by DAVE PAYNE SR.

Earlier this week, I visited the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' Web site and found attacks on things most sacred to me- Pittsburgh Steelers football and flyfishing.
I checked out the site, hoping to find out what the group actually does when its not sending unsolicited email to outdoors writers asking us to write about watching grass grow instead of hunting and fishing.
Here's what they do when they are not writing to me: they write to other people and take pictures of women wearing nothing but vegetables or strategically-placed rabbits, which along with the letters are posted on the Web site. 
They've come down hard on Terry Long, who played football for the gallant Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1980s. The group demands Long reorganize his Pittsburgh-based foods business to quit selling chickens and start selling turnip greens.
"A good sport would pick on opponents his own size and leave defenseless little birds alone," said Cem Akin, a PETA research associate and longtime Pittsburgh resident.
I doubt anyone in Steel Town will be buying Akin a beer anytime soon. Pittsburgh, like me, bleeds black and gold. 
It gets worse. They are also attacking the sacred art of flyfishing.
In one fax to Baker High School in Baldwinsville, NY, the group demanded a school-sponsored flyfishing trip be nixed. "You might as well take the kids to a dogfight... by teaching fishing at school, we teach that violence is acceptable," the fax said.
So does that mean when I watched all those episodes of the Andy Griffith Show as a kid I was actually being introduced to a seedy Meyers-Lake underworld of fishing and violence? Was Andy's prize fishing rod, "Eagle Eye Annie," some dark metaphor for a fish-slaying sword?
For clarification, I contacted Jim Clark, who has written numerous books on the show and is "presiding Goober" of the 12,000-chapter-strong Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club.
That PETA nonsense, he said, flat wouldn't fly with Andy and the gang at Meyers Lake and would sink like a stomachful of Rafe Holister moonshine.  Clark offered a pro-fishing alternative to PETA's Web site- www.mayberry.com.
"Those PETA folks are strange and curious fellers," said Alan Newsome, president of the 1,500-member "Who's Been Messing With the Bulletin Board" chapter of the club.
I searched the PETA Web site for any mention of the Andy Griffith Show. There were none and for good reason. If PETA marched on Meyers Lake, Ernest T. Bass would be waiting for them at the Robert E. Lee Natural Bridge with a pocketful of rocks and a battle cry: "wrong or right, I'm here to fight and if you wonder who I be, it's me, it's me, it's Ernest T."
Some things in Mayberry are sacred and worth fighting for. In the fictional North Carolina town, the rod you spare when you spoil a child is used only for fishing.
Fishing creates a natural bond between men and fish, fathers and sons and teaches children a respect for nature and its precious cycles, Clark said.
"Those are the kinds of lessons that Andy Taylor shares with is son, Opie, in Mayberry, and other adults are wise to pass along to children. If our schools (like Baker High) have the wisdom to tackle the challenge as well, I say more power to them," Clark said.
The response to PETA's demand from the Baldwinsville Central School District was a firm, "no,"according to the Post-Standard in Syracuse.
I'm also sure if Helen Crump took her class to Meyers Lake for a flyfishing lesson and she got one of those PETA faxes, she'd also tell the group where to go in a polite, Mayberry sort of way.
The Baldwinsville, Pittsburgh and Mayberry fronts are united and run through Parkersburg.
PETA, lay off my Steelers and flyfishing and Meyers Lake, but keep those celery bikinis coming.