FUCK PETA

From the Huffington Post:

Shocking Photos: PETA's Secret Slaughter of Kittens, Puppies
  
Warning: Some of the following graphic photos may distress the reader.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals -- indeed their "ethical treatment." Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA's front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority -- 96 percent in 2011 -- exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed, when Pet Cremation Services of Tidewater stops by on their regular visits to pick up their remains. Between these visits, the bodies are stored in the giant walk-in freezer PETA installed for this very purpose. It is a freezer that cost $9,370 and, like the company which incinerates the bodies of PETA's victims, was paid for with the donations of animal lovers who could never have imagined that the money they donated to help animals would be used to end their lives instead. In fact, in the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals.

And

A mother cat and her two kittens, all perfectly healthy and adoptable and none in danger of being killed until they were given to PETA by a veterinarian who was trying to find them homes and was told by PETA employees that they would have no problem adopting them out. After PETA lied to him and the mother and her kittens were entrusted to their care, they reportedly killed them, within minutes, in the back of a van.

More here.

I've always had a problem with PETA from the moment I first heard about them.  Their position, as I understand it, has always been impossible.  I mean, not that I disagree with where they stand in the abstract.  I love animals, too.  I don't think we ought to use animals for scientific experiments, if it can be avoided.  I agree that the meat industry often abuses them horrifically.  I think that the fur industry is particularly cruel.  Indeed, if it wasn't for PETA, I don't think I would know nearly as much as I do about how our civilization abuses animals on a routine and widespread basis.  So there's always been some room for me to see them sympathetically, if not as ideological allies.

But here's the problem.  PETA pushes a radical agenda for which humanity is simply not ready.  Now, I know that various liberation movements over the years have been dismissed for exactly the same reason.  And, generally, my thought is that there is no time like the present to end oppression, regardless of the current culture or the dominant mode of thinking.  But PETA would, for instance, have us all become vegetarians, even though humans have eaten animal flesh since before recorded history.  As noble as I believe the decision to become a vegetarian is, it must, for the time being, continue to be an individual decision.  The vast, vast majority of us enjoy eating meat.  It isn't simply for nourishment, either; eating meat is deeply embedded in our very identities.  And that may very well be wrong in multiple ways.  But it is, and has been for millennia, something that is essentially human.  PETA, however, seeks to villainize virtually the entire population, branding as evil people who do something that humans have always done, something that is seen and understood as life-sustaining and life-affirming.  They make a noble individual decision into a social mandate.  And you're evil if you don't embrace that mandate.

That's bad enough, turning a nuanced discussion of morals and ethics into a simplified conceptualization of good and evil with which both fundamentalist Christians and Muslims would feel at home.  But what's worse is that it misses the point entirely.  The United States now tortures captives as official policy.  We put prisoners to death.  We allow children and the elderly to go homeless and hungry.  Large percentages of the population go without health care.  We wage war, killing not just soldiers, but also civilians in very large numbers.  We poison the atmosphere.  We poison our life-giving waters and food supplies.  We allow a very few to have most of society's wealth, leaving most of the rest with almost nothing at all.  We continue to practice racism, homophobia, sexism, and other kinds of prejudice in pervasive ways.  In short, at this point in history, humans are seemingly incapable of treating other humans in an ethical way.

How on earth can we possibly find it within us to treat animals better than we treat ourselves?

The reality is that we can't.  Mankind must first learn to be kind to mankind.  That is a necessary condition for treating animals ethically in any large-scale meaningful way.  PETA's radical agenda is a non-starter in this day and age.  Consequently, all the self-righteous posturing, all the celebrity hob-nobbing, all the blood thrown at fur coats, all the anguished crying and moaning and gnashing of teeth about eating meat, all the bogus talk of "animal rights" within a social context where human rights are routinely violated, it's all narcissistic bullshit.  Indeed, it's insulting and offensive.

Again, don't get me wrong.  Society does, indeed, abuse animals, and we've got to stop it as soon as possible.  But it's just not black and white.  There are good and real reasons why some scientific experiments on animals are direly necessary.  There are good reasons people eat meat.  To throw around the concept of evil in such a haphazard way simply helps true evil, behavior and actions that we understand unambiguously to be evil, and which continue to exist all around us, all the time, fade into the social woodwork.  And that's why I've always had a problem with PETA.  They seem to be way more into being PETA than into real and meaningful social change.  

Of course, now it turns out that not even PETA believes what they want everybody else to believe.

You'd think that with their hundreds of millions of donation dollars, with all their celebrities and resources, that they'd find ways to honor their promises to avoid euthanizing the pets that come to their shelters.  But no.  Instead, they're particularly effective at killing animals they promised to save.  I suppose they need to save money so as to remain famous and in the public eye.  Running with the beautiful people ain't cheap.  Needless to say, they no longer have even my sympathies.

Indeed, I condemn PETA as the worst sort of human scum.  They're part of the problem.  Definitely not the solution.  I hope they rot in Hell.

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