I’m not outraged over animal euthanasia either, but
I’m re-adding emphasis
Very few people (outside of vegetarians or the odd family farmer here and there) ever gave a flying fuck - much less a single thought - as to the conditions of how animals at factory farms are raised or how modern slaughterhouses go about their business, so even PETA have managed to do some good work in both raising awareness and getting crackdowns on some of the worst offenders.
It’s easy to make people care about cute critters, even if it involves painless deaths. It’s another to get them to think about millions of food animals each year being raised in horrifying conditions and being allowed to suffer needlessly even past the point where they should have been slaughtered or put down.
I don’t support PETA or contribute money to them, but at least they have been at the forefront of a part of animal welfare that barely anyone thought about.
I had a friend go all PETA on me, I swear it would have been better if she became a scientologist or moonie. She would have seemed more normal, she ended up cutting off contact with all her meat eating friends after we just couldn’t tolerate her anymore. Then she got married, had a kid and stopped her silly obsession with PETA. She still loves animals but its not a religion to her anymore. PETA is for stupid young kids and crazy old people.
The official position of PETA is that all domestication of animals is slavery, including keeping pets. They would rather kill your pet than let you love it and care for it.
Not only that but they liken animal ownership to Nazi concentration camps… or… something.
When in fact its them running the animal concentration camps.
OTOH, who else but PETA would ever tolerate A Monkey With a Gun? 
So they’re no hypocrasy when PETA protests and block pet shelter that also euthanize animals claiming that killing animals for any reason is wrong?
I’m kind of shocked more people on here aren’t outraged by this. I find it utterly disgusting; in other words, perfectly PETA. May they rot in hell forever.
Yes, I’m well aware of that. I disagree with them, just as I disagree with people who hold that abortion is murder, but they’re entitled to their different opinion.
Yup, just as many abortion opponents would rather keep a pregnant woman chained in a basement until she’d given birth than let her have an abortion.
As long as people aren’t actually doing such outrageous illegal repressive acts, I can’t get too worked up over the fact that they think it would be theoretically okay to do them because of their weird extremist views on ethics.
If PETA activists start stealing pets from owners who do love and care for them so they can euthanize them (just as PETA activists have done similarly reprehensible outrageous illegal repressive acts in the past), I’ll be as pissed off as anybody could wish. But legally euthanizing unwanted animals is not a crime.
IMO the people being most evil in this scenario are the so-called animal lovers who irresponsibly create the unwanted pets in the first place, via reproduction or abandonment. I think that rescuing and rehabilitating such animals is great, but I don’t think that euthanizing them is evil.
Like http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/peta-employee-arraigned-on-felony-dog-napping-theft-charge-58088762.htmlthis? --PETA employee arraigned on federal dog-napping theft charge
If the accusation is true, that’s exactly the sort of reprehensible outrageous illegal repressive act I was talking about, and I’ll happily join you in denouncing it.
PETA is working very hard to make pet owning so difficult and expensive that most folks won’t be able to afford it. This is one of the reasons why they spend so much money on lobbyists, and stick their noses into non-problems hoping to whip it into a crisis.
It isn’t the folks “creating unwanted pets” - note that for the most part we don’t see many puppies in shelters - its the irresponsibility of owners that needs to be dealt with if we want to see even fewer pets in shelters. Cats should not be allowed to roam outside, particularly if they aren’t altered, unless they are barn cats or some such. Dogs should in fenced yards, on lead or under command. People should research what size/coat/breed is best for their lifestyle, and then commit to getting training done before they end up with a 90 pound teenager with no manners. Research also what is a good breeder - it isn’t someone with a female whose neighbor had a male of the same breed, so they had a litter “so the kids could learn” or some such nonsense. It isn’t any of the pups available at pet stores or flea markets or on signs nailed to telephone poles. And for the most part, it isn’t any of the “designer dog” breeders either. If people would quit buying from those who are in it for the money, we’d have far fewer mass produced dogs.
And most of all, people should quit pushing shelter dogs as the best choice - outside of the occasional puppies, almost all of the dogs are in there because they have some sort of bad habit(s) and would take a lot of work to make into a nice pet. Plus, the more the word gets out that there are organizations and people who rescue shelter pets, the more people think that anything they drop off there will be re-homed. This is why people want all shelters to be no-kill, and why those owners took their pets to PETA because they were told they would find them homes, not kill them right away.
I worked at a shelter in the South for six years, and when we got our euthanasia rate below 75%, it was cause for much celebration. We were one of the good ones, too: many municipal shelters had much higher euthanasia rates.
I’m not outraged by this because, again, those municipal shelters euthanized using terrible methods, most especially carbon monoxide. PETA’s initial goal was to offer an alternative euthanasia method for these shelters on the NC/VA border. They hired some incompetent goons who decided, why waste time transporting them up to Norfolk when they’re just going to be euthanized anyway? There was a big stink about it, but the guys in question did nothing cruel, just violated disposal laws. PETA fired the employees IIRC.
As for the claims that PETA thinks all companion ownership is slavery, I’ve looked repeatedly for cites for this claim and never been able to find them. Saint Cad, I’m unfamiliar with the protest of a shelter you’re talking about. In my area, PETA did help shut down a really terrible local shelter run by a lunatic whose desire never to euthanize animals led to animals living in disease-ridden squalor, beaten by stressed and underpaid workers, with minimal socialization. Is that what you’re talking about?
Finally, that prnewswire “article” is really a press release from the “Center for Consumer Freedom,” one of the most despicable and lying astroturf “organizations” out there (AFAIK it’s not so much an organization as it is one dude who hires himself out to the restaurant and hunting lobbies to write massively distorted articles about HSUS, AHA, PETA, and MADD). Don’t trust that any further than you can throw it.
What the what? Check out a search for puppies around Atlanta: 870 results. Shelters are inundated with puppies and kittens in breeding season. I encourage anyone to call any shelter in the south during the summer months and say, “You don’t have any puppies in, do you?” When the laughter ends, you’ll get your answer.
Yup. In fact, their policy on pets is on their website. To summarize, it says that ideally, pet animals would be better off never having existed at all rather than having to go through things such as forced breeding, confinement, treating them like commodities, abuse from callous/unknowing owners, etc. They go on to state that they do not confiscate animals that are well-cared for and “free them”, and that they push for spaying and neutering, and adopting pets from shelters rather than encouraging more breeding, and that this will reduce animal suffering.
Note I said “for the most part”. There are areas where there are still plenty of unaltered free roaming dogs creating unwanted puppies, tho I am surprised to hear that a large city like Atlanta is having that problem.
OTOH, many of those dogs are not what I meant when I said puppies - I was meaning actual baby puppies, 8 to 12 weeks old. Like the herds of baby kittens that shelters get.
And, some of the shelters have been importing dogs from overseas in order to have something to sell.
I did not expect to come into this thread and actually gain sympathy for PETA.
One, I checked out their website, and many of the positions I actually agree with, which I wasn’t aware of before.
About the “shelter” - I agree that something with no adoption floor should not be called a shelter. But it’s hard to get outraged about ~1000 animals being euthanized when that exact same things happens to millions each year in the US alone.
I do hope owners are aware of this fact when they surrender their pets to PETA or any shelter, though. Chances are, if you give up your pet, it will be killed. I think a lot of people are shielded from this reality by hanging onto the slim hope that their pet could be adopted.
There’s something to that: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/peta-and-humane-society-attacked-by-reports--but-are-they-real/2012/02/27/gIQAZdR2dR_blog.html
Issues | Humane World for Animals
More to the point, there’s the Huffpo article, admittedly written by an advocate (Nathan J. Winograd, with whom I part company on the topic of the feral cat menace). But here’s an article by a real journalist at the Atlantic, who draws broadly similar conclusions: PETA's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad History of Killing Animals - The Atlantic
With a 2.5 percent adoption rate for dogs, a 0.4 rate for cats and a $30,000,000+ budget, I opine that PETA should establish adoption hours at least on alternative Mondays.
The shelters I know try to do everything they can to get rid of most of their pet population alternatively. Puppies to no-kill shelters or programs of “transport puppies”, breed-looking dogs to breed-specific foster programs, etc.
Puppies still make a large portion of shelters in the south. You may not see as much some days because of season. I remember when I did a rotation in the Baton Rouge shelter, the veterinarian there tried as much as possible to get the puppies into any alternative program so she could both save the pups and open space in the main area for other dogs.
But it seems PETA doesn’t even try to reduce the numbers of euthanasia. That’s the outrage. Most shelters will try to reduce the numbers of animals they kill and increase adoption. PETA doesn’t care.
Recommendation: Act local. Support your local shelters (no-kill or kill). Volunteer there, donate supplies to those. They’ll be grateful and your donation will go straight there.