusement park with people willing to eat them.
The offer to give a line-cutting pass to anyone willing to eat a live Madagascar hissing cockroach wasn't even in the first couple of paragraphs of the release, but within a couple of weeks, this hideously disgusting stunt was picked up by wire services and publicized nationwide.
Chowing down on one of the 2- to 3-inch horned cockroaches gets you a pass for four people to cut to the front of the line on rides from Oct. 7 through Oct. 29. You've still got to pay admission, though, like everyone else.
I'm with PETA on this one. I'm certainly not fond of cockroaches, and if I saw one two or three inches long, I'd want to kill it, but might be too petrified to find something large enough to attack it with. Sure, a business gets tons of free publicity to engage in such revolting displays, but at what cost to its reputation, and at what level of possible endangerment to their clientele? I don't even want to see a Madagascar hissing cockroach from a distance, even if it's dead, pinned to a board, and encased in glass. And I'm not sure I'd want to be in the same amusement park with people willing to eat them.
