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Revision as of 08:53, 21 June 2006

File:PETAlogo.JPG
Logo of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is a prominent animal rights organization. Founded in 1980, it has its headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, a stated 850,000 members, and over 100 employees worldwide. Outside the U.S., there are affiliated offices in the UK, [1] India, [2] Germany [3] Asia, and the Netherlands. [4] There is also peta2 Street Team for high school and college-age activists. [5] Ingrid Newkirk is PETA's international president.

PETA's philosophy is that "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." [6] In support of that position, it focuses on four core issues: factory farming, [7] [8] vivisection or animal testing, fur farming, and animals in entertainment, as well as fishing, the killing of animals regarded as pests, abuse of backyard dogs, and cock fighting. The organization works through public education, undercover investigations, animal rescue, and government lobbying. It also takes in animals, including strays and those given to PETA by their owners, finding homes for some and euthanizing the rest.

The organization has been criticized for its support of direct action carried out by activists in the name of the Animal Liberation Front, and for the actions of some of its employees with regard to their treatment of animals. [9]

PETA's philosophy

File:IngridNewkirk.jpg
PETA's president and co-founder Ingrid Newkirk

PETA operates under the principle that animals are not to be eaten, worn, used for work or servitude, experimented upon, or used for entertainment. In support of that position, it focuses on four core issues: factory farming, vivisection or animal testing, fur farming, and animals in entertainment, and strongly advocates a vegan lifestyle. [6]

PETA also deals with other related animal rights issues, such as fishing, the killing of animals regarded as pests, pet abuse, and cock fighting. It works through public education, undercover investigations, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns.[6]

History

The group first came to public attention in 1981, when it became involved in the Silver Spring monkeys case. Alex Pacheco, one of PETA's founders, conducted an undercover investigation of a primate laboratory, documenting evidence of abuse and neglect. The investigation resulted in Dr Edward Taub being charged with animal cruelty, and though his eventual convictions were overturned on appeal, the National Institutes of Health cancelled its grant to his laboratory. [10]

Other highlights of the organization's campaigns include:

  • 1983: successfully stopped a United States Department of Defense "wound lab" which had planned to fire missiles into dogs and goats.
  • 1984: released more than 70 hours of videotape shot in the University of Pennsylvania head-injury laboratory, showing the treatment of primates there. The Secretary of Health and Human Services subsequently cut off all funding to the laboratory and the experiments were stopped. In the same year, a Texas slaughterhouse to which 30,000 horses were taken each year from all over the United States, then allegedly left to starve outside without shelter, was closed after a PETA campaign.
  • 1985: revealed details of the treatment of dogs at the City of Hope laboratory in California. The government fined the center $11,000 and suspended more than $1,000,000 in federal funding.
  • 1986: stopped the total-isolation confinement of chimpanzees at a Maryland research laboratory called SEMA. Dr. Jane Goodall called her tour of the SEMA lab "the worst experience of my life."
  • 1987: stopped a plan by Cedars-Sinai, California's largest hospital to ship stray dogs from Mexico into California for experiments. In the same year, they launched the Compassion Campaign to fight cosmetics and personal-care product testing on animals. By 1989, PETA had persuaded nearly 500 companies, including Mary Kay and Amway, to go "cruelty-free."
  • 1988: secret video shot inside East Carolina University and distributed by PETA showed an inadequately anesthetized dog undergoing surgery during a classroom exercise. The university subsequently declared a moratorium on the use of live animals.
  • 1990: exposed the alleged beating of orangutans by Las Vegas entertainer Bobby Berosini, who used the primates in a nightclub act. His captive-bred wildlife permit was suspended by the U.S. Department of the Interior, and his show closed. Four years later, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled in PETA’s favor and overturned a Las Vegas jury’s $3.2 million defamation award to Berosini. In the same year, the Caring Consumer Campaign succeeded in persuading Estée Lauder and 40 other companies to halt animal testing.
  • 1991: the Silver Spring monkeys case receives a unanimous, positive ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, the first time that a case involving animals in laboratories had been heard by the court.
  • 1992: PETA undercover investigators revealed the details of U.S. foie gras production, documenting the force-feeding of geese. Police subsequently conducted the first-ever raid in the United States, and possibly in the world, on a factory farm, and many restaurants removed foie gras from their menus. In the same year, PETA testified at the first-ever U.S. congressional hearing on the use of animals in circuses, rodeos, films, and other types of entertainment.
  • 1993: General Motors gave PETA a statement of assurance that it had ended the use of live pigs and baboons in crash tests after a PETA campaign. In the same year, L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics company, signed a worldwide ban on animal testing, following a PETA campaign. PETA also revealed details of scabies experiments using dogs and rabbits at Wright State University. The university was subsequently charged with violating the Animal Welfare Act, and the experiments ended.
  • 1994: Buckshire Corporation, a laboratory animal breeding facility, was charged with violations of the Animal Welfare Act after a 38-page complaint was submitted by PETA. A furrier is charged with cruelty to animals following the release of PETA videotapes showing a California fur rancher electrocuting a chinchilla by clipping wires to the animal’s genitals. It was the first time in U.S. history that a furrier was charged with cruelty.
  • 1999: a North Carolina grand jury handed down the first-ever felony cruelty indictments against pig-farm workers after an undercover PETA investigator videotaped workers beating lame pigs with wrenches, and skinning and dismembering a conscious pig.
  • 2000: successfully campaigned for 11 months against McDonalds to implement more stringent welfare standards.
  • 2001: launched a successful campaign against Burger King. After months of vocal public pressure, the fast-food giant agreed to implement the welfare standards demanded by PETA. These standards increased the amount of cage space given to laying hens and promised unannounced inspections of slaughterhouses, among other things. [1] [2] In this same year, the group launched a very public, but unsuccessful campaign to have the University of South Carolina change its mascot from the Gamecock. The group contended that the name promoted cock fighting, but the school stood firm and kept the mascot name, saying that cock fighting had not been legal in South Carolina for more than a century, and the mascot was a representation of the fighting power of a gamecock, not indicative of any promotion of cockfighting.
  • 2005: PETA sued Feld Entertainment (producer of Ringling circus and Disney on ice) saying Feld ran a spying operation on the PETA organization run by an ex-CIA employee with the intent to harm or destroy PETA. [3] After nine hours of deliberation on March 15, 2006, a Fairfax County, Virginia jury found that Ringling Bros. did not harm or conspire against PETA, and the case was dismissed. [4]
  • 2006: PETA persuaded J. Crew and Ralph Lauren to not sell fur. They also persuaded Welch's to end animal testing.

Campaigns

PETA Lettuce Ladies in Columbus, Ohio

PETA is well known for its aggressive media campaigns, public demonstrations, and attacks on large corporations for their alleged mistreatment of animals. In 2003, PETA received media attention for its boycott of Kentucky Fried Chicken. PETCO and Procter & Gamble are other examples of companies PETA says are exploiting animals for profit. According to PETA, PETCO confines animals in filthy enclosures, where they are commonly left to die, and Procter & Gamble tests its products on animals. On April 12, 2005, PETA announced it had ended its boycott against PETCO, in part because of PETCO's decision to end sales of large birds in its stores.

Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC)

PETA has a major campaign targeting Kentucky Fried Chicken that has included more than 10,000 demonstrations worldwide and support from the Dalai Lama, Al Sharpton, Paul McCartney, and Dick Gregory, among others. PETA is requesting that KFC require that its suppliers adopt the welfare recommendations of KFC's own animal welfare committee, including stopping the breaking of birds' limbs and drowning conscious birds in tanks of scalding water [5]. This campaign came under heavy criticism in the Republic of Ireland after members of PETA handed out graphic pictures of dead chickens and buckets of fake blood and feathers to school children.

Circuses

PETA regularly protests circuses that use animals, especially targeting Ringling Brothers, accusing them of using abusive methods to train their animals and keeping them in inhumane conditions when not performing.[6]

Jesus was a Vegetarian

Several PETA commercials have used Christian themes to promote vegetarianism, including one claiming that Jesus was a vegetarian, and another featuring a pig with the caption "He Died for Your Sins." [7]

Lettuce Ladies

PETA's 'Lettuce Ladies' are women, some of them Playboy models, who appear publicly in bikinis made to look like lettuce leaves, and distribute information about the vegan diet. [8] There is a lesser-known male counterpart to the Lettuce Ladies, called the Broccoli Boys. [9]

Name changes of cities

PETA regularly asks towns and cities whose names in its view are suggestive of animal exploitation to change their names. In April 2003, they offered free veggie burgers to the city of Hamburg, New York, in exchange for changing its name. PETA also campaigned in 1996 to have the town of Fishkill, New York, change its name, claiming the name suggests cruelty to fish. (The root "kill", found in many New York town names, is Dutch for "creek".)

In October 2003, the group urged the town of Rodeo, California, to change its name because it invokes images of the sport of rodeo, which they claim is harmful to animals, even though the town's name is pronouced differently than a cowboy 'rodeo'. As a replacement name, they suggested Unity, an acknowledgement of Union Oil's role in saving the area economically in the late 19th century. PETA offered to donate $20,000 worth of veggie burgers to local schools if the name was changed. The town declined.

Anti-fur campaigns

PETA may be best known for its long-running campaign, "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur", in which activists and celebrities appear partially nude to express their opposition to fur-wearing. This tactic has resulted in widespread media coverage. On 21 May 2006 they held a high-profile naked protest on St Peters Hill, near St Paul's Cathedral, in central London to continue their protest against the use of real bear fur in the Bearskins used by the Foot Guards.[10] Another campaign was called: "Here's the rest of your fur coat" . [11]

Youth Education

File:Grrrcover2001.jpg
Joaquin Phoenix on the cover of PETA's Grrr! Magazine

PETA runs a website geared towards children at Petakids.com with contests, online games, online videos, a free subscription to Grrr! Magazine, comics, celebrities and music that is supportive of animal causes. The website also provides an E-News list that has seen an increase from 50,000 to 250,000 subscribers.

PETA teamed up with bands such as Deftones, STUN, and Further Seems Forever, to record radio spots on a variety of topics, including reporting animal abuse. The youth-oriented web site Peta2.com featured over 50 interviews from bands such as Yellowcard, The Shins, The Used, and Good Charlotte. PETA’s efforts were widely covered, including by MTV, Rolling Stone, AP, and Revolver.

PETA2 dispatched activist, volunteers, and staffers on 61 summer concert and skateboard tours including the Warped, Phish, and Morrissey tours. At these events, PETA screened the "Meet Your Meat" video and spoke with and handed out information to approximately 3,500,000 youths[citation needed].

Animal Liberation Project

The most recent controversy generated by PETA is its "Are Animals the New Slaves?" campaign. [12] The campaign involves a tour of the United States and featured a display in which images oppressed minorities, including black slaves, Indians, child laborers, and women, were juxtaposed with those of chained elephants and slaughtered cows [13]. The campaign was criticised by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [14], and PETA temporarily suspended the campaign [15], but decided to continue after discussions with the group. African-American activist and legendary comedian Dick Gregory would go on to explicitly state in a PETA campaign that when he saw animals in cages, "slavery" was the only word that came to mind.

Community Animal Project

PETA has several programs helping cats and dogs in poorer areas of southeastern Virginia and northern North Carolina. PETA has spayed or neutered over 25,000 cats and dogs for reduced price or for free in the last few years. The organization comes to the aide of neglected dogs and cats who are severely ill and injured, and it pursues cruelty cases against extreme cases. They offer free humane euthanasia services to counties that kill unwanted animals via gassing or shooting. PETA also offers free euthanasia to people whose companion animals are severely ill/dying but who cannot afford euthanasia at a veterinarian. PETA paid for and built a cat shelter in a North Carolina county. Each year the organization builds and sets up hundreds of sturdy dog houses, with straw bedding, for dogs that are chained outside all winter. PETA also creates and airs numerous public service announcements and billboards urging people to help control the rampant pet overpopulation crisis through spaying/neutering, and adopting animals from shelters instead of purchasing cats and dogs from pet stores or breeders.

Criticism of PETA

PETA has been accused of financially contributing to eco-terrorist groups such as the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front. In response, PETA claims that they have never financially supported any illegal or violent activities, drawing a distinction between supporting the eco-terrorists and supporting their actions. [16].

Critics also point to a statement from Alex Pacheco, one of PETA's founders that "arson, property destruction, burglary, and theft are acceptable crimes when used for the animal cause" [17] as a reason that PETA should lose its status as a non-profit organization. However, Pacheco has not been with the organization for years. [18]

Some feminists, particularly ecofeminists such as Carol Adams oppose PETA's sexual ads often featuring nude or barely clothed women; they consider the ads objectification.

Many people are also lead to belive that PETA's ideals are based more on emotional/common society ethics and not logical thinking.

Targeting of vulnerable groups

PETA has also been accused of targeting "vulnerable or emotionally sensitive" groups, particularly teenage girls. PETA was ordered by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority to discontinue claims it made about milk consumption in a campaign targeted at school children, concluding that the compaign "played on children's anxieties and were likely to cause some children undue fear and distress."[19] The ad featured trading cards with statements such as "Sue's milk-drinking led to her battle with zits." Other cards claimed that dairy products cause obesity, belching and flatulence, and excessive nasal mucus build up. In response to the ruling, PETA modified the cards to address the Standards Authority's regulations.

Additionally, PETA has been severely criticized for distributing graphic pamphlets to children attending school plays. According to PETA's website [20]the pamplets are geared toward making parents aware of how their actions affect their children. PETA claims that pamphlets are never given to children under the age of 13, though even at that age one must question the ability of most children to separate logical arguments from those based wholly on emotional impact. One pamplet, addressing the wearing of fur, was titled "Your Mommy Kills Animals"[21] and featured an illustration of a mother-figure slicing a knife into a rabbit's stomach. Another pamphlet was titled "Your Daddy Kills Animals!"[22] and showed an image of a father-figure gutting a fish. The latter pamphlet declared that "Since your daddy is teaching you the wrong lessons about right and wrong, you should teach him fishing is killing. Until your daddy learns it's not fun to kill, keep your doggies and kitties away from him. He's so hooked on killing defenseless animals, they could be next."[23]

Animal cruelty and euthanasia

In June 2005, police investigators staked out a garbage dumpster in Ahoskie, North Carolina after discovering that over one hundred dead animals had been dumped there over the course of a month.

Police observed PETA employees Andrew Benjamin Cook and Adria Joy Hinkle approach the dumpster in a van registered to PETA and dump 18 dead animals in a garbage dumpster behind a grocery store. Thirteen more were found inside the van. The animals had been euthanized by PETA in shelters in Northampton and Bertie counties. PETA condemned the dumping as against their policy, and suspended Cook. Police charged Cook and Hinkle each with 31 felony counts of animal cruelty and eight misdemeanor counts of illegal disposal of dead animals.[24]

Extremism and support of industrial sabotage

Adrian R. Morrison DVM PhD, has accused PETA of using edited and out-of-context video footage to allege cruelty to animals. In particular, he cites an example of videos purporting to show cats being embalmed alive by the Carolina Biological Supply Company being given to the USDA as evidence of animal cruelty. He claims that subsequent testimony demonstrated that the cats had not been alive and that the video was being used an in an attempt to convey false information [25].

Following a complaint from the Research Defence Society, the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled that a PETA mailing about vivisection was misleading. [26]

In North America, opponents have sardonically formed a group also known as "PETA," except that the letters stand for "People Eating Tasty Animals". PETA was involved in legal action for several years in the 1990s to shut down the competing web site operated by this group.

Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on PETA

In the first episode of season 2, Penn and Teller devoted an entire episode to criticism of PETA, accusing the organization of misleading its members, euthanizing two-thirds (68%) of the animals it received, funding eco-terrorist(Rodney Coronado of the Animal Liberation Front), using drugs and treatments that were developed from animal based research, and ultimately putting its political agenda of animal rights over the welfare of human beings.

Holocaust on Your Plate

One of the most controversial PETA campaigns was their Holocaust on Your Plate campaign. In it PETA claimed that: "like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps." [27]

The Anti-Defamation League strongly criticized the implication of moral equivalence between the killing of animals and the Holocaust. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League criticised the campaign saying "the effort by Peta to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent... Rather than deepen our revulsion against what the Nazis did to the Jews, the project will undermine the struggle to understand the Holocaust and to find a way to make sure such catastrophes never happen again," [28] Fred Zeidman, chair of the US Holocaust Memorial Council said of the campaign that PETA "has chosen to ignore common decency and to desecrate the memory of Holocaust victims, survivors and their families in its perverted effort to generate headlines."[29]A press release from the ADL stated:

PETA's effort to seek approval for their Holocaust on Your Plate campaign is outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights. Rather than deepen our revulsion against what the Nazis did to the Jews, the project will undermine the struggle to understand the Holocaust and to find ways to make sure such catastrophes never happen again.

PETA defended the comparison, saying that "the logic and methods employed in factory farms and slaughterhouses are analogous to those used in concentration camps," thereby attempting to justify their implicit claim that animal abuse is the moral equivalent of human genocide. PETA argued that in both the Holocaust and animal slaughter, there is a systematic "concept of other cultures or other species as deficient and thus disposable, and that this indifference allows the slaughter to continue." [30]. PETA also claimed the moral support of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, and used his statement "In relation to [animals] all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka" [31]. The use of this quote in this context was supported by Singer's grandson Stephen R. Dujack. [32] In May 2005, PETA apologized for the campaign while broadly defending the analogy.

PETA also came under heavy criticism from Jewish groups in 2003 when President Ingrid Newkirk sent a letter [33] to Yasser Arafat in response to a Jerusalem bombing attack in which a donkey was loaded with explosives and blown up, and also listed several other instances where animals were harmed during armed human conflicts. PETA was criticized for the letter from several corners for not asking Arafat to stop all violence, but only to refrain from using animals in the conflict. Gene Mueller of the Washington Times and Mike Bolton of the Birmingham News both wrote articles condemning the letter, and their criticism was joined by numerous columnists and pro-Israel organizations.

List of famous members and supporters of PETA

Famous members and supporters of PETA

Pandit*Ravi Shankar

Multimedia releases to benefit PETA

Notes

  1. ^ PETA UK
  2. ^ PETA India
  3. ^ PETA Germany
  4. ^ PETA Netherlands
  5. ^ PETA2 Street Team
  6. ^ a b c About PETA
  7. ^ "Cruelty to Animals: Mechanized Madness", PETA.
  8. ^ "Undercover investigations", PETA.
  9. ^ Freeman, Darren. "PETA workers face 25 felony counts in North Carolina", The Virginian Pilot, October 15, 2005
  10. ^ "PETA Milestones", June 10, 2006

References

Further reading

Official PETA sites

Other official PETA sites

Criticism of PETA

Sites critical of PETA
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