That’s actually PETA Senior Vice President MaryBeth Sweetland. But yes, it is the height of hypocrisy.
Edit: Rick beat me to the punch with MaryBeth’s quote.
Huh. Misread my cite, my apologies. The point stands however.
The one girl I know who embraces PETA seems to do it because she likes to look at herself and post pictures of herself in various stages of undress on her MySpace.
I don’t even know if I can muster up actual hate for PETA anymore. I honestly believe they are shooting themselves in the foot, as I know of no one in my generation or younger that actually buys what they are selling. That’s the thing about trolling: it’s unsustainable in the long run.
I’ve never seen anything to support that assertion. Even their positions on animal welfare/rights differ greatly. They support a lot of animal research (but with some reductions), they are in favor of responsible pet ownership, they oppose cruelty in raising of food animals but are not against eating animals, etc. They’re against hunting for any reason other than wildlife population management or food.
This is impressively ignorant, even for you. :dubious:
There’s a one-many lobbying team who runs some websites like activistcash.com and some others. He’s hired by the restaurant industry to try to discredit people who might increase restaurant costs or litigation. His two main focuses are animal welfare issues and MADD. If you hear someone claiming HSUS is like PETA, they probably have been taken in by this guy.
Seal hunters have stopped hunting juvenile seals at least 20 years ago because of protests. Of course, that won’t stop PETA or other extremist groups from still making this claim, as young seals are “cute”.
And of course, most of the opposition to seal hunting is based on cuteness in the first place.
Are you a Bears or Vikings fan? 
You don’t say.
Still, Friedo, I suspect you’d be unable to provide a cite showing that -all- cruelty-free cosmetics use recipes from companies which currently perform animal testing. Cosmetic testing on animals was banned in Britain in 1998 and was banned in the EU five years later. Clearly it’s possible to buy from companies which currently eschew animal testing for cosmetics. I can’t do anything about products or companies involved in animal tests decades ago but I can do my best to avoid products from companies which are still testing today.
Like I said, the testing lists are imperfect, but they’re a start.
One of my favorite early internet sites was Hunting Baby Fur Seals for Fun and Profit. It was a tongue in cheek site that had the feel of those late night ads for home businesses/MLM type of things.
Of course some people had no sense of humor about it. And some even thought the thing was for real. The hate mail that guy posted was hilarious.
And the Bonzai Kitty website where the guy had a how to on how to grow a baby kitten in a bottle to make it a Bonzai Kitty had some good mail too.
I remember that one! Oh, man - memories. Prodigy dial-up, watching GIFs sloowwwly load one line at a time … I kind of miss the nineties now.
I’m reasonably sure I’ve seen it on a bumper sticker somewhere. An oldie, but definately a goodie.
PETA are not part of ‘The Left’, whatever that might be.
PETA is particularly annoying for those of us who do support Animal Welfare causes (note Animal Welfare, not Animal Rights) because they are so out there with their insane campaigns, that they tend to paint every activity and organization related to animals with the same crazy brush.
That was OpalCat, here, where she was questioning whether its ethical for vegetarians to buy leather-bound books or some such nonsense.
Hmm, now I’m hungry for some buckeyes…
I wonder if this is because there were actually two different people handling it in each city - the San Jose guy didn’t really want to antagonize someone who was cooperating/seemed to want what was best for the sharks, but didn’t bother to communicate that to his Miami counterpart:
“Hey. Yeah, I’ve got two sharks here, need some help getting them released into the ocean. You can help me out? Hey, thanks man. Huh? Oh, they were living in a pizza restaurant for two years, and now they’re too big for the tank, yeah.”
I’m sure there are plenty of people, though, who join PETA because “hey, they help animals”, and aren’t really aware of what whackjobs they’re hooking up with.
:eek: Of all the ignorance mentioned in this thread, I think this takes the prize.
They actually have already- in 2000 PETA did this dumbass ‘Got beer?’ campaign, which it aimed at college students, claiming that beer was better for you than millk (Cecil actually did a column related to it). MADD got all up in their grill about it and they pulled the campaign, only to try to start it up again a couple years later in Canada. I’m they (PETA, that is) were delighted with the extra attention they got from it.
No, it was the same person, the woman who was in charge of the operation to “rescue” my sharks. She played nice with the media in San Jose, but the articles I saw in the Miami press quoted her with the lies I’ve written about.
You have a point, though. She probably didn’t want to antagonize us, as you say, but wanted PETA to come across as “The Hero” in Miami, perhaps thinking we’d never know.
I believe the ultimate credit for this bon mot goes to Terry Pratchett.
I agree with much of the grumbling about PETA’s tactics, hypocrisy, attention-whoring, ect. Compared to that, one particular grudge I still hold against them seems pretty minor, but rankles me in the mists of memory. Early in the explosion of the web, one guy registered the domain PETA.org. He put up a web site called People Eating Tasty Animals that featured links to anti-PETA information, as well as a lot of sites of interest to people who like the things PETA hates. When PETA woke up and realized they were missing the bus, they wrested the domain name away from the owner through lawsuits. They were a huge organization funded by the allowances of a lot of gullible 14-year-olds, but the guy who got the domain name first was just a guy holding down a job. Fucking pricks.