Get comfortable, this is going to be a long one.

I’ve mentioned before that I love animals. I have my whole life, as long as I can remember. I loved learning about animals, I loved my pets, and some of them have had a huge impact on my life. I try to convince people to use humane, live traps to get rid of pests and I take every opportunity I get to teach my girl about animals. My respect and love for every creature in the animal kingdom is immense, and I do not put up with people questioning that about me. It also so happens that I love eating meat, and cooking it. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is strongly against that and brainwashes people into thinking that their personal ethics should apply to everyone worldwide, and they will go to any lengths to show that. From fallacies, to morally questionable ads, to lies, and terrorism. Regardless of where you stand on the animal rights issue, PETA are a bunch of manipulative immoral assholes and should be avoided and shut down.

PETA’s mission statement: “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment“. Lets keep that in mind for the rest of this.

Everyone knows that PETA is against eating meat and animal testing (which I’ll get to later).  However, most people don’t realize the extreme PETA calls for and what it would cost them personally. The organization isn’t only against meat, they oppose the use of animals for human consumption in any manner. “Going vegan is the best resolution you can make“. That means no meat, no dairy, eggs, fish, honey, gelatin or anything else which comes from animal products.

In fact, PETA also advocates that owners feed their pets a vegan diet. “If you are concerned about your companion animals’ health and about the cruelty of the meat industry, now is the time to stop buying meat-based commercial pet food.” This is ludicrous. You want to talk about ethics? How about the ethics and ramifications of forcing an unnatural diet on an animal? Dictating what another human can eat is screwed up, but it’s on a whole different level when you dictate ethics of animal freedom, then turning around and force them to consume a diet they would never eat naturally.

And what is their stance on pets exactly anyways? Officially speaking, they don’t want people to give up pets, but also advocate steps to control the pet population and ask that people go to shelters, not breeders to adopt animals. That’s great, I agree completely. But it becomes confusing when you look at the details.

“…we believe that it would have been in the animals’ best interests if the institution of “pet keeping” […] never existed” Tracing the history of pets one would find that it started when early humans formed a symbiotic bond with wild dogs. The humans would provide the dogs with food, and the dogs would deter more dangerous animals from venturing too close. No longer did the wolves have to endanger themselves hunting or go weeks without catching prey. Pet keeping started with a huge benefit to the pet and life for them only got more comfortable as time went on.

PETA’s website currently features a large header with the words “Animals are not ours to […] use for entertainment…”. I use my cat for entertainment all the time. We play together, I take pictures of him, I laugh when he tries to jump somewhere and misses, and I give him hugs and attention. When I had dogs, we’d entertain our selves playing fetch. We’d throw balls into the lake at the cottage and the whole family would marvel at them jumping off the dock. So by PETA’s standard, I and anyone else who enjoys a pets company should not be allowed that gift as it provides entertainment. Oh, and they don’t just stop at regular household pets. “Optimally, humans should be relied upon for support of the disabled rather than working dogs and other animals—it is too common for animals to be exploited and abused.” PETA is also against service animals for those in need. While they may state officially they aren’t against pets, it sure seems that they push members in the opposite direction.

In its war against animal abuse, PETA has used some very questionable advertising tactics. Almost everyone has seen ads featuring animals being abused, crammed into tiny pens, viciously killed and otherwise treated terrible. This happens. I’m not going to say it doesn’t. However, this is not how farming is legally carried out in the civilized world. We have animal rights laws which prohibit all these practices shown. Yes, it still happens, but so does child abuse. The law is there to prevent it and punish those who do. Not only the law, but the customers too. I can attest that working in the food industry part of our training is to recognize and reject meat which shows signs of abuse. I’m not kidding, we spent an entire class going over various types of meat, what it should look like healthy, what bruises look like, unusual lacerations and clotted blood. By accepting this meat we could be held responsible and thus it is in our best interest to send it back. Having said that, I’ve never seen a piece of meat which needed to be sent back in over a decade working in kitchens. The ads PETA shows are taken from companies who end up getting charged, are years old and out of date with current laws, or from farms in other countries where the regulations are much different. Sometimes they are straight up fake. They even attack the wool industry, which doesn’t kill the animals, with isolated incidents and exaggerated claims. (In this particular case I’d also like to point out the ridiculous, underhanded and cowardly claim by Jona Weinhofen that he was “victimized by farmers” who defended them selves after he attacked them.)

But these aren’t PETAs most offensive ads by far. They go so far as to equate animal farming with the victims of the holocaust, the KKK, rape, and even domestic terrorism. This is plain outrageous and disgusting. I love animals, but to equate animal meat to the suffering of other human beings is the lowest form of low. Animals deserve rights too, but the needs of humans comes first. And PETA agrees, even if they decide to act like childish hypocrites about it.

It’s no secret PETA strongly opposes animal testing. They’ll go so far as to carry out acts of terrorism on labs where animal testing is carried out (but I’ll get to the in a bit). Despite the fact that cures and treatments have been developed for caner, smallpox, polio, AIDS and diabetes among countless others, PETA claims “that the majority of animal experiments do not contribute to improving human health“. Contrarily,  the Foundation for Biomedical Research has said “Animal research has played a vital role in virtually every major medical advance of the last century – for both human and veterinary health.” 

Notice that diabetes was in bold a couple sentences back? It has a very special connection to the executives of PETA. One of them in particular actually. Mary Beth Sweetland is a vice-president of PETA and suffers from type-1 diabetes. She attributes her good health to a vegan life style and claims that it keep her disease under control. However she also takes daily doses of insulin, a diabetes treatment derived from animal products, first used in 1922 after research done through animal testing. The vice-president of the organization which claims animal testing is useless and should never happen, relies on animal testing to live her day to day life. “[My medicine] still contains some animal products — and I have no qualms about it…. I don’t see myself as a hypocrite. I need my life to fight for the rights of animals“. Read that again, go ahead…She shows no remorse. No respect towards the animals she so strongly fights to free, for giving their lives so she can have hers. Hypocrite isn’t even a strong enough word. You can not condemn others to suffering and death but make an exception only for your self. If other peoples lives are not worth animal testing, neither is Mary Beth Sweetlands. Remember, if you support and give your money to PETA, you are paying this woman’s salary.

Sadly, these aren’t even the worst things PETA does. Behind all the smiles, cute animals and bullshit, is something even more dangerous. Please read this carefully and let it sink in. You probably won’t believe me at first, but I will prove it to you. If you support People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), you are vicariously supporting at least two different domestic terrorist groups.  Has it sunk in? With all the fear mongering going on across the globe right now, millions of people openly and happily support domestic terrorism and encourage other to do so. Both the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front are labelled as domestic terrorist groups by the FBI, and both of them have received support, praise, and funding from PETA. Most notably they donated $70 000, that is seventy-thousand dollars, to convicted arsonist Rodney Coronado, a member of the ALF for legal defense fees after he was charged with fire bombing a research lab. Again, if you give money to PETA you are supporting terrorism. The scary thing is, PETA doesn’t even try to hide it. PETAs website says of the ALF “The ALF,” which is simply the name adopted by people acting illegally in behalf of animal rights, breaks inanimate objects such as stereotaxic devices and decapitators in order to save lives.” and compares them to “The Underground Railroad and the French Resistance“. Ingrid Newkirk, the president and founder of PETA has said of Coronado “[he] is a very committed Native American animal rights activist and a decent person.” and “I think that if we hadn’t provided him with a good legal defense he wouldn’t be back out doing productive things in the community again — like the good person that he is. We are very happy to have done that.” In fact, at his trial, the federal prosecutor implicated Newkirk in the crime. Firebombing buildings is something PETA considers a productive thing in the community…

But Coronado isn’t the exception. PETA is very friendly with convicted criminals and terrorists. Between 2002-2005, Gary Yourofsky was employed as PETAs official national lecturer. Yourofsky has been banned from both Canada, and Great Britain as a result of his extremism and has gone on record saying “If an ‘animal abuser’ were killed in a research lab firebombing, I would unequivocally support that, too.” Again, this man was PETAs official national lecturer and was the guy who went to high schools to talk about the organization and what the students could do to be involved. A proud convicted fellon was the one PETA wanted talking to students. All these ties to PETA were so strong in fact that the FBI investigated them on suspicions of terrorism. There is no denying that support for PETA is support of extremism and terrorists.

Though PETA doesn’t require members to follow a vegan lifestyle, Newkirk has said “Eating meat is primitive, barbaric, and arrogant.” However, she has also stated “Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They are all mammals“. Consider those two statements for a moment. Ingrid considers all animals to be the same, have the same rights and treatments. Therefore animals should be held to the same standard as human which means that animal hunting other animals, as they do naturally is against the ideals of PETAs president. If you’re willing to separate our morals based on our species then you have to recognize that we are different and must have special rights.

PETA is not the kind loving group that so many people equate them with. There have been protests in the name of PETA in front of humane societies for euthanizing animals while the reality is that PETA put 1675, nearly 90%, of the animals it rescued in 2012 to sleep. They oppose zoos because “The zoo community regards the animals it keeps as commodities, and animals are regularly bought, sold, borrowed, and traded without any regard for established relationships.” which is an incredibly simplified vision and usually not true.  They try to indoctrinate young children without parental consent, sometimes even criminalizing the parents themselves. They are underhanded liars, have no regard for other human beings or their suffering, hold themselves to a double standard and worst of all PETA supports terrorism (I’m not sure I can say that enough).

I don’t agree that we shouldn’t harm animals at all. I love eating meat, I love cooking meat, I love eating and cooking other animal products, I love using animal products for every day things (speaking of which, if you’re 100% against using animals in any way, have a look at all the things you take for granted with animal byproducts in them). I strongly support animals rights and being as humane as possible when we have to kill animals. But regardless of where you personally stand on the animal right chart, be it total vegan or Ted Nugent, please don’t give any support to PETA, expose them as the ass holes they all are.