Last Monday's episode, April 19, of the hit primetime ABC series "10 Things I Hate About You" was titled "Meat is Murder." It centered on Kat's efforts to get Meatless Monday's introduced at her school.

You can watch the episode on line at:
http://community.abcfamily.go.com/watch/10-things-i-hate-about-you/meat-murder

I urge you to check it out, at least for a minute -- stations take note of what shows and episodes get the most online hits.

I will give you some highlights:
It opens with Kat sitting at lunch, reading a book titled, "Meat is Not Green." When her boyfriend sits down with a burger and asks about the book in a teasing manner, Kat says:
"Did you know that 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from animal agriculture?"

He admits that it's fascinating and she says,
"If everybody at this school ate vegetables instead of processed animal flesh just one day a week it would make a huge environmental impact."

He asks if he could do a walkathon instead, and she says,
"If you don't want to do it for the earth, do it for you colon."

Then she gets up and says, "Enjoy your carbon footprint. I am going to go do something about this."

While it's hard to tell just from reading the words, what's great about the scene is the fun and warm way in which Kat delivers the information, with she and her boyfriend agreeing to hang out after school that day. There was a time when animal and environmental activists were portrayed on TV as unbearable. This episode shows how far we have come. The animal advocate on this show is super smart and also warm and pretty and charming -- characteristics the animals could use on their side.

Kat goes to the student council meeting and says:
"Every day the earth is getting closer and closer to cataclysmic climate change, yet every year we are burning more and more fossil fuels. It is time for our generation to say 'Enough.' We didn't cause this mess, but we can clean it up, and that starts right here, right now, with your approval of Meatless Mondays."

When the item goes up for a vote, it passes! Then we see an appropriate bit of realism when Kat's previous ally decides to sabotage the win and run a student president election campaign based on the promise of pepperoni pizza on Mondays. But the ending of the episode is positive, with Kat's boyfriend trying his first soy dog and deciding it isn't bad. He asks why, if "you guys" hate meat so much, the soy dog tastes like meat. She says:
"Well it's not that I hate the taste, it's just that whenever I see meat all I see is this little face saying 'Don't eat me."

Nice.

"10 Things About You" takes feedback at: http://community.abcfamily.go.com/feedback
Choose that show's title from the pull down menu.
Please take just a moment to thank the producers for the Meatless Monday episode. Positive feedback will encourage similar themes in the future. The Meatless Monday website, www.MeatlessMonday.com tells us that 751,000 people watched last Monday's episode of "10 Things I Hate About You." Those numbers mean power to get a message out. Please express your appreciation and give the producers some encouragement so that they'll keep up the good work.

Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn

DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line.

Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com to learn about Karen Dawn's book, "Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals," which was chosen last year by the Washington Post as one of the "Best Books of The Year!"