Time For Vegans to Get Off The Fence: PETA is a Disaster for Animal Advocacy!

Some vegans say that PETA has done a mixture of both good and bad things in their work as an animal advocacy organization, and so they have neutral or mixed feelings toward them. But whether a neutral attitude toward an entity that does both good and bad things is appropriate depends on how bad the bad things are. If they're sufficiently bad then a neutral attitude isn't really appropriate. So if someone helps old ladies across the street, donates to charities, volunteers at the soup kitchen...but they rape their mom, then no one would take a neutral attitude toward that person; their bad action has "crossed the line," so to speak.

And such is the case with PETA. Yeah, you can find promotion of veganism (mixed with a hell of a lot of welfarism and promotion of less-than-veganism) on their website, yeah they've made some good videos, yeah Ingrid Newkirk has written that there's no such thing as humanely raised and slaughtered meat, but...in addition to their sexist advertising and their welfarist campaigns and positions, PETA has killed healthy, adoptable animals, lots of them. It's not just inconsistent with their name (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), it's absolutely inexcusable, and anyone associated with PETA who has been involved with this ought to go to jail just as Michael Vick did. It's puzzling why they would do this. Part of the answer can be found here: http://www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=12153 Warning: This article contains pics of some of the healthy, adoptable animals PETA has killed. In addition, it contains a postcard from Ingrid Newkirk to Nathan Winograd (a leader of the no-kill shelter movement) stating that PETA does not believe that nonhuman animals have a right to life! This stunning admission ironically puts PETA, thought to be an animal rights organization, squarely on the opposite side of the "right to life" issue from the majority of Americans, at least insofar as animals considered "pets" are concerned.

All in all, the attitude PETA takes toward animals can only be described as speciesist. Not speciesist in the same way that most people are, as they don't make the same illogical distinction between "food" animals and "pets," but speciesist nonetheless. How else can we explain things like their giving an award to Temple Grandin for designing "more humane" slaughterhouses or their campaign to get KFC Canada to switch from suppliers that slit chickens' throats to suppliers that gas chickens to death instead, and their praise for KFC when they did so? Can you imagine a supposed human rights organization giving an award to Himmler for coming up with the bright idea of gassing Jews and other Holocaust victims instead of shooting them? And can you imagine our reaction if an organization supposedly devoted to the welfare of children advocated rounding up homeless children and "euthanizing" them? Because that's what PETA advocates, and engages in, for stray cats: http://www.alleycat.org/page.aspx?pid=897

In short, the bad so far outweighs the good in PETA's case that not only does PETA not deserve either financial or rhetorical support from any genuine animal rights advocate, but our movement (and animals) would be far better off if they ceased to exist altogether.