I sent this letter to Tom's Foods several years ago. Their response was a pre-packaged corporate explanation about how Tom's Foods always does its best to assure the freshness of its snacks. Phffft! Some people can't even see the humor in the things they expect us to eat.

T.

Gentlemen: I am writing to discuss a matter of great importance, with hopes that you will immediately curtail activities which are so shockingly grotesque, even as I write this I tremble in outrage. I am speaking of your practice of packaging the most gruesome assortment of biological amputees in your bags of so-called "Animal Cookies."

Here in my hand, for example, is a splendid elephant, baked to golden perfection, his edges a crisp and beckoning brown -- but he has no trunk! His pachydermal proboscis, savagely severed, is now lost forever. How can I eat him? Certainly not whole, not now. You've ruined that for him and for me.

Here is another, a three-legged giraffe, his pitiful stump spilling tiny crumbs of crunchy-sweet cookie-gore onto my desktop. I can almost hear his plaintive cries. Yet he is more fortunate than some, for here is a baked buffalo with no legs at all! A pathetic quadruple amputee -- another brutal bison bakery butchery. Is this what you mean when you boast of your company's "operations?"

Look at these poor victims spread out before me -- horrible, hornless rhinos, hapless headless apes, hacked-up, halved-up hippos -- indeed, the very sight of the crippled creatures in your mangled menagerie is enough to make one toss one's cookies! And if this is not enough, digging down and deep into the bag, what do I find but a sickening smorgasbord of dismembered members -- a hideous hodge-podge of horns and heads and hooves, assorted arms, loose legs...

I have heard it said that "parts is parts," but Tom, Brutal Bagger of Bakery Beasts, you have given ugly meaning to the term Animal "Crackers." Crackers, indeed! You biscuit bisectors! Despicable disectors of dough! Contemptible cookie "cutters!" Now tell me...what have you done with the sweetbreads?!

Ted A. Thompson
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal Cookies