People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Logo of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

For the SI prefix, see Peta

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the largest animal rights organization in the world. Founded in 1980 as a non-profit organization, it has its headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, and a stated one million members and suppporters, 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 focuses its attention in four areas in which the largest numbers of animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of time: factory farming, [6] vivisection or animal testing, the clothing trade, and animals in entertainment.[7] It also works on a wide range of other animal-rights issues, including fishing, the killing of animals regarded as pests, abuse of backyard dogs, and cock fighting.

PETA works through public education, cruelty investigations, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns.

PETA's philosophy

File:IngridNewkirk.jpg

Ingrid Newkirk PETA's president and co-founder

PETA's motto is: "Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." [8] Its website states:

PETA believes that animals deserve the most basic rights — consideration of their own best interests regardless of whether they are useful to humans. Like you, they are capable of suffering and have interests in leading their own lives; therefore, they are not ours to use — for food, clothing, entertainment, or experimentation, or for any other reason." [9]

The organization was founded in 1980 by Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco,who were inspired by Peter Singer's 1975 book Animal Liberation.

In the long term, PETA advocates the abolition of animal exploitation, and espouses the philosophical position of animal rights; in the short term, it is willing to advocate animal-welfare reforms, and it has negotiated with a number of industries that use animals to obtain improvements in welfare standards. PETA strongly supports the vegan lifestyle.

History

The group first came to public attention in the United States in 1981, when it became involved in the Silver Spring, Maryland monkey case. Pacheco conducted an undercover investigation of a primate laboratory, documenting numerous cases of abuse and neglect. The investigation resulted in the first-ever conviction of an animal experimenter on charges of animal abuse and the first-ever suspension of federal research funds for cruelty. [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. [11] [12] 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. [13]

Campaigns

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.

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." [14] Some Christian leaders, such as the Reverend Andrew Linzey, support some of these ideas, but mainstream theologians cite passages in the Christian Bible that support the view that Jesus ate fish and lamb. [15]

Lettuce Ladies

PETA's 'Lettuce Ladies' are women, some of them Playboy models, who appear publicly in scanty costumes made to look like lettuce leaves, and distribute information about the vegan diet. [16] There is a lesser-known male counterpart to the Lettuce Ladies, called the Broccoli Boys.

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. [17]."

The Anti-Defamation League strongly criticized the implication of moral equivalence between the killing of animals and the Holocaust. 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." 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." [18]. 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 humans are Nazis; for them it is an eternal Treblinka". The use of this quote in this context was supported by Singer's grandson Stephen J. Dujack. [19] In May 2005, PETA apologized for the campaign while broadly defending the analogy. The campaign however continues in areas such as San Francisco

Name changes of cities

PETA regularly asks towns and cities whose names are suggestive of animal exploitation to change their names. In April 2003, they offered free veggie burgers to the city of Hamburg 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".) These campaigns have been effective in generating media coverage of animal-rights issues.

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.

Youth Education

File:Grrrcover2001.jpg

Joaquin Phoenix On the cover of PETA's Grrr! Magazine

PETA runs a website geared towards kids at Petakids.com with contest, online games, online video, 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.

Teachkind is another education program of PETA whose aim is to provide educators with free high-quality lesson plans and materials. The program seeks to develop critical-thinking skills, empathy, compassion, and civic responsibility while empowering students to take compassionate action for animals in their own communities. TeachKind also helps educators and schools implement healthy and humane educational policies that benefit students, educators, and animals. In 2004, the number of teachers involved in PETA’s Teachkind Network have more then tripled, with more then 8,000 teachers regularly using PETA materials in their classrooms. Teachkind also implemented the first-ever “Animal Kindness Program” at Boys and Girls Clubs in the U.S. to teach empathy and understanding for animals. PETA sites that its humane education teaching kit went to all 25,000 schools in the U.S.[20]

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PETA's Teachkind Network

To reach older kids, PETA launched a new humane education program. Their video lesson plan, distributed to every high school in the United States, reached an estimated 750,000 students and is the largest humane education effort directed at high schools in history.

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 popular 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 youth.

Animal Liberation Project

The most recent controversy generated by PETA is its "Are Animals the New Slaves?" campaign. [21] The campaign involves a tour of the United States and featured a display in which images of black people who had been lynched were juxtaposed with those of slaughtered cows [22]. The campaign was criticised by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [23], and PETA suspended the campaign [24], though 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. PETA's 2004 IRS form 990 shows that on March 30th of that year, PETA gave Dick Gregory $3,000[25] to support program activities.

Criticism of PETA

Critics look down on the fact that PETA has financially contributed to "eco-terrorist" groups such as the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). [26]

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" [27] as a reason that PETA should lose its status as a non-profit organization. [28] Part of the reasoning behind their concern is the degree of financial support given by PETA to these organizations, [29][30] associated with firebombings and other destruction of property, and described by the United States Department of Homeland Security as "terrorist threats." [31] PETA has also been accused of operating animal shelters that kill more animals than most publicly operated shelters in the United States. [32]

Adrian R. Morrison DVM PhD, has accused PETA of using edited and out-of-context video footage to allege cruelty to animals. In particlar, 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. 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 [33].

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 delivered a scathing indictment of PETA, accusing the organization of misleading its members, euthanizing most of the animals it "liberated," funding terrorist organizations, and putting its political agenda of animal rights over the welfare of human beings.

South Park with PETA

PETA was depicted on South Park episode 119, in which the organization's 'secret forest headquarters' was shown. In the show, PETA espoused human-animal coexistance to the point of inter-species marriage and mating. While such claims are clearly preposterous, they reflect the common public perception that PETA members (and other animal-rights activists) cannot distinguish between animals and people (or even favor animals; at one point in the episode a character responds to a politically incorrect statement by saying that "PETA doesn't care about people"). This perception prevents many from taking the organization seriously.

Alleged targeting of vulnerable groups

PETA has also been accused of targeting "vulnerable or emotionally sensitive" groups, particularly teenage girls, and was ordered by Great Britain's Advertising Standards Authority to discontinue claims it made about milk consumption in a campaign targeted at school children.[34] 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.

PETA has also been accused of promoting vegetarian and vegan lifestyles without providing sufficient information on the alleged health risks involved in excluding meat and dairy from a typical Western diet without providing an alternative source of nutrition, though their "vegan starter kits" combat this notion. It has also linked both lifestyles to weight loss, prompting concerns over PETA's targeting the gender and age groups that are vulnerable to eating disorders.

Support of "extremists and terrorists"

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"We're here to hold the radical line." (Ingrid Newkirk, founder and director of PETA, 1991)
"Arson, property destruction, burglary, and theft are acceptable crimes when used for the animal cause." (Alex Pacheco, director of PETA at the time, and its co-founder, in 1989)
"We cannot condemn the Animal Liberation Front ... they act courageously ... [their activities] comprise an important part of today's animal protection movement." (PETA statement concerning ALF's activities, 1991)
Paid $45,200 in support of convicted ALF arsonist Rodney Coronado (1995). [35]
The United States FBI considers ALF to be a "terrorist threat". [36]
Paid $2,000 to the ALF spokesman after the ALF claimed responsibility for fire bombing the Utah Fur Breeders Agricultural Co-op in 1997. [37]
Paid $2,000 to David Wilson, a member of ALF in 1999. [38]
Paid $5,000 to the "Josh Harper Support Committee" in 2000. [39] [40]
Paid $1,500 to ELF in 2001. [41]
Paid $7,500 to Fran Stephanie Trutt, who attempted to kill a medical research executive. [42]
"Of course we're going to be, as a movement, blowing stuff up and smashing windows...is a great way to bring about animal liberation". (Bruce Friedrich, the Vegan Campaign Coordinator for PETA, during a 2001 animal rights convention.

Response to a suicide bombing

In response to a news report in January of 2003 that a donkey was laden with explosives and intentionally blown up in a failed attack on a busload of Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk sent then Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat a request that he "appeal to all those who listen to [him] to leave the animals out of this conflict"; she was criticized because she did not in the process ask Arafat to try to stop suicide bombings that killed people but did not harm animals. She later explained to the Washington Post, in what some non-animal rights sympathizers came to take as a morally untenable stance, "It is not my business to inject myself into human wars."

Use of nudity

Feminists for Animal Rights have published articles criticizing PETA for its use of female nudity (though no one has ever fully stripped in public) in campaigns such as "I'd rather go naked than wear fur,", "Milk Gone Wild" (in which young women pull up their tops to reveal prosthetic udders worn over their breasts ), "vegetarians make better lovers" and for using Playboy models in some campaigns as well as having string-bikini-clad women wrestle in tofu. Animal-rights lawyer Gary L. Francione has also been outspoken in his condemnation of what he sees as PETA's sexism. Many also feel that PETA's use of gimmicks such as nudity trivializes the seriousness of animal-rights issues. PETA's defenders respond that they are not sexist, as both men and women appear in the campaigns, and that they use arresting images to gain publicity for their campaigns against animal abuse. Nikki Craft is also an outspoken critic on her web site [43].

Animal cruelty and euthanasia

In June 2005, police investigators staked out a garbage container in Ahoskie, North Carolina after discovering that over one hundred dead animals had been dumped there every Wednesday for a month. [44]

Police observed PETA employees Andrew Benjamin Cook and Adria Joy Hinkle approach the trash container behind a grocery store in a van registered to PETA and dump 18 dead animals into it. Thirteen more were found inside the van. The animals were from shelters in Northampton and Bertie counties. Police charged Cook and Hinkle each with 31 felony counts of animal cruelty and eight misdemeanor counts of illegal disposal of dead animals. These were dismissed on 14 October 2005, and 25 felony charges (22 of animal cruelty and three felony charges of obtaining property by false pretense) brought in their place. The latter charges are based on PETA having euthanized three cats from an Ahoskie veterinarian after promising to find the animals new homes [45])

Newkirk responded to the media attention with the statement: "PETA has never made a secret of the fact that most of the animals picked up in North Carolina are euthanized." [46] According to PETA's own filings with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, PETA killed 86.3% of the animals in its care in 2004. [47]. Similar filings for the Norfolk SPCA shelter, located 3.5 miles from the PETA headquarters, show that the Norfolk SPCA killed fewer than 5% of animals in its care. PETA has defended its actions by saying there is inadequate care for the animals they receive, and that killing them humanely is a better fate than allowing them to live in inappropriate conditions.

List of famous members and supporters

(Please do not add any more names to this section without linking to a source)

Multimedia releases to benefit PETA

Animal Liberation (April 21, 1987) WaxTrax! (LP, CS, CD)
Paul McCartney and Friends: The PETA Concert for Party Animals (2000) Image Entertainment (DVD)
Tame Yourself (April 30, 2001) R.N.A./Rhino (CD)
Liberation: Songs to Benefit PETA (2003) Fat Wreck Chords (CD)

References

Morrison, A.R. (2001). Personal Reflections on the “Animal-Rights” Phenomenon. In Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol 44:1, pp. 62-75. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Meet Your Meat a PETA-produced slaughterhouse tour narrated by Alec Baldwin

External links

Official PETA sites

General Animal Rights:

Animal Testing:

Animals Used for Clothing:

Companion Animals:

HelpingAnimals.com

International:

Vegetarian:

FishingHurts.com
GoVeg.com
JesusVeg.com - not to be confused with the Christian Vegetarian Association's christianveg.com
KFCCruelty.com
MilkSucks.com
VegetarianStarterKit.com
Lettuceladies.com

Wildlife:

HelpingWildlife.com

More PETA websites at:

Other PETA Websites

Sites critical of PETA