7 Things You Didn’t Know About PETA

1) According to government documents, PETA employees have killed more than 19,200 dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens since 1998. This behavior continues despite PETA’s moralizing about the “unethical” treatment of animals by farmers, scientists, restaurant owners, circuses, hunters, fishermen, zookeepers, and countless other Americans. PETA puts to death over 90 percent of the animals it accepts from members of the public who expect the group to make a reasonable attempt to find them adoptive homes. PETA holds absolutely no open-adoption shelter hours at its Norfolk, VA headquarters, choosing instead to spend part of its $32 million annual income on a contract with a crematory service to periodically empty hundreds of animal bodies from its large walk-in freezer.

2) PETA president and co-founder Ingrid Newkirk has described her group’s overall goal as “total animal liberation.” This means the complete abolition of meat, milk, cheese, eggs, honey, zoos, aquariums, circuses, wool, leather, fur, silk, hunting, fishing, and pet ownership. In a 2003 profile of Newkirk in The New Yorker, author Michael Specter wrote that Newkirk has had at least one seeing-eye dog taken away from its blind owner. PETA is also against all medical research that requires the use of animals, including research aimed at curing AIDS and cancer.

3) PETA has given tens of thousands of dollars to convicted arsonists and other violent criminals. This includes a 2001 donation of $1,500 to the North American Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an FBI-certified “domestic terrorist” group responsible for dozens of firebombs and death threats. During the 1990s, PETA paid $70,200 to Rodney Coronado, an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) serial arsonist convicted of burning down a Michigan State University research laboratory. In his sentencing memorandum, a federal prosecutor implicated PETA president Ingrid Newkirk in that crime. PETA vegetarian campaign coordinator Bruce Friedrich has also told an animal rights convention that “blowing stuff up and smashing windows” is “a great way to bring about animal liberation,” adding, “Hallelujah to the people who are willing to do it.”

4) PETA activists regularly target children as young as six years old with anti-meat and anti-milk propaganda, even waiting outside their schools to intercept them without notifying their parents. One piece of kid-targeted PETA literature tells small children: “Your Mommy Kills Animals!” PETA brags that its messages reach over 1.2 million minor children, including 30,000 kids between the ages of 6 and 12, all contacted by e-mail without parental supervision. One PETA vice president told the Fox News Channel’s audience: “Our campaigns are always geared towards children, and they always will be.”

5) PETA’s president has said that “even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we would be against it.” And PETA has repeatedly attacked research foundations like the March of Dimes, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and the American Cancer Society, solely because they support animal-based research aimed at curing life-threatening diseases and birth defects. And PETA helped to start and manage a quasi-medical front group, the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, to attack medical research head-on.

6) PETA has compared Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust to farm animals and Jesus Christ to pigs. PETA’s religious campaigns include a website that claims—despite ample evidence to the contrary—that Jesus Christ was a vegetarian. PETA holds protests at houses of worship, even suing one church that tried to protect its members from Sunday-morning harassment. Its billboards taunt Christians with the message that hogs “died for their sins.” PETA insists, contrary to centuries of rabbinical teaching, that the Jewish ritual of kosher slaughter shouldn’t be allowed. And its infamous “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign crassly compared the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide to farm animals.

7) PETA frequently looks the other way when its celebrity spokespersons don’t practice what it preaches. As gossip bloggers and Hollywood journalists have noted, Pamela Anderson’s Dodge Viper (auctioned to benefit PETA) had a “luxurious leather interior”; Jenna Jameson was photographed fishing, slurping oysters, and wearing a leather jacket just weeks after launching an anti-leather campaign for PETA; Morrissey got an official “okay” from PETA after eating at a steakhouse; Dita von Teese has written about her love of furs and foie gras; Steve-O built a career out of abusing small animals on film; the officially “anti-fur” Eva Mendes often wears fur anyway; and Charlize Theron’s celebrated October 2007 Vogue cover shoot featured several suede garments. In 2008, “Baby Phat” designer Kimora Lee Simmons became a PETA spokesmodel despite working with fur and leather, after making a $20,000 donation to the animal rights group.

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Despite PETA’s anti-animal cruelty advocacy, the organization itself has killed nearly 90 percent of all the cats and dogs dropped off at its Virginia shelter in 2012.

Critics have slammed the People for the Ethical Rights of Animals (PETA) for its hypocrisy and have referred to PETA’s facilities a ‘euthanasia clinic’ rather than a ‘shelter’. In its defense, the organization claims that the euthanized animals were disease-ridden and ‘unadoptable’.

Of the 1,647 cats and dogs that PETA took in last year, only 19 ended up in new homes, according to the Virginia Department for Agriculture and Consumer Services. And of the 34 ‘other companion animals’ that were taken in, such as rabbits and guinea pigs, 28 were euthanized and only four were adopted.

Dogs at PETA’s shelter had the worst fate: 1045 out of 1110, or 94 percent, were euthanized in the facility. The organization’s kill rate is significantly higher than that of most other US kill shelters. In an interview with USA TODAY, PETA spokeswoman Jane Dollinger acknowledged that most shelters euthanize about 39 percent of their animals.

The Center for Consumer Freedom has harshly criticized PETA for its mass extermination, claiming that the shelter has euthanized 29,398 pets since 1998.

“The animal rights group is talking out of both sides of its mouth – on one side preaching its animal liberation agenda, while on the other signing the death warrant of over 89 percent of pets in its care,” CCF Research Analyst Justin Wilson said in a press release. “It’s beyond hypocritical.”

PETA has a $36 million budget, which the CCF believes should be used to find homes for the animals that are quickly put down – not to do “I’d rather go naked” photoshoots with well-known celebrities for its anti-fur campaign.

“It seems PETA is more dedicated to publicity stunts than to keeping the animals in its own care alive,” Wilson said. “It’s the height of hypocrisy for PETA to demonstrate for the ‘rights’ of rats and pigs, while killing tens of thousands of pets. It’s time that the Commonwealth of Virginia finally reclassifies PETA’s pet shelter for what it is – a slaughterhouse.”

PETA has long defended its high euthanasia rates by calling the practice ‘the compassionate option’. The agency claims that killing the unwanted animals is a better choice than letting them roam the streets or sit in cramped cages for years.

“We have a small division that does hands-on work with animals, and most of the animals we take in are society’s rejects – aggressive, on death’s door, or somehow unadoptable,” Dollinger told USA TODAY.

But criticism against PETA is unlikely to die down as long as the organization continues to kill almost all of its cats and dogs, while advocating for the rights of chickens and pigs.

"With the resources at their disposal, PETA and the Humane Society of the U.S. could become no-kill in no time," attorney Nathan Winograd told the Daily Beast in 2008, after PETA’s 85 percent kill rate was released. "Instead they have become leading killers of cats and dogs, and the animal-loving public unwittingly foots the bill through taxes and donations."

And the kill rate has only been creeping up as fewer animals survive PETA’s ‘shelter’.

Source: Russia Today