The National Pork Board sent a 12-page “cease and desist” letter in response to ThinkGeek’s April Fool’s ad for “canned unicorn meat” that used the NPB’s familiar slogan “The other white meat.”
Bloggers naturally seized on the obvious joke — to take at face value that the Pork Board was pig-headed enough to believe unicorn really was being offered for human consumption in competition with pork.
ThinkGeek ended its legal woes by issuing a public apology, though they couldn’t resist ending with a humorous stinger:
Luckily, the Sisters at Radiant Farms, where the unicorns are nursed through old age before being slaughtered, canned, and brought to market at ThinkGeek, have nothing to worry about–this kind of use is protected as a parody. (We’re hoping the NPB doesn’t tell the Sisters that unicorns don’t actually exist; it’d break their little sparkly hearts.)
[Thanks to David Klaus and Andrew Porter for the story.]
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This isn’t the first time the Nat’l Pork Board has been litigiously, over-threateningly stupid. In 2007 they had CafePress remove a t-shirt sold by a breast-feeding activist to benefit Mother’s Milk Banks which said “The Other White Milk”, because they thought it infringed their trademark and also according to their dirty minds the shirts encouraged adults to do that which babies do, and this sexual image which she did not imply but they inferred sullied the wholesomeness of commercial pig slaughtering.
I kid you not.