**The content and links in this article may potentially contain or lead to sensitive images of animal abuse, proceed with caution.**
Us humans love animals. We cherish them for their importance to our world and the joy they bring to their lives. We understand their lives to be as fragile as ours and seek to protect them when possible. However, it seems when a vegan shows a deep care for animal life, our view on animal rights seems to shift in some weird and ugly ways.
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is a non profit animal rights organization that has become one of the most controversial activist groups today. Having been around since 1980, PETA has done a lot of advocacy for animal rights and have racked up quite a repertoire of controversies that people use as reasons for their dislike of PETA.
For some, the criticism of PETA doesn’t go much further than a simple dislike of veganism. A lot of people find vegans overall to be annoying or preachy and discount the movement as a whole from this perception.
This is a remarkably shallow position to hold. Regardless of what you believe about the movement, animals and their well being is incredibly important to many people and vegans believe the work they do is important to animal well being. Placing such importance on generalizations of a whole movement is an excuse to avoid engaging with the concept of veganism as a whole.
A lot of our consumption habits conflict with our ethics surrounding the treatment of animals, and confronting that cognitive dissonance brings out an instinctive defensive position against vegans and veganism for a lot of people. It’s always an uncomfortable feeling to confront your own beliefs, but avoiding that feeling leads to stagnation in your own beliefs and disregarding ideas you might otherwise agree with.
However, some have more serious concerns about PETA. For a lot of folks, their dislike of PETA comes from concerns about them being dog killers. That they are over zealous when it comes to the euthanasia of pets. While this would be a valid concern if true, the truth of the story has been misconstrued thanks to and to the benefit of meat companies.
The narrative of PETA killing pets has originated from campaigns by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), most notably the website PetaKillsAnimals.com launched in 2005. This website is a laundry list of reasons to not support PETA, and full of claims of what their motives truly are. Such as: “PETA’s pro-killing attitude is part of its core—and it should shock any animal lover.”
This non profit was started by Richard Berman, a lobbyist who has worked for several meat companies in his career including when he started the CCF. As far as judging the trustworthiness of sources is concerned, it doesn’t get more dubious than a man who works for meat companies advocating against the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Berman will point out what at first seems like an insanely high rate of euthanasia, almost 50,000 animals from 1998 to 2023 (while making little mention of the over 10,000 animals who were deferred to other shelters for adoption, sterilized and returned to the owners, or adopted outright). Without the wider context from PETA and the overall world of animal adoption, this stat alone doesn’t give you nearly enough information to understand the wider world of animal adoption.
PETA has never run or claimed to have run a traditional adoption shelter that you may be familiar with. PETA’s shelter in Norfolk, Va. doesn’t turn away animals, as PETA doesn’t want to release more stray dogs that live poor quality of life and often painful deaths or keep pets in hostile situations with owners that don’t want them. Many owners after being turned away by shelters kill their pets in ways worse than a lethal injection.
PETA’s shelter also doesn’t adopt a no kill policy as the amount of animals they take in make it near impossible to provide suitable living standards for every animal. Shelters with a no kill policy either keep animals isolated in cages where they become depressed or violent, keeping animals locked away deteriorating mental states that cause them to be undesired by adopters, or animals are uncaged in an enclosed space. This runs the risk of injuries between the animals fighting each other, disease spreading, or unsanitary living conditions.
Lastly, PETA’s shelter also accepts animals from folks who have an animal that needs to be put down and will peacefully put them down at low to no cost. This is a tremendously helpful service for those with animals that have terminal illnesses or painful injuries that can’t be remedied.
“PETA is proud to be a shelter at which animals in need of a merciful death don’t have the door slammed in their faces, a place where people in our community and in poverty-stricken areas surrounding our southern Virginia headquarters, the Sam Simon Center, can come to receive that respectful, considerate final service to their animal companions,” PETA responds on the counter website PetaKillsAnimalsScam.com
As sad as euthanasia can be, the amount of animals that have been created by animal breeders have created a situation where it is unsustainable to create perfect conditions for every animal that needs a home. It’s a difficult process for everyone involved, but what is being observed here is a symptom of a larger problem stemming from a society that systematically abuses animals. Not a rogue pet killing organization.
The highly publicized case of Maya has also been misconstrued to paint an unfair picture. Maya was a dog that PETA had mistakenly taken from its family and had put down the day the dog was taken.
This story is often cited to show PETA’s lack of care for animals, but the details of the case don’t support this conclusion once you look into it. PETA were called in to remove wild dogs from the area as they were harming livestock in the area. They were told animals with no collar and running free in the trailer park where the livestock was were wild dogs. The chihuahua had escaped the yard of the family home, and because the owners weren’t home there was no way for PETA to know the mistake they were making. There were no other pets taken from the area that day either.
Once PETA realized the error they apologized for the tragedy that had occurred and settled the incident with the family in court. Both parties agreed the incident was an accident, and PETA paid the family $49,000 for what happened.
“Indeed, it is more probable under this evidence that the two women associated with PETA that day believed they were gathering animals that posed health and/or livestock threat in the trailer park and adjacent community. Without evidence supporting the requisite criminal intent, no criminal prosecution can occur,” stated Accomack County’s commonwealth Attorney Gary Agar regarding the case.
An awful tragedy undeniably, but far from an act of negligence or bloodthirstiness towards animals that many will have you believe. While it is incredibly easy to get wrapped up in such an emotionally charged narrative, stories like this show us how deceptive news stories can be without the proper context.
Checking for the sources of information you hear, the trustworthiness of the source delivering the information, and verifying the facts of the case for yourself are important steps for considering the information you take in day to day. No one is immune to misinformation, which is why taking these steps are important before coming to any conclusions on a topic.
PETA is not perfect. There is a conversation to be had about how the ways PETA chooses to advocate for veganism does not help their cause and bolsters other forms of bigotry. It’s difficult to have that conversation when there is so much misinformation and unwillingness to engage with the topic in good faith. PETA has done lots of activism for animal rights and has raised awareness for many industries that people may not realize animal abuse may be going on in such as the honey and wool industries.
We are doing a disservice to animals when we ignore the contributions made to their liberation and ignore the activism that’s meant to be in service of them. All of us could do more for animals than we currently are. While none of us may be able to single handedly change anything overnight, we all can take time to reflect and do what we can to do what’s right.