For the past couple months, we’ve been getting two or three solicitations a week from them. I have never been enamored with them anyway since I am not vegan and it would seem hypocritical to pretend to support them. But my wife has sent them money in the past. It now seems to me that they have morphed from being an animal rights organization to being a fund raising one. They are spending several dollars a month on this and I throw their junk away withone reading. Has something happened to the organization? Taken over by someone?
I’d encourage it. Anything to keep them away from animals.
Yeah. I’m dubious that they were ever an animal rights organization, as opposed to a ‘no non-human animals anywhere near the humans’ organization.
I always thought, without real knowledge, just thought they were just a bit too militant and adversarial for my tastes.
Yes I get solicitations all the time from them. Never sent a dime. I’m just on the mailing lists because I’ve donated to animal rights organizations, I suppose.
They’re 100% an animal-rights organization, with a touch of preferential utilitarianism, philosophies developed by Tom Reagan and Peter Singer. I disagree in some pretty profound ways with the philosophies, but the idea that they’re not animal rights in its purest form is not convincing to me at all.
That said, they’re also of the “any publicity is good publicity” mindset, and they’re massive trolls, believing that being trolls makes them hip and cool and gets more people to go vegan. Whether that’s an effective strategy? I dunno. But I know I don’t WANT it to be, so I try not to give them any attention, for much the same reason that I don’t give teenage edgelords any attention.
I haven’t noticed them for awhile, but I tuned them out long ago when it was revealed that their leader was knowingly using pork based insulin for her diabetes while castigating anyone else for doing so.
As an ex-JW who would’ve once courted death by refusing blood transfusions, this seemed liked cowardice as well as hypocrisy.
Believe what you will, but be prepared to back it up.
Full disclosure: I will now accept blood transfusions if necessary because I no longer believe in the Witness faith.
I suspect that the longer a non-profit exists, the more of it attention gets diverted to fundraising, so that after a while that becomes the main focus its activity.
I’ve gotten the impression for a long time that the best way to characterize them is as “performative”. That they aren’t really interested in animal welfare so much as making a big show of how concerned they are over animal welfare. It’s about ego gratification, not actually helping animals.
I’ll also point out that they have a history of killing animals, for all their posturing.
From the perspective of someone who has been around animal trainers, farmers, and others who breed and work with animals for at least 45 years, I can say that PETA and its sister organization ASPCA (which is not linked to local SPCAs, by the way), are universally loathed and feared by them. They have a fanatic fervor not in the slightest way inflected by rationality, reason, or sympathy with other human beings. They create enormous difficulties for people who have devoted their lives to working with animals, and they promulgate absurd lies (sheep shearing is brutal torture, letting lab animals loose to wander the countryside is a holy act of mercy …) They prey upon city people’s ignorant sympathies for animals and collect all kinds of money from them.
That this organization is successful and long-lived is a consequence of the vast ignorance of most humans about our relationship to animals, and also the various inhumane practices of treatment of domestic animals which rightly should be eliminated, but not by crazed ladies on a mission from God.
Without a doubt, the person who has been the best influence on the cattle industry has been Temple Grandin, who singlehandedly revolutionized slaughterhouse design to make it much easier for cattle to be calm and move freely, thus eliminating the previous abuse and force. She’s a hero, PETA is a group of fanatical extremists.
I follow their advice & bring cold animals in in winter time & warm them up.
I think they started out by trying to help animals. But it followed a progression of
We need to help animals!
We need everyone to help animals!
We need to get peoples’ attention, so they can help animals!
We need to get peoples’ attention!
We need to do whatever we can to get peoples’ attention!
Harming animals gets peoples’ attention!
We need to harm animals, to get peoples’ attention!
Look at us harming animals, aren’t we so virtuous for caring about animals?
Just saw the movie about her. What a special human-being.
I’m sure there’s a biography about her, I’m gonna look for it. I wanna know more.
Thanks, Ulfrieda, you have clarified a lot for me.
What I still don’t understand is why this barrage of snail mail just started a month or so ago. It will all go directly to trash, not collecting $200.
They’re like the obnoxious militant vegans–they hide under a cloak of humaneness and concern for animals, but what they’re really after is control over other humans and what they do. May PETA be consigned to the trash can of history, and may that process start soon.
I once donated to a hospital, in memory of a deceased friend. Years later, they keep soliciting me for $$. It must have cost them more than I originally gave them.
Do you have a link? I was always under the impression that they were really for animal welfare rather than animal rights, and didn’t really have much to do with each other besides being on the same side in many things.
Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the United States, sits firmly in the middle, learning towards PETA but much less performative. Their old name was also pretty deceptive, as it lead people to think their neighboorhood humane society was the same thing. And would donate to the national org accidentally.
Are you referring to Temple Grandin? She’s written several books, some for general audiences and others more specialized.
I’ve seen her speak, live, and seen her interviewed many times, and believe she would be a really fun person to know IRL.
PETA took off by advertising on MTV, back when they were culturally relevant, and they’re nothing but a PR firm, really. They don’t help animals.
Yeah–I don’t find @Ulfreida’s conflation of the two to be at all accurate. And a heads-up when looking for a cite about how awful they are: there’s some dude out there who gets paid by the restaurant industry and others to create sham websites attacking PETA, ASPCA, HSUS, MADD, CDC, and other groups. Berman and Company are really nasty, and you should be very careful when looking at anti-animal-welfare websites to be sure it’s not him–or if it is, to be extra diligent in your fact verification.
Okay, I stopped just remembering what I knew fifteen years ago and started googling.
There are three separate national organizations, all of them controversial.
PETA is the abolitionist fanatic group, committed to offensive and enraging public and private acts. I wouldn’t call them terrorists, but they use similar tactics to make headlines.
HSUS or Humane Society of the US, has been periodically mired in scandal. They have misrepresented themselves as rescue organization, but they are notable for euthanizing all the animals they ‘rescue’, donating nothing to local shelters but intimating they do, and paying their founder and CEO Wayne Pacelle (who stepped down due to sexual abuse scandals) the lion’s share of their take. They are the ‘respectable’ arm of PETA.
ASPCA also does not help local shelters, hoards its hundreds of millions of dollars in donations in offshore accounts, and is a shitty charity, but is not associated with PETA, my bad.
As everyone who knows anything about animal rescue will tell you, donations to your local shelter is the only recommended course, if that is where you wish to put your extra dough.
I second this heartily. Here in the southeast the euthanasia rate for small shelters is astronomical. I’ve now lived in two areas where a local push for a no-kill (in truth a low-kill, sensible rehoming, training, fostering, out-of-state placement) shelter has made an huge difference. Like, euth numbers going from 92% to 30% or less. Not overnight, of course, but once the facilities and programs were solid. None of the big “humane” orgs had anything to do with it, it was all grassroots funding.