I’m not quite sure where to put this thread–General Questions, IMHO, MPSIMS, the Pit or here. Feel free to move it.
PETA’s message about how to treat animals is very negative: Don’t eat them, don’t use them as pets, don’t use them for entertainment, don’t use them for scientific experiments, don’t even use them as guide animals. I’m not getting what we are suppose to be doing with them. Should they all be in nature? Ferral animals have the worst lives around, and any life with humans has to be better than an all natural one.
I don’t really understand it myself. Do they really believe that wild Holsteins used to roam the earth? That a Chihauhua would survive for five minutes on his own?
A few days ago, I was on their website (after watching Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit!” YouTube segment on it) and I noticed that they support spay/neuter programs. They say that there is no biological or mental need for animals to reproduce. I see this as a stunning hypocrisy, given their insistance that animals should have the same rights as people.
If their goal truly is the “freeing” of all animals, they’re idiots who need to check out a book on ecosystems from the public library. The balance of nature as it stands now would ensure that 99.9% of these animals would die very miserable deaths.
I think in the perfect PETA world, there would be no domesticated animals at all. But unless they have a time machine & can go back thousands of years to change the course of history, that ship has sailed.
At this point, the best humans can do, I think, is to be sure that animals that are domesticated live lives that are as comfortable as possible…“freeing” them certainly would be cruel punishment.
IF (big, big if) you really wanted to get rid of all domestic animals, you could just prevent them from mating and wait for them to die their natural deaths. Then you would only have wild animals. I guess you would have to euthanize turtles and other long-lived animals that couldn’t be released in the wild.
As you probably know from my posts of PETA I am not fan. I wish I knew where they went astray because they are so outside the relam of rational though on the subject at hand it verges on the cultish.
I’ve never been a fan of PETA, because I simply believe that animals aren’t humans: they don’t have the same feelings or intelligence or status that humans do. However, with that said, alot of people feel sympathy towards animals (hence, we have pets), and that creates emotional values that we trasure in animals. And that creates PETA.
I’m not a fan, either. I don’t think animals should have the same rights as people though I do think that some of them have emotions and some species, such as chimps, approach sentience. I have no problem with killing and eating animals, but I feel strongly that they should be kept in humane conditions and endure no more pain in their slaughter than is absolutely necessary.
Nor do I have a problem with animal testing as long as it is done in a fashion which causes the animal as little distress as possible. (And from what I’ve heard from animal researchers who have posted on the SDMB, most of them are very concerned with the animals’ well-being.) I think sometimes the words “animal testing” creates an emotional image of some mad scientist torturing animals just to see what happens.
For me, respect for animals means that we should respect that they can feel physical pain and some emotional attatchements and should try to avoid inflicting unecessary pain in either area. If PETA espoused those values, I’d be marching along side them.
I honestly don’t understand their objection to guide dogs and other working animals. I’ve met quite a few of them, having experience with guide dog pre-training and meeting drug dogs. They’re all happy and excited to be doing their job. (One drug dog I knew would quiver and dance with excitement when she knew she was going to do a search.) Many of them seem rather proud of it. Even racing animals (who are well-treated by their owners) seem to just love the competition.
That might be true, but to some of PETA members/supporters/people on the extreme of the animal rights movement it’s also irrelevant. One of the arguments that was used to justify slavery in the 16th-19th centuries was that by taking somebody out of Africa and enslaving them, you were doing them a favor, and improving their lives and standard of living. That sort of argument is rightly condemned today, because people realize that improving somebody’s living standards is no good justification for enslaving them.
It’s the same way with animals, in that sense. Taking them out of the wild might be physically better for them, but it’s still enslaving them, and if you believe that other, non-human animals should have the same rights as human beings, then that slavery is still immoral.
I think (although I’m not sure), that part of the objection is the fact that we have bred the dogs to be of service to us in the first place, taking away their natural desires, and shaping them to desire unnatural things.
But as I said before, now that we have done that, isn’t it better to let the dog live the life he was bred to live? You can’t take the breeding out of him.
I love animals too, but arguing about PETA is pointless. Its an organization that is simply based on a flawed concept. That concept being How to feel good about yourself and impress others by defending animals.
The most important thing to remember about them is what’s the first letter in PETA stand for? People. Its not about actually improving animal welfare (like organizations such as The Humane Society or the ASPCA or local shelters) so much as it is about being seen trying to.
They remind of those TheTruth.com assholes. They’re not interested in improving anyone’s health. They’re interested in making themselves feel important by showing what they consider the ‘ignorant masses’ how big tobacco is duping them.
At their worst I think PETA is a quasi-terrorist organization that I would like to see exposed & disbanded.