A recent article in a British newspaper is a cause for reflection, about both the content and the source.
The story reports the news that the “animal rights” organization which styles itself “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” (PETA) last year killed nearly 90% of the 1,600 lost or abandoned dogs and cats turned over to its Virginia headquarters’ animal “shelter.”
To be precise, of the 1,110 kitty cats and 733 puppy dogs handed over to its tender care, 1,045 of the cats and 602 of the dogs were slaughtered. Only two of the hapless cats and three of the distressed dogs were reclaimed by their owners. Twenty-two of the cats and 106 of the dogs were sent to another shelter (the story doesn’t tell us what subsequently happened to them). The fates of 34 of the cats and 7 of the dogs were classified as “miscellaneous.”
In fact, since 1998, PETA has liquidated 29,398 pets. The organization’s “shelter” was more like an extermination camp.
These facts were unearthed and brought to light by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a group that represents restaurant owners who are doubtless angry at all the PETA ads showing famous female celebrities posing naked in order to convince people not to eat meat or wear fur. This is called payback, and as we used to say in my youth, payback is a bitch (who may therefore be “put to sleep” if PETA gets hold of her).
The PETAphiles were not amused at the unfavorable information being released. They appear to believe that only they have the right to unattractive news about groups they hate. In justification of their actions relative to the innocent animals formerly in their care, a PETA spokeman averred, “We have a small division that does hand-on work with animals, and most of the animals we take in are society’s rejects: aggressive, on death’s door, or somehow unadoptable.”
Yes, all those killer kitties — ferocious felines attacking hapless hominids! We can all attest to the growing menace. And the animals “on death’s door” . . . let’s just kick the pesky pets though it!
The PETA mouthpiece petulantly added that, “CCF’s goal is to damage PETA by misrepresenting the situation and the number of unwanted and suffering animals PETA euthanizes because of injury, illness, age, aggression, and other problems, because their guardians requested it, or because no good homes exist for them.”
“Euthanize”: isn’t that the ultimate euphemism? And why is it ethical to slaughter injured or sick animals, rather than attempt to cure them, or keep them alive even if they are old, or find other “guardians” or homes for them?
The truth — revealed by that term, “guardian” (as opposed to the more common term “owner”) — is that many of the hard core of the PETA activists are hard-line animal rights activists, who conceptualize a pet as a free soul in slavery. From that perspective, if Fluffy or Fido cannot self-actualize in full Kantian autonomy by itself, and is to be the lifelong pet owned by some miserable human, then death may be preferable . . . death is more noble than forcing it to live a life of degraded bondage to a hideous human. To these activists, there should be no pets at all. You can create a no-pet society either by eliminating the institution of pethood or, failing that, by eliminating the pets.
Also interesting is the source. Notice that the information about the actions of this American PETA chapter was published in a British newspaper, not in the American mainstream media. PETA is an organization within the penumbra of the PC protection machine (AKA the MSM), so naturally no critical information is to be divulged.
