For several years they have been total kooks putting animals on the same level as humans (arugably higher). But were they always this kooky. I remember my school getting a dog rescued from PITA in the 70’s (yes they had a school dog - got a problem with that). We made a bunch of PITA posters for one of their events. I just can’t believe that the school would have us make these posters for such a bunch of kooks so they must have been more mainstream that that.
I don’t know however, we were told to make a pet poster with the word PITA on it somewhere, at that age it could have been ‘Long Live the USSR’ and we wouldn’t have known the difference.
This gets me to one of my pet peaves, when kids are used as the teachers political pawns. Not really the point of this thread, but though it fits here anyway.
PETA has, indeed, always been an organization of loons. It seems that in the last 10 years or so, though, that they’ve gotten even loonier. I don’t know if they had a balance of power shift from the looney to the ultra-looney faction, or if they just started raking in more contributions, allowing them to speak out and stage events more often.
They also recycle. They spoke out about the use of guide dogs (or “slaves,” subjected to human will) in the early 90s, and recently got some more press about this issue.
For kicks, I subscribed to their magazine for a few years back then. For all I know, they’re still sending it to my old office.
There is an article in this weeks New Yorker about PETA and it’s founder. Well worth checking out, but the article isn’t available on the New Yorker web site.
PETA has completely lost the plot. Frankly, I don’t know if they ever had one. Back in the 80’s, they were mainly into informing people about puppy mills and encouraging vegan diets, campaigning against fur and staging random public silliness like a few dozen naked people passing out fliers. All pretty tame, I suppose, but some ugliness came out around, IIRC, '85 or '86 about PETA’s involvement with and funding of the Animal Liberation Front- some sort of shadowy guerilla force of college kids who liked to spend their off-hours burning down research labs to “free the animals”. I think it was this that really touched off their descent into madness. They started getting more celebrity spokes-beings, more political, and more openly attacking large corporations and dragging assorted ohers through the court sytem.
One of the founders of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, is the president of the organization to this day. I don’t know much about her, beyond the fact that she is stark raving mad. And I do mean mad-aside from her relentless insistence that human and non-human animals should be considered both morally and legally equal, she’s been known to team up with “pet psychics” and other frauds, committed acts of violence against people opposed to her, and openly supported what is basically a terrorist organization. (ALF)
Now, while PETA’s goals may have originally been noble and pure, they have become nothing more than a senseless propaganda mill committed only to attracting as much attention to themselves as possible. They seem to be completely blind to the fact that all their histrionics serve only to harm their own goals and completely discredit them. Kind of sad, really.