Why do YOU hate PETA?

The BBQ Pit
1

There’s a lot of PETA bashing on this board, of which I wholeheartedly approve. I’m curious, though, if anyone else has actually had any run-ins with them, or reasons to personally hate them. Not that a reason is needed to hate and bash them; the fact that PETA is composed of a bunch or morons is quite sufficient. Here’s my story:

I used to be the general manager of a pizza restaurant in downtown San Jose. In 1998 the space next to my store became available for lease, so my boss (the owner of the restaurant) snapped it up and expanded the restaurant, tripling its size. One of the things he bought for the expansion was a 360 gallon aquarium, complete with two nurse sharks, Mike and Dale.

Those guys were awesome. I, and my staff, quickly fell in love with the sharks, and having them created something of a buzz around town. We fed them by hand, and would pet them as we fed them. I never knew fish could have personalities until I got Mike and Dale. For instance, the tank was located in my office, with the front facing out into the restaurant; the door to the office opened right near the side of the tank. Whenever I would enter, the sharks would dash to that end of the tank and start hamming it up. It’s hard to describe, but it was kind of like how a dog gets totally excited when you come home.

At one point, The Daily Show filmed a short segment in my restaurant specifically because of my sharks. They were doing a “Tale of Survival” story, about the mascot of the San Jose Sharks who tried to rappel from the rafters of the Arena and got stuck. TDS staff asked if there was anywhere close by that had actual sharks, and they were directed to my store. For some reason, only the second half of the story can be found in TDS archives, and the parts filmed in my store aired during the first half of the story. :frowning:

Unfortunately, about a year after we got them, Mike and Dale started to outgrow their aquarium. I started looking around for someone to take them, but didn’t have much luck. I tried the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, but IIRC they couldn’t take them because they didn’t have tanks at an appropriate temperature for my sharks.

As an aside - and this isn’t even about PETA yet - during this time I got all sorts of grief from people about this. Some hippy-type would come up to me, all outraged, and start in about how I had to get those sharks outta there - as if I didn’t already know that. I would try to patiently explain that I was trying to find them a new home, but it was never good enough. I had to get them out RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I always wanted to throttle these idiots - what the hell was I supposed to do, drive the sharks down to Santa Cruz and toss 'em off the end of the pier?

Anyway, I wasn’t looking for any compensation for my sharks, I just wanted to find them a home. I was looking into donating them to Caesar’s Palace, when PETA came along. I knew of the organization, but at the time I didn’t know how loopy they were (or maybe they hadn’t gone off the deep end yet?). They wanted to help, and I was happy with that. In early 2000 they put together a deal where the sharks were flown to Miami and released off of the Florida Keys, at no expense to my company. The lady I dealt with was very nice (at the time), and I thought it was a win-win situation.

The San Jose Mercury News showed up to cover the story when the day came to remove the sharks from my restaurant. The next day, a Sunday, the story ran. The article was fair - it impartially covered the story pretty much as I’ve written it here. The press in Miami, though, was a different story. I wasn’t witness to it, as it happened on the other side of the country, but apparently the arrival of my sharks caused a bit of a stir in the Miami press. When I heard of this, I started looking into it, to see what was being written and shown on television.

None of it was good. The lady I dealt with was all smiles-and-nice with my company, then turned around and painted us as the epitome of evil to the media in Miami. Instead of just telling the truth, they were helping out someone in need and finding a home for my sharks, PETA made it appear as though I was some cruel asshole who likes to torture animals, keeping the sharks in a tank that was “unkempt” to the point the sharks “could barely breathe.” And, of course, PETA came charging to the “rescue.” It was all such a bunch of fucking bullshit! And did the “fair and impartial” press in Miami contact me to get my side of the story? Of course not.

As much as I would have liked to take PETA to task for this, it wouldn’t have done any good. Being the manager of the restaurant, if I’d attacked them then my company name would have gotten involved, and things would have become unnecessarily ugly. So I let it go. I did, however, write a scathing email to the nitwit at the Miami Herald who wrote a rather inflammatory article, but she never got back to me. Surprise, surprise.

For my write up here, I tried to hunt down these articles to link them here. I found the SJ Mercury story, dated 2/6/00, in their archives, but I’d have to create an account to access the full article, which I’m not interested in doing. I did a search for “shark” in the Miami Herald’s archives, looking through the month of February 2000, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. But again, the search results only showed the first couple of lines of each story, and I can’t access the rest without an account.

So that is why I personally think PETA is a bunch of fucking idiots. Any others?

2

I’m a vegetarian, partially for animal-cruelty-based reasons. I also dislike animal testing of cosmetics/beauty products and try to avoid ones that use the process, though I’m in favor of (useful, logical) animal testing for medical products. I don’t proselytize on the subject.

I hate PETA because many of their campaigns end up tarring sensible people like me with the brush of idiot lunacy. I get that they’re trying to make a point with the “seakittens” campaign (rename fish to “seakittens” because otherwise people don’t give a damn about anything that isn’t cute and fluffy) and many others, but damn, most people just see stuff like that and think they’re lunatics who want animals to be able to vote and hold office or something.

I also hate PETA for their history of supporting various radical organizations, like speaking out in favor of radical action, monetarily helping the Animal Liberation Front in defending against lawsuits, and PETA’s founder helped ALF with some raids, allegedly.

And in a lot of ways, they’re the only ones out there for many issues. Most successful anti-animal-cruelty organizations are the “omg look at the puppies being beaten and starved!” types. I understand why. Those ads on TV totally dig in on my conscience - and tear ducts, for that matter. And PETA does help in the area of pets, including offering reduced cost or free pet neutering and offering free, compassionate euthanasia for pets whose owners cannot afford it (or for some communities who cannot afford to provide it at shelters), in some poor regions of the US.

But on the subject of treatment of food animals, PETA is the major player. Most people don’t know about what their meat goes through before it hits their tables, but some would certainly prefer that it be treated a lot better when it’s a living, breathing animal, and would be interested in knowing about what’s going on. Pulling stupid stunts isn’t the best way to go about it, and between that and their support of more radical organizations, PETA makes themselves look dangerous and unreliable, and makes those people who are concerned about such things look insane.

3

I find PETA both amusing and annoying. The amusing part: claiming that certain animals are like humans. A local Boston radio talk show guy (Howie Carr) always has some nut from PETA on-the day before Thanksgiving. This guy raves on and on about how turkeys are intelligent, and that it is a crime to kill and eat them. The fact is, a domestic turkey is pretty low on the intelligence scale, and they taste delicious. :smiley:
The annoying part: they don’t want people to have pet dogs and cats. I HAVE a dog, and I take good care of her-it is none of their damn business, that I enjoy my pet.:frowning:

4

PETA is real tough when they’re harassing blue haired little old ladies for wearing fur. If they want to impress me, they’ll need to start harassing biker gangs for wearing leather.

5

Moving thread from IMHO to The BBQ Pit.

6

I don’t like PETA, because they’re a bunch of douchebags who assume that anyone who has a pet has a slave. Not really, I wish I lived in the kind of luxury my dog does. The spoiled dog gets anything and everything she wants, sleeps whenever she wants, and might as well be a cat for all the work she does.

7

I hate PETA because they kill perfectly healthy animals. They get animals in and instead of finding homes for them, euthanize them. And they do this for 90% of the dogs and cats they get.

8

As a fisherman, I have a FEW reasons.

I wouldn’t even know where to start. The PETArds can rot in hell.

9

I was just telling myself the other day that if reincarnation is real I want to come back as a cat that has the life that my cats have. They get fed, cleaned up after, petted when they want it and ignored when they don’t, and don’t have to do a lick of work. Well, being neutered might have been a disadvantage…

10

I agree with Ferret Herder. I hate that a lot of us vegetarians who are interested in animal welfare end up get painted with the loony brush due to these morons.

11

This is very strange. Why would you tar-and-feather a business that’s cooperating with your agenda in full? If you think sharks shouldn’t live in tanks, and a business says “hey, we have sharks in tanks - can you help us release them?”, why wouldn’t you praise them to the skies? Isn’t this exactly the behavior PETA wants to encourage?

12

Because they’re basically the teabaggers of the left - a bunch of yahoos whose extreme rhetoric and stunts pretty much obscure whatever legimate concerns they may have.

13

Because PETA’s business is not releasing sharks. PETA’s business is soliciting donations from people who want sharks released. The harder it looks, the more the money flows. Wresting these mistreated fish from cruel owners draws a lot more donations than having somebody walk up and give you a couple of sharks.

14

I have no use for an organization that shows up at a restaurant and pickets it with a “meat is murder” rant. The last time they did this in my area I drove across down (as did many other people) to buy food from the establishment. I don’t remember what the outcome was but the restaurant did very well that day. The only message that hit the news was the success of the business.

The same organization was railing against large egg production facilities in my state in the middle of the swine flu epidemic (eggs are used in the vaccine process).

For any good they might do they burn their credibility to the ground with the stunts they pull.

15

They lie to people about animals and animal products. They regard animal rights as being above human rights.

16

I hate them for coming to the state in which I live, the lying scumbags, and telling shelters they’ll find new homes for some of their animals and then killing those animals and dumping the bodies.

I hate them for getting for getting away with it, and I hate that most likely that isn’t the first time and won’t be the last, either. And still there’s morons out there that give them money.

17

There’s two types of people:

  1. People who are for animal rights in some form or another (against corporate feed lots, against animal cruelty, against animal testing, against fur/leather). These people generally hold beliefs which can in some way be paraphrased as ‘treat living things with respect’. These people will generally acknowledge that it’s impossible to treat everything perfectly, and that if a pharmaceutical test may, say, yield a drug which is cheap to produce and prevents glaucoma, saving the vision and thus livelihood of countless humans may be worth the discomfort and even death of otherwise well-treated lab animals. They also acknowledge that what someone chooses to eat is really none of your damn business: your preferences are your own, and no one likes to go out to dinner with an asshole.
  2. PETA people, who refuse to acknowledge any shades of gray and believe that their moral beliefs are unassailable truths. They also seem to think that dressing up hot chicks in bikinis and having them strut around in public does something meaningful, when all it does is make me confused as to who I hate more, the black-and-white animal rights people or the “everything is offensive” feminist people.

Also, I haven’t read as much of what they say about other animals, but their stance on pet dogs is pretty reprehensible.

18

Anyone know a PETA member?

19

I should clarify that PETA approached me, not the other way around. I don’t know how that came about, I assume a customer got in touch with them. So perhaps in their twisted minds they really were “coming to the rescue.”

I’ve never given this much thought before, but now I’m wondering why the way they presented the story towards the media in San Jose, where my business was located, was so drastically different than the spin they gave the story for Miami. I mean, knowing what I do about PETA now, it seems out of character that they didn’t spread the same lies at home, where they could have hurt my business. Though I suppose it’s easier to make yourself look like the hero in a faraway place, where the “vanquished” aren’t present to counter the story.

20

They are extremists that think doing anything they want is alright if it’s for their goal.