animal cruelty

[heatray5d]

Those of you involved with PETA out to take a look at this.

Now, it's important to note that this story is being given legs by a website run by the Center for Consumer Freedom, an industry group that specializes in attacking and painting environmental, animal rights and public health groups as extremists and even terrorists.

Here's some highlights from the CCF's "About Us" page:
"The Center for Consumer Freedom is supported by restaurants, food companies and more than 1,000 concerned individuals."

"Many of the companies and individuals who support the Center financially have indicated that they want anonymity as contributors. They are reasonably apprehensive about privacy and safety in light of the violence some activist groups have adopted as a 'game plan' to impose their views."

Now, the status of the CCF alone makes any claims they make pretty suspect (check out their Obesity Debate page for some classic pro-industry propaganda. It's full of stories that refute claims that very few health groups or physicians organizations are making, while managing to not actually address the obesity problem at all. It's a fascinating excersize in propagandizing).

However, the copies of the filings (linked here) from the Norfolk, VA office of PETA on the percentage of animals killed over animals adopted out (86% killed) are pretty shocking, especially considering that the Norfolk SPCA manages to find homes for 73% of its animals.

Now, there's nothing that can be done about the CCF, unless the CEO of McDonald's has friended me without me noticing, in which case I encourage him to keep those shitheels on a shorter leash. But those of you who count yourselves as members of PETA should be making a fucking phone call and demanding that they keep every single one of those animals alive that is capable of living reasonably well (I've no illusions that, say, rescued fighting cocks can be expected to be rehabilitated). There's no room for hypocrisy in an organization like PETA.

Links ripped from the journals/comments of madeofmeat, theturducken.

Check out my new icon! Look into his eye!

UPDATED: All of these links are worksafe, but one or two of them might have pictures of meat or dead animals.

Comments

[alonewiththemoon]

One of PETA's philosophical guidelines is that no animals should be pets, that keeping animals as pets is slavery and they all belong back out in the wild. I'm sure they can totally justify the killing to themselves because of that, especially since they've been criticized for the cruelty of throwing animals out into the wild who weren't prepared for it and subsequently died of starvation, injury, etc. If keeping animals in captivity is morally wrong but putting those individuals into the wild would result in their slow and/or painful deaths, then killing them quickly would seem like the better choice.

Anyone who has pets and gives money to PETA should really think about these things.

[heatray.livejournal.com]

PETA is philosophically opposed to keeping animals as pets, but I think this quote from Ingrid Newkirk covers their philosophical objection nicely:

"I don't use the word 'pet.' I think it's speciesist language. I prefer 'companion animal.' For one thing, we would no longer allow breeding. People could not create different breeds. There would be no pet shops. If people had companion animals in their homes, those animals would have to be refugees from the animal shelters and the streets. You would have a protective relationship with them just as you would with an orphaned child. But as the surplus of cats and dogs (artificially engineered by centuries of forced breeding) declined, eventually companion animals would be phased out, and we would return to a more symbiotic relationship – enjoyment at a distance."
- The Harper's Forum Book, Jack Hitt, ed., 1989, p.223

So, in addition to proving that Newkirk is a crazy, pedantic douchebag, it also indicates that they would be against releasing into the wild animals that could or would not survive. So while, for instance, some breeds of ferrets are "wild" animals and could be released, others that have been specialized and bred as pets would no long be bred, and would be kept under the protection of humans until their numbers declined and disappeared.

I don't agree with her fundamental objection to owning pets, and her definition of "enjoyment at a distance" as a "symbiotic relationship" is idiotic, especially since dogs and housecats are so far removed by breeding from their wild roots that their relationship with humans as-is is already a healthy symbiosis. But I would have to say that if there are PETA members releasing dogs and cats into the Amazon or Rhesus monkeys into the high Rockies, those members are misunderstanding their own philosophy.

Which is not to say PETA's leaders don't turn a blind eye to such idiocy - they clearly do. But again, it's not official policy, and internal pressure from its membership should be able to eliminate such things, which is why I posted in the first place.