PETA Admits It Kills Adoptable Cats and Dogs
The more I observe PETA, the more bizarre it seems to me. It claims to love animals, and yet it euthanizes more than 90% of the animals it takes in. Why does PETA have to do this? Animal shelters are able to euthanize animals too sick, injured, or aggressive to be found good homes. Moreover, it does not have a formal adoption program, it has admitted to the Telegraph, and it kills adoptable animals. From the story:Peta insists that homes could not be found for the dogs and cats, usually because they were in such poor health or because they were "unsocialised" and aggressive, usually because of bad treatment by their owners.
Doing the dirty work of finding homes for adoptable animals?
But the organisation, which does not run its own animal adoption programme and does not accept animals into its care elsewhere, admitted to The Sunday Telegraph that some treatable and adoptable animals were also among those killed by lethal injection.
"We are doing the dirty work that others won't," said Daphna Nachminovitch, vice-president for cruelty investigations. "We are proud to be a shelter of last resort that takes in old broken animals and gives them a humane end. "America is facing an epidemic of overpopulation. Six to eight million unwanted pets are turned in to shelters each year and half of them have to be euthanised. Our euthanasia programme is no secret."It's a societal problem. We're not going to turn our backs on these animals just so that our figures look good. We're not saying that all the animals we euthanise are suffering from incurable conditions. But overpopulation is a crisis. It's a matter of actually finding a good home."
Let me translate: Animal rights ideology wishes to see all domesticated animals cease to exist. This includes pets. I believe PETA wants every dog, cat, cow, sheep, sterilized, and out of existence as the current animals die off. (This is Gary Francione's position.) PETA also believes that domesticated animals are slaves, and that this is by definition suffering, and so even adoptable animals are better off dead. Further, I suspect, they euthanize adoptable animals because only vegans are deemed acceptable to the group as people entitled to receive an animal. If I am right about this, that would preclude placing cats in homes because without meat products, cats go blind.
I can't prove the above suspicions, but they are utterly consistent with PETA's ideology. Whatever the case, PETA should be investigated to determine how hard they try to find adoptable homes for those animals, how long they keep adoptable animals, and whether a 90%-plus kill rate is justifiable. Besides, I'll bet local humane societies--not to be confused with HSUS--could give them a hand in finding these animals homes. In the meantime, maybe somebody should infiltrate PETA, as its members are fond of doing animal industries, and take secret videos to prove the cruelty.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 4:54 AM
20 Comments
20 Comments:
When are we going to realize that killing someone doesn't a help them? I know we're talking about animals in this case, but the mindset is the same.
Let's kill children in the womb to save them from dying at a young age.
Let's kill animals to save them from living in a shelter.
Culture of death, anyone?
Yes some of the way humans treat non-human animals is part of the culture of death. That's been what I've been saying all along here.
As things now stand, there are more dogs and cats than there are homes to be found for them, and every home found for one is one less place available for the rest. It's a matter of numbers. That's one reason pet owners are implored to spay and neuter their pets.
If that's Gary Francione's position, I don't agree with it. Nor am I a vegan. I do think that ending vivisection would not only decrease animal suffering and the human suffering that is the result of the callousness it encoutages in the scientific and medical establishment, and help to combat the culture of death, but also engender a more humane attitude toward non-human animals in other respects. As long as we regard them as things to be used and discarded in laboratories for the sake of our "quality of life" (same clarion cry as the death culture's), not merely eaten as other animals eat other animals for the sake of survival, which is a different matter, we're going to keep regarding them as disposeable in shelters as well.
Finding a home for an animal is not easy, shelters kill many, many adoptable animals, and PETA euthanizes as humanely as possible animals who would die in compression chambers otherwise. Of course euthanizing an animal is murder, just as euthanizing a human is. But I think SHS would find it enlightening to learn first-hand by doing some hands-on animal welfare work how difficult it is to find homes and how many more animals there are than there are homes for them rather than focusing on ideological suppositions and suspicions. This has nothing to do with deliberately refusing to find homes and regarding pethood as slavery or considering death better than life; it has to do with numbers. If you think what PETA is doing is bad, you should see what goes on in shelters -- not to mention laboratories.
p.s. Various humane societies may be willing to lend a hand to PETA in placing these animals, but not able. They already have their hands full. If they didn't, PETA would not be doing what it is doing. Or have they offered and been rebuffed?
Laura: I agree; killing someone does not help them, and I think that that should become a catch-phrase in the massive publicity campaigns that are necessary to fight the culture of death. You're spot on in pointing out that treating non-human animals better corresponds with treating humans better.
Lauren: Sorry, I meant Lauren, not Laura! I read your name too quickly and confused it with that of Laura who also comments here.
Yes, valuing life is valuing life. We've devalued non-human animal life and that has led to devaluing human life. It's not necessary to keep a boot-heel on their neck to elevate ourselves; that has the opposite effect. The animal rights movement can't be blamed for the death culture, which preceded it. There was no PETA in the 1930s and 1940s, which were preceded by the 19th-century glorification of science that included laboraory experimentation.
And "human exceptionalism."
I suppose we should castigate Teddy Roosevelt for refusing to kill the bear, and consider him a precursor of Al Gore?
Roosvelt had the best attitude toward both animals and people that I've ever seen in a leader. We could use another Teddy, to be honest with you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ijLulwUTY
The above link is to a YouTube video of Penn and Teller's BS. LANGUAGE WARNING! (It's Penn and Teller, come on, like you didn't see that coming!) They take on PETA head-first, and I like how they lay out everthing nice an neat.
T.E. We sure could.
The infiltration work PETA and other organizations has exposed more, and done more good, than infiltrating PETA, which publicly acknowledges what it does and says why it does plainly, ever could. Anyway, Ingrid Newkirk offered me a full-time job there ca. 1984, which I still regret not having taken; maybe that's some form of diluted indirect tenuous "infiltration" via SHS, best I can do, anyway. I think the idea is good, though, in that it would settle matters once and for all. I don't think it would be possible, but I wish SHS could see PETA up close and understand why they do what they do.
Ianthe -
I don't disagree that there are organizations out there that are doing good for protecting God's animals. But several members of PETA have been arrested for fire-bombings, making death threats against others, etc. Eco-terrorism and animal-liberation-terrorism is never the way to go, and PETA tends toward violently out-there tactics. Plus, as an old-fashioned feminist, I can't say I approve of their using women in such a way that turns them into objects, rather than respects their humanity.
One of my favorite authors, Mercedes Lackey (she writes fantasy and sci-fi, with her most popular series sporting 26 novels and counting), is an animal rehabilitator. She takes injured raptures (birds of prey) and helps them heal, then gets them back into hunting form. She's been the target of PETA, among other animal rights groups, because in order to release the birds back to the wild, she has to teach them how to kill. You can't "fake" a kill, she says, and that's ruffled some feathers. No pun intended.
One of her books, "Fiddler Faire," is a collection of short stories. One story in it is about animal liberationists biting off more than they can chew, but the forward to the story talks about how she has had to deal with them invading her personal life. There's nothing quite like a woman who's won awards for writing sophisticated stories about homosexuals in primitive societies saying, loudly, "We don't do politically correct!" It's like hearing Analis Morrissette singing songs about how anti-male feminism has gone too far. If someone on that side of the fence is pointing out it's going overboard, you know there's a problem.
T.E.: I like what she does for the raptors but I understand why the animal rights people oppose it, too. I don't find the voluntary participation of female celebrities in PETA's ads objectifying, exploitative, or demeaning. In fact they wouldn't be in the ads if they weren't recognizeable personages willing to go out on a limb in support of what they believe in, and PETA isn't a casting couch and can't advance or damage their careers, which those in showbiz who don't like what PETA stands for can. As for extreme measures, they're standing up for those victimized by extreme measures who have no voice or way to defend themselves.
p.s. If God owns them, God owns us too; they have more purity of soul than we do and maybe God should do a little more work on us. I think they own themselves.
Sad to say, many animal shelters have a hard time placing animals in adoptive homes during tough economic periods. We have always had two cats, and when one of ours died last summer at the age of 18 we adopted another, a 7 week-old kitten that someone had found wandering around the streets of Newark. The animal shelter people mentioned that families displaced from their homes often desert their pets --- release them into the wild, or worse, into city streets to fend for themselves --- which strikes me as totally unconscionable. Perhaps, under those circumstances, euthanizing them would be preferable, although putting down a healthy dog or cat is an idea I really have difficulty accepting.
It’s disingenuous, to say the least, for the deceitfully-named Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) to complain about the number of unwanted and suffering animals whom PETA has been forced to euthanize because their guardians requested it, or because no good homes exist for them.
CCF is a front group for Philip Morris, Outback Steakhouse, KFC, cattle ranchers, and other animal exploiters who kill millions of animals every year, not out of compassion, but out of greed. CCF promotes meat-eating and defends corporations that send billions of cows, chickens, pigs, and other animals to terrifying, gruesome, and painful deaths in slaughterhouses.
PETA handled far more animals than 2,124 in 2008. In fact, we took in more than 10,000 dogs and cats, spaying and neutering all of them at low to no cost. We gave them shots, fixed their wounds and treated their illnesses, and returned them to the community. Most of the animals we took in and euthanized could hardly be called "pets," as they had spent their lives on heavy chains, for instance. They were unsocialized, never having been inside a building of any kind or known a pat on the head. Others were indeed someone's, but they were aged, sick, injured, dying, too aggressive to place, and the like, and PETA offered them a release from suffering, with no charge to their owners or custodians.
Those figures also do not include the hundreds upon hundreds of dogs and cats whose suffering PETA works to alleviate by providing them with free food when their owners are poor, clean water buckets, sturdy dog houses, straw for winter, and more, or the hundreds of adoptable dogs and cats we will not take in but refer to walk-in animal shelters and adoption centers. Since 2001, PETA's low- to no-cost spay-and-neuter mobile clinics, SNIP and ABC, have sterilized more than 50,000 animals, preventing hundreds of thousands of animals from being born, neglected, abandoned, abused, or euthanized when no one wanted them. We also actively decrease the number of animals who end up in animal shelters only to be euthanized for lack of good homes by using star power to promote spaying and neutering in ads across the country.
On a national level, PETA is focusing on the root of the problem through our Animal Birth Control (ABC) campaign. The ABC campaign targets breeders, pet stores, and cat- and dog-breeding mills and in an active way through protests, PSAs, celebrity support, and investigations and puts the blame for the overpopulation crisis squarely where it belongs—with those who breed animals or allow their animals to breed. As long as animals are bred, homeless dogs and cats in animal shelters will die because there simply aren't enough good homes for them all.
As long as animals are still be purposely bred and people aren't spaying and neutering their companions, open-admission animal shelters and organizations like PETA must do society's dirty work. Euthanasia is not a solution to overpopulation but rather a tragic necessity given the present crisis. PETA is proud to be a "shelter of last resort," where animals who have no place to go or who are unwanted or suffering are welcomed with love and open arms.
You can read more about this in Ingrid Newkirk's last blog: http://blog.peta.org/archives/2009/03/why_we_euthaniz.php
PeTa doesn't believe in animal domestication, period. Let's quit lying about it.
When Ingrid Newkirk offered me a full-time staff position at PETA and was telling me what the living arrangements would be, she asked me if I had animals -- which would have influenced where they put me (in a place with space for them, or not). She didn't object to the idea of my having pets, or tell me I couldn't be part of PETA if I did. In fact, their staff bring their pets to work with them. I couldn't bear to leave New York at the time and often since have wished I'd decided otherwise. When I've dealt with PETA since, it's been obvious to me that they do a great deal of pet welfare work and that they don't think pets are better off dead than alive, or just shouldn't be. Nor have I ever heard from them that they oppose the existence of pets.
And even if they didn't believe in animal domestication, period, that philosophical viewpoint at the cutting edge of the animal rights movement would help to improve the lot of domesticated. Rights movements move forward along spectra, the extreme edge of which does not manifest as the result, but opens the way like the prow of a ship cutting through the water. Remember race riots? Bra-burning? We now have a half-African-American President (I just wish it were someone else, of any race), and women, fully underclothed, are now on the Supreme Court, Secretary of State, presidential contenders, heads of state and heads of major corporations, etc., and we don't hear "boo" about it. But someone has to say "boo!" at the outset to get things rolling.
I have a hard time understanding how PETA can say animals are equal to people, and then go and kill perfectly healthy animals. It doesn't matter if other shelters do it...they don't have the mind set that animals are equal to people.
Can't they just take some of the millions of dollars they make and open a no-kill shelter or something to put the healthy pets until they find a home? Or is that money better spent on making children's comics about how their parents kill animals or commercials of women humping vegetables?
I recently had a conversation at www.catfevertreatment.com with a vegan that was wondering if they should feed their cat meat or if there was a vegan alternative. She claimed there was. I claimed that the "natural" thing for cats was to eat meat. She didn't have much to say about that. I'm all for natural. PETA seems to be all about "unnatural". I can't believe that they kill animals like this.
The latest on PETA, this one coming seemingly tongue-in-cheek from MoJo..
Mother Jones :: PETA to Pet Shop Boys: Roll Over
And I quoteth: PETA has finally gathered up the courage to ask the Pet Shop Boys to change their name. Explaining that pet shops often treat animals cruelly, the group suggests that the PSB consider a more critter-friendly name, like Rescue Shelter Boys.
Based on its reiteration via other resources, appears to be serious.....
Is it just me, or does it seem things are escalating exponentially out of that camp..? Extremely sadly as it were, a very public organizational meltdown generated internally by PETA itself sure appears eminent on the horizon..
Wandering back into the depths of the Net amidst still dizzying visions of the long ago rumored threat that owners were going to have to provide air conditioning and mattresses for their southern living horses and cattle.......
Peta is trying to shut down the animal sanctuary Primarily Primates.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smAUkhEnkg8
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