If you can't trust PeTA, who can you trust? (Don't answer — that's a rhetorical question . . .)
Here we all thought that PeTA was dedicated to compassion and kindness towards animals, committed to building a cruelty-free world, and opposed to the slaughter of animals, be it useless slaughter or not . . .
And now we learn from the Center For Consumer Freedom that they themselves are killing animals left in their charge right and left. Here's what a press release from CCF had to say today:
NEW YORK, May 9 /PRNewswire/ -- While loudly complaining about the "unethical" treatment of animals by restaurant owners, grocers, farmers, scientists, anglers, and countless other Americans, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has been hiding its own dirty little secret. PETA kills animals, and visitors to New York's famed Times Square during the month of May will see a 60-by-60-foot billboard carrying that message, in a rare splashy advertisement that PETA won't appreciate. Information obtained from the State of Virginia shows that PETA has a long-standing practice of killing thousands of dogs, cats, and other animals at its Norfolk, Virginia headquarters. Along with the billboard, the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom is unveiling a new website --http://www.PetaKillsAnimals.com -- where PETA's hypocritical death toll is on display.
Between 1998 and 2003, PETA put to death over 10,000 dogs, cats, and other creatures that the group publicly calls "companion animals." Not counting those that PETA held only temporarily -- for spaying or neutering -- the group killed over 85 percent of the animals it took in during 2003.
"PETA raked in nearly $29 million last year," said Center for Consumer Freedom research director David Martosko, "and much of it was from pet owners who thought their donations actually helped animals. Instead, PETA killed them -- while spending millions on programs equating meat eaters with Nazis, scaring young children away from drinking milk, recruiting kids into a radical animal-rights lifestyle, and even defending arsonists and other violent extremists."
Ouch!
Other animal protection agencies near PETA's Virginia headquarters "put down" a much smaller percentage of the animals entrusted to them. In 2003 the Norfolk SPCA found adoptive homes for 73 percent of its animals. The Virginia Beach SPCA adopted out 66 percent. PETA could only manage 14 percent.
"We're out to tell the truth about PETA," added Martosko. "This group's duplicity knows no bounds. PETA accepts animal-lovers' donations with one hand while administering lethal injections to puppies and kittens with the other. That's not 'ethical.' It's hypocritical."
To see detailed numbers related to PETA's massive euthanasia program, visit http://www.PetaKillsAnimals.com.
(CCF editorializes about this here, and you can see a table of the numbers here.)
This is of surpassing interest to me, given that we have Ingrid Newkirk herself claiming she'd be opposed to using animals for research, even if it led to a cure for AIDS, and that she regards pet breeding and ownership as an "abysmal situation."
Guess she and PeTA have found a way to rectify the "abysmal situation" . . . just kill them when they show up at PeTA's shelter . . .
That's certainly a more lofty moral purpose than using animals for research.
Personally, I think if CCF's claim is true (and is there any doubt?), PeTA President Ingrid Newkirk should "undergo thorough psychiatric evaluations followed by mandatory counseling¯the safety of the community may depend on it" (sic).
President Newkirk and her corporation should be treated according to the same standard she demands be applied to other people she tags as animal abusers. Or so I would argue.
Which brings me to wonder what the terrorist ALF (the Animal Liberation Front) is up to these days.
One would think that they'd be outraged at PeTA's extermination of these innocent animals, and would even now be secretly plotting a "direct action" to free them from PeTA's abusive clutches. If successful, they could release them into the (urban) environment, hoping with all their hearts that "some might make it."
Or, perhaps ALF will take a page from the SHAC playbook, and mount a campaign to force PeTA's corporate bosses into cruelty-free compliance by terrorizing PeTA's employees, donors, celebrity supporters and suppliers by vandalizing property, demonizing individuals and posting personal information (kids' names, telephone numbers, addresses . . .) on web sites . . ..
Brian
