PETA has alienated me, and I am, presumably, part of their exact target audience. Not that I was ever a hardcore supporter… i suppose i’ve just always felt vaguely sympathetic to their cause. I mean, I’m a vegetarian and I used to volunteer for the Humane Society when I lived in Vegas by working on adoption drives on the weekends. Animal cruelty as I define it pisses me off. But it turns out PETA and I have very different notions about what ethical treatment means.
Basically, some PETA employees are on trial right now charged with animal abuse. At first I dismissed this as an isolated incident; there’s thousands of PETA members, of course a few would turn out to be bad. But then i read more on the website petakillsanimals.com. Turns out their adoption programs are a complete failure. I’ve worked on adoption programs before. The whole point is to save as many animals as possible by finding them good homes. Maybe a couple get put down, usually the dogs with severe personality problems, but not like this. (that’s a PDF in case you don’t like to open pdfs in your browser) PETA kills 90% of the animals they take in. 90%!!. (see below, 90% in 2005, 80% overall)
| Year | Received† | Adopted | Killed | Transferred | % Killed | % Adopted |
| 2005 | 2,145 | 146 | 1,946 | 69 | 90.7 | 6.8 |
| 2003 | 2,224 | 312 | 1,911 | 1 | 85.9 | 14.0 |
| 2001 | 2,685 | 703 | 1,944 | 14 | 72.4 | 26.2 |
| 1999 | 1,805 | 386 | 1,328 | 91 | 73.6 | 21.4 |
| * figures represent the second half of 1998 only † other than spay/neuter animals |
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The issue is simply that PETA sees even well-treated, happy pets as prisoners and they sincerely feel that a dog would be better off dead than be a slave to a human owner. This idea makes my blood boil. I love dogs so much. I have a dog and as far as i’m concerned Roxy is a person. Albeit less intelligent, but no less valuable to me than any of my friends or members of my family. If a dog has to be put down for extreme behavior or health problems and because there really is no home for that dog, then so be it, but killing dogs without exhausting every effort to find them a home is murder. PETA spends a lot of money campaigning to stop companies testing their products on animals, so much that they can’t afford to run no-kill shelters?! Their propaganda is more important than lives.
