While I agree with this desire, as I said earlier, my (limited) experience with their animal shelter advocacy subgroup made me think that this was a part of PETA that was less publicity-whorish and more interested in actually doing good work. I did deal with them a very little bit when they helped draw attention to a terrible local no-kill shelter, an investigation that helped in the shelter’s eventual shutdown by the state. (I wasn’t there when the shelter was shut down–my experience was with PETA as they conducted investigations and published pieces on this shelter). The people at PETA I corresponded with were unfailingly polite and professional and never asked me if I’d had a hamburger for lunch.
It’s great to see a black eye for PETA, but if I’m correct, that this is a department in PETA less interested in shouting LOOKITMELOOKITME and more interested in getting good things done, I’d rather put the black eye elsewhere, unless there’s very good evidence for putting it here. At this point, I think the evidence for putting it here is:
Some jerkwads who worked for PETA around 2008, conducted euthanasias in a sloppy (and possibly deceptive, although that was never fully established) manner, and got fired for it;
Some terrible looking shelter stats that PETA has explained, not to everyone’s satisfaction, but the main objection to which explanation seems to be “I don’t think they tell the truth, so they’re probably not telling the truth”;
Interviews with a no-kill zealot; and
An astroturf guy who’s made his living lying about HSUS, the Humane Association, and other animal groups (in addition to MADD etc.)
I can easily imagine other good evidence. What does their animal surrender contract look like? What specific pets have been euthanized contradicting their owners’ standards? Are all animal organizations in Norfolk reporting similar experiences with PETA–i.e., that PETA refuses to engage in any talk about transferring animals? Are there flyers or other things given out in which PETA talks about how their shelter adopts out animals and encourages people to surrender their animals? Are there former employees who will describe the philosophy of “death before ownership” that pervaded the animal shelter department?
Right now, as you say, the prosecution isn’t nearly ready to rest, and the prosecutorial theory–that PETA believes animals are better off dead than pets–is blatantly contradicted by a lot of evidence on the defense side (PETA’s work with open access shelters, their talk about their own pets, their encouragement to their followers to adopt pets from shelters, the lack of statements from PETA that death is preferable to pet-hood for animals, etc.)
If PETA’s owner surrender contract contains something like this and requires owners to sign it, I have no patience with anyone saying that they thought their animal would be adopted out and feeling betrayed.
I remember the first time I heard such nonsense at my shelter. It was terrible and heartwrenching to see the mourning family who’d changed their minds and were furious that their pet had been euthanized just hours after bringing it in to our overcrowded open-access shelter. So that evening I asked a friend of mine, “If you were moving or something, would you ever consider taking your cat to the animal shelter?”
She looked at me in horror and said, “Of course not! You’d kill her!”
And I was like, “Yeah! That’s what we tell those mofos!”
So if mofos are signing that and then weeping about Fluffy getting euthanized, they need to shut up and maybe not surrender their animal next time.
But if PETA’s owner surrender contract says, “We’ll make every effort to adopt out your animal, but we can’t guarantee we’ll find him a new companion,” then they obviously need to change that language.
Part of the problem is that I think a number of people are mixing up this sort of thing—
—with having a “death wish” for animals, or something similarly “twisted” or “evil”.
There’s nothing remotely evil about believing or asserting that it would be a better world overall if people didn’t eat animals or keep them as pets. While such a position is extremely debatable and subjective, that’s not the same thing as being evil.
Now, lying about facts or killing animals that their owners don’t want killed are indeed evil acts, and if anybody wants to pit PETA for documented instances of such behavior I’ll willingly support that pitting.
But aspiring to an ideal of a pet-free world, and being willing to kill animals that don’t belong to anyone and that nobody else is volunteering to care for, don’t in themselves constitute Pittable offenses in my book.
Mind you, they don’t mean that PETA is right, either: there are plenty of valid reasons to object to both of those positions. But the world isn’t divided into those who are right and those who are evil.
Ok, back to the clownishness. There are 2 authors at Huffpo, one is a no-kill zealot and the other is… a no-kill zealot. One has a law degree and the other is a novelist.
In the interest of free speech and my own amusement, I will recount an interview of one with the other where they lay out the PETA case.
C: Douglas Anthony Cooper (the interviewer / author)
W: Nathan Winograd (no-kill zealot / expert)
That could be all well and good if that was all PETA was doing, but its actually just a drop in the bucket for them. Their big thing is legislation and propaganda, trying to influence the country to fewer and fewer pets and the elimination of all breeders. And that doesn’t even touch on their stupidity about farm animals.
Yeah, that’s gotta be it. The millions of genuinely unwanted domestic animals being treated as disposable aren’t the real problem. If we would just fire all those lazy and complacent animal shelter directors (who are doubtless only in it for the highly lucrative salaries and the hot babes anyway), the situation would be straightforward. :rolleyes:
So what? Trying to implement one’s ideological positions via legislation and propaganda is not evil either. (Telling lies in the process, of course, is an evil act, as I noted before, but there’s nothing wrong with trying to influence laws and public opinion per se.)
Well, if it’s specifically PETA’s lying that bothers you, then by all means bitch about that. Lying is bad.
But you made it sound like what you were pissed off about was simply PETA’s having the temerity to advocate a position you personally disagreed with: namely, “trying to influence the country to fewer and fewer pets and the elimination of all breeders”.
Bad ideas are bad too and are eminently pitable in my view. I agree though that a distinction might be drawn between political actions that are legal and legitimate, and political strategies that are illegal, immoral, attention whoring, unethical, unusually deceptive, unusually appealing to sentiment as opposed to reason, inane, ridiculous, pompous, self satisfied, self indulgent, etc.
Sure, you’re free to pit anything you think is a bad idea. Like I said, though, there’s a difference between “bad” as in “bad idea” and “bad” as in “evil”.
Has anyone ever wanted to adopt a dog from a local shelter only to discover that none of the local shelters had animals to adopt? Except for people with very breed-specific interests–in which case, they might have to wait a bit–I don’t think this happens.
So it doesn’t really matter if PETA has adoption hours or moves animals around the country to other shelters. If they had adopted 10,000 more animals out of their shelter, then 10,000 other animals would have been put down somewhere else.
The only want to save an animal’s life is to convince someone that wasn’t planning to adopt one to do so.
If the shelters in the region weren’t filled to capacity, than shuffling the animals around might save some lives by increasing the stock of sheltered animals. But is seems likely that seasonal effects would reverse this: there will come a time when the region’s shelters are filled up, and then kill rates would increase.
Shelter animals have disproportionate amounts of behavioral issues. So shifting animals without behavioral issues to adoption shelters might produce better canine-human matches. A good thing, though the life-saving effects are indirect and probably small. (They would operate via better matches leading to more adoptions.)
Building more kennels saves lives as it increases the regional shelter capacity. PETA could do this.
These qualifications are minor. Overall I’d say that Mando JO wins the thread. Questions remain regarding allegations of PETA deceptiveness though.
I am pissed off because PETA is trying to deprive us of our right to live with companion animals, and they are doing it by lying to the general public.
Actually, very little of this is true. We don’t really have a pet overpopulation problem anymore (feral cats are another issue). There are of course local areas that have too many, but the answer isn’t to ship them all over, the answer is public education. Because if you don’t do that, the problem in that area will continue. Plus if you have government funded shelters doing this, you end up with taxpayers in some areas paying to take care of the irresponsibility of other areas. We even have shelters bringing in dogs from overseas, so they can justify their budgets and/or continue to have a product to sell.
Which is another point - any given 10,000 shelter dogs aren’t the same thing as any other given 10,000 shelter dogs. Some of the dogs that get killed are because of temperament issues, others have been hit by cars and no one wants to pay to put them back together. In other cases, people will take their old dog into a shelter to be put down because they don’t want to pay to treat it or have it put down. And finally, many shelters will automatically put down dogs of specific breeds or if they sort of in a way look like those breeds.
Of course, none of this addresses free will - people have a right to own the pets they want to. The next time I want a dog, why should I be required to pay quite a bit of money to get a large teenaged mixed breed with no manners, no health background and no real way to know what sort of temperament it has before I bring it home? In most places, that is the bulk of the dogs available in a shelter.
The only way to save these animals lives is to get more education out there. The spay/neuter campaign has worked well, now we need to focus on people educating themselves prior to even bringing the puppy/dog home, and then getting proper training into it. As long as the focus is on just cleaning up after the irresponsible, the problem goes on.
Your link discussed dogs imported from other states - something that could be acceptable in my view- but also dogs imported from Puerto Rico and Taiwan. Here’s the 2003 USA Today article on pet imports by shelters: USATODAY.com - More cities importing pound puppies
“Puerto Rico… shipped 14,000 strays to the US for adoption,” over 7 years. They say that they are saving street dogs. So I guess if PETA shipped a dog to Massachusetts, that would be one fewer dog imported from Puerto Rico, and one more Puerto Rican dog put down. Unless the number of dogs euthanized from that island is constant due to their lack of spay and neuter practices. I’m not sure. Does anybody here have a background in ecology?
ETA: FWIW (not much), I’m sympathetic to curlcoat’s pro-breeder bias. While there are fine dogs adopted from shelters, there’s a public interest in breeding emotionally stable pets as opposed to nutty ones-- or pretty ones, the latter coming from a subsection of breeders. While freedom is all and good, I have to shake my head every time I see a gasping bulldog.
One organization there, in one country. 14,000 dogs from one place in one country.
I don’t know about Puerto Rico, but we get a lot of street dogs from Mexico here and they are a major public health problem because they haven’t had shots and vets don’t see them unless they have an obvious problem. And, street dogs breed like bunnies, so there is a never ending supply. Not to mention that the locals get paid a little (which to them is a lot) for every stray they catch and bring in so even if they somehow ran out of strays, I’m sure the locals would breed them for the money. Most of Mexico is seriously third world so any way to make money works for them!
I don’t see why we should be paying taxes to support shelters who are bringing in dogs from overseas? In the case of Mexico, human life is cheap there so trying to reduce the number of stray dogs is way low on the list of priorities. And like feral cats, if you take one out of there, others are born to take it’s place. AND, having all these overseas dogs go thru our shelters gives PETA more ammunition about how we have this fictional overpopulation problem here.
Eh… The organization in Puerto Rico that organizes sending dogs overseas is a private one. It is not one of the public local shelters. Also, the dogs are vetted, vaccinated, and given at the very least basic veterinary care before being sent outside. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even be able to pass the health certificate required to transport animals by air.
And this is a bit of a hijack from the original topic.
Unless they have a vet over there willing to provide health certificates to anything, as the puppy mills tend to. The ones coming from Mexico are driven over the border.
In the long term, intensive far-reaching education of pet owners may eliminate the problem (though I’m doubtful we’ll ever totally get rid of the problem of unwanted pets). In the short term, it’s inevitable that there will continually be a dearth of adoptable animals in some geographical areas and a surplus of adoptable animals in others.
If we don’t want adoptable animals being euthanized*, then we’re going to have to ship the excess from one region to another. Otherwise, if pet-deficient Region A decides that they will increase their pet supply by more local breeding rather than by bringing in unwanted pets from pet-abundant Region B, the excess pets in Region B will have to be killed.
It’s not a question of “should Region A taxpayers pay for shelter funding to ‘take care of the irresponsibility’ of other areas?” It’s a question of “should unwanted Region B pets be killed or transferred to places where there are people who do want them?”
The answer seems to be that if you treat pets like other consumer commodities, with manufacturers churning out an abundant supply of extremely varied products to suit a huge range of consumer tastes and budgets, then you’re inevitably going to get a substantial percentage of the products ending up in the trash before their useful lifetime is over. And lots of animal lovers are opposed to that scenario.
Realistically speaking, there are only two basic ways to maintain a supply of pet animals:
Abundant, varied and (comparatively) cheap, more like purchasing a manufactured product. Breed enough for everybody easily to acquire the amounts, kinds and qualities that they want, and deal with the inevitable surplus of unwanted products either by routine euthanasia or by accumulating a pet overpopulation that shelters struggle to cope with.
Limited, unpredictable and (comparatively) expensive, more like adoption of a human baby. Focus not on providing additional stocks of pets but on ensuring a good home for every existing pet, so that healthy adoptable animals don’t end up euthanized or warehoused in shelters. Accept that this will mean that many would-be pet owners will have to wait a long time to adopt a pet and/or have to settle for a pet they consider less desirable.
I personally don’t care which of those two options society chooses, since I favor adoption from shelters but am not morally opposed to euthanasia. But you can’t have it both ways at once. You can’t have the feel-good humane ethicality of option (2) and the convenient consumer “free will” of option (1) simultaneously.
Which, as I noted earlier, is something that I personally am not particularly opposed to as long as it’s done humanely, but I respect the right of “no kill” advocates to hold a different view.