LARRY WOODY, Courier Columnist
Wednesday, February 12, 2014 5:11 pm

As soon as I saw Joe Nameth bop onto the field for the Super Bowl coin toss, I knew the fur would fly.

Broadway Joe was decked out in a full length coat made from the pelts of either 200 chinchillas or four border collies (it
was hard to tell, which, exactly).

But one thing WAS predictable: the animal-rights folks would get their Naugahyde in a wad and start howling like the guests of honor at a Save the Wolves rally.

Sure enough, the animal-rights crowd has been on Namath like an Eskimo on a baby fur seal. They want to skin him alive for wearing fur. Wearing fur is not politically correct these days. Which is why I wear it every chance I get, including in the shower and at the beach in July. It's fun to make PETA people so mad they could choke an artichoke.

I wonder if they ever consider the fact that if their ancestors had felt the way they do, they wouldn't be here? Go back, say, to the Stone Age when a celebrity caveman -- Cliffhanger Joe -- walked onto the field for the Super Bowl coin toss wearing a mammoth-skin coat.

Members of the PETA tribe were outraged, and demanded that the coat be removed immediately. Cliffhanger Joe
complied, and promptly froze solid. So did all the members of the pesky PETA tribe. Disdaining the wearing of fur,
they attempted to weave warm clothing from rainbows and moonbeams, but it didn't work and they quickly became
extinct -- casualties of Global Stupid.

Even if they hadn't frozen to death by eschewing fur, eschewing chewing animals would have led to their demise by
starvation. Tofu and mammoth-flavored soybean burgers hadn't been invented yet.

Had the prehistoric PETAs somehow survived on a diet of ferns and twigs, they wouldn't have been able to cut it on the wild frontier.

Irate PETA person: "I hope that's not a coonskin cap you're wearing!"

Davy: "Uh ..."

And of course the Leatherstocking Tales couldn't have been written without leather, had the PETAs picketed the tannery.
If a PETA frontiers-person wouldn't eat meat, about all that was left in the cupboard was (yuk) hominy. But to plow
the fields to raise the corn to make the hominy required the use of a mule, and of course that would start the Save the
Jackass crowd to braying.

Not only would frontier vegans have had little to wear and less to eat, they couldn't have illuminated their cabins. Candles were made from tallow -- and those sheep didn't sweat it off on a tanning bed.

PETA pioneers would have had to hunker in the dark -- cold, naked and hungry, wishing a flock of Brussels sprouts or a herd of tofu would wander by.

But they didn't shiver and starve. They, like the cave-persons, had the good sense to wear fur and leather, and to chow down on the tasty critters from whence it came.

Today we have faux fur and synthetic leather to replace the genuine stuff and, I admit, there's no NEED to wear a coonskin cap or a coat that makes Broadway Joe look like Broadway Lassie. It's simply a matter of personal preference. However, anyone who disagrees with PETA about fur will get their hide tanned.