And Then They Were Monsters: How PETA's Ingrid Newkirk Is Like Che Guevera
Douglas Anthony Cooper writes (in a long but worthwhile read) at HuffPo, that Ingrid Newkirk, who got into the animal rights business over her horror at euthanization of some kittens, founded an organization -- PETA -- that now slaughters animals by the thousands, and fast, too:
PETA, for reasons near impossible to comprehend, decided to devote itself to precisely the treachery that inspired Newkirk's mission in the first place. Her organization now routinely takes in animals, with the gentle lie that it intends to re-home them. It then exterminates them. Generally within twenty-four hours. All of them.Correction: almost all. Some lucky 3 percent managed to escape PETA's euthanasia machine last year. How these blessed few got chosen is an interesting question in itself. While we are being precise: the workers at that first shelter were not in fact treacherous -- they did not lie about their intentions. They were less vicious than the organization that Newkirk founded in response to their blithe slaughter.
Consider this grotesque moral path. It really is difficult to come up with a more perverse character arc. Imagine Harriet Tubman deciding late in life to become a slave trader. Or Raoul Wallenberg collaborating with the SS. Or St. Francis of Assisi joining the butchers' guild.
...A former PETA employee spoke of one particular incident that burned into her mind forever: A teary-eyed man showed up at PETA headquarters one day with his beloved pet rabbit. The man had grown old and sick and was no longer able to care properly for his friend. He supplied a cage, bed, toys, and even vet records for this pet. He was assured by PETA workers that they would take 'good care' of his rabbit and find him a home. The man left distraught but no doubt believing that his friend would be able to live out the rest of his life in a loving, compassionate home... PETA workers carried him to the 'death house' immediately and ended his life.
This was not an isolated incident: as I have documented, it is the way that PETA operated, and still does.
How does this happen?
The closest analogy I can think of is Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Not the Che from Albert Korda's iconic and ubiquitous photograph -- the guerilla with a beret gazing ominously towards the horizon from t-shirts -- but the young medical student in The Motorcycle Diaries: a sincere humanist, whose encounters with the dispossessed moved him to become an almost saintly advocate for the poor. I am convinced that Ernesto Guevara was, like the young Newkirk, a truly decent soul.
And then something happened.
The Che that was assassinated in 1967 is still lionized by people who have chosen to maintain a comfortable distance from the historical details, but the older Guevara is not admirable. This is not an ideological observation. Whether regarded from the left or the right, Che was a murderer.
He was among the 82 guerillas who invaded Cuba with Fidel Castro in 1956. Fulgencio Batista's soldiers decimated them, and the myth is that in the retreat from the slaughter, Che had to make a rapid decision between carrying a medical kit, or ammunition for his rifle. He chose bullets.
And then he began to execute people.
Look, PETA is a bunch of shallow, screeching idiots.
But it also seems like the problem is more within the hearts of the shallow Americans who decide to become pet owners.
The vast majority of them, NOT including our hostess, treat their animals with savage disregard for their needs as representatives of other species.
In the computer programming business, it's called a sandbox: A place where you can test out your software without worrying that it will infect the rest of your networks.
For a tremendous number of pet owners, animals are expected to withstand whatever half-baked ideas about affection and responsibility the owner decides to inflict on another living being. Dammit, I will SHOW this beast what it means to be loved, even if I leave it on the balcony for three days with an opened can of food while I go on ski trip....
It's a few years old, but this is the article that made this all clear to me.
Our larger society has decided that the suffering of housepets counts for nothing... And that includes those occasions when "sincere" PETA members use them as emotional tools.
When you get right down to it, the PETA described in this blog post is no worse than the typical urban animal control agency.
That is to say, they're despicable.
Crid [CridComment at Gmail] at March 3, 2015 12:53 AM
Any story on Newkirk's criminal nut-cult is incomplete if it neglects to mention PETA's sponsorship of arsonists.
-jcr
John C. Randolph at March 3, 2015 4:41 AM
Terribly sad piece at that link, Crid.
And I think PETA's members -- especially the sort who look with horror at you as you eat a hamburger -- don't understand that their donations are funding a deathmarch.
Amy Alkon at March 3, 2015 4:44 AM
"When you get right down to it, the PETA described in this blog post is no worse than the typical urban animal control agency."
The typical urban animal control agency isn't spending millions of dollars in lobbying to try to get medical reasearch shut down. PETA is an evil organization, in the Dolores Umbridge sense: Its members do great harm during the day, and then they go to bed at night and sleep soundly, absolutely convinced that they are in the moral right.
Cousin Dave at March 3, 2015 7:48 AM
It's messed up, but, as crazy as they are, PETA is not the biggest problem in housepet animal welfare.
I've volunteered for years at various shelters (currently at a city shelter). Crid gets at it above, and I see it every weekend: there's a reason why probably 80% of the 200+ dogs in the shelter are large dogs that are about a year old. That's the exact point their owners realize they won't stay puppies forever, that they'll "impinge" on their lifestyle and that training takes time they'd rather devote to other things.
Unsurprisingly, nobody wants to adopt these untrained, unsocialized cast-offs.
PETA's hiding their intentions (and outright lying about them) is despicable. If they were up-front about what they did to the animals people surrendered, they'd shine a much-needed light on the real problem -- that people are getting pets they can't handle and then handing them over for others to dispose of.
sofar at March 3, 2015 8:04 AM
> The typical urban animal control
> agency isn't spending millions of
> dollars in lobbying to try to get
> medical reasearch shut down.
Good point and well-taken I promise, so this is pure argumentation:
Yeah, but once you've convinced the government to give you money for evil, you've already had a full day of villainy. Our government is boner-swollen with people like that, and our encounter with it is only just begun.
And again, the providence of these tortured creatures is our society itself... Whether the resultant death is delivered by a mundane public technocracy or by a pathologically smug private-sector initiative, we need to come to grips with the fact that no one can think of anything better to do with these animals than killing them as inexpensively as possible.
The problem, born in the cruel human hearts of "owners" playing games with the meaning of intimate love, is that large.
Crid [CridComment at Gmail] at March 3, 2015 9:17 AM
On the one hand, PETA really doesn't have a choice - neither does your local Animal Control/Services office. The population of animals bred to be domestic pets is too large. And releasing them into the wild isn't an option as most of them are ill-equipped to survive and such a release would flood an eco-system unprepared for such an invasion.
Already, too many places are overrun by invasive species released foolishly into the wild.
And the fault for that, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
"You can't help that. We're all mad here." ~ The Cheshire Cat
"The trouble with a kitten is that eventually it becomes a cat." ~ Ogden Nash
______________________________
On the other hand, PETA folks can at least be honest about the problem and work openly toward a solution, instead of cloaking themselves in the fiction that they're the animal lovers and we're the barbarians for eating a hamburger.
Conan the Grammarian at March 3, 2015 11:12 AM
PETA and some other places is really about the money and the crazy.
Actually taking care of the animals costs money,money that could be used for political and social crazy ends. So it doesn't happen.
Joe J at March 3, 2015 11:26 AM
Even though they are popular, don't imagine that the toy breeds are safe. I just adopted a 10-year-old pug rescued from a puppy mill. She has spent her entire life meeting "demand" for all those cute little pug puppies.
I see what ten years of living in filthy, cramped quarters with a lousy diet and no veterinary care have done to her bent, scarred little body.
Pirate Jo at March 3, 2015 11:27 AM
Fortunately, PETA is no longer the model for most animal rescue. I would think that Best Friends is the ideal after which most rescues model themselves these days. PETA is all about politics now. Maybe its inevitable as these types of organizations grow...I hope not, but time will tell.
Niki at March 3, 2015 12:15 PM
I walked that dog every day, and while she was super skittish at first, I worked with her and she came to get along with meeting other dogs (and always loved meeting people) in the neighbourhood (as long as the dog wasn't aggressive of course).
Friends used to give me hard time when I'd have to get home or swing by the house before going places to make sure the dog was fed, watered, let out, etc... so there are those out there that care. But yes, there are also a lot of very selfish people that don't really think things through or that see them as an annoyance (why they got a pet in the first place is beyond me). They remind me of the people that'll induce labor around a vacation schedule or something. Or that want kids in the baby stage, but didn't think ahead to the years after that.
Miguelitosd at March 3, 2015 3:26 PM
Miguel - sounds like our 2nd dog a sweet yellow lab who was owned by the adult daughter of a neighbor and who was prettying much tied up in a yard for two years while the couple divorced. The grandparents "rescued" her and we took her in. She was so excited for affection that she actually got very thin for a few months as she was too excited by us to eat. She had 8 great years with my folks. They now have another doll in the form of a Boxer.
I am always surprised when people are so dumb and irresponsible when it comes to pets. A woman at work was given a dog for Christmas (at great expense) and she has no time for her. Another idiot has 4 young kids who wanted a dog so the mother said yes, but only if it is small and so they got a Maltese! I know I don't have the space and time for a dog, sonI have to adored cats who are helping me write this. 😉
PETA is a sham. If all of those dumdum celebrities who made them so powerful would get real and help expose them perhaps the tide will turn. Disgusting.
CatherineM31 at March 3, 2015 5:16 PM
Amy Alkon
https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2015/03/and-then-they-w-1.html#comment-5879153">comment from CatherineM31I also can't believe the way people treat their pets. The jerk actress next door leaves her hound alone in her yard to bark all day, on and off, and then sometimes leaves a small yappy dog there, too.
Amy Alkon
at March 3, 2015 9:24 PM
"Yeah, but once you've convinced the government to give you money for evil, you've already had a full day of villainy."
Point taken. Absolutely.
"That's the exact point their owners realize they won't stay puppies forever, that they'll "impinge" on their lifestyle and that training takes time they'd rather devote to other things."
Oh, I'm absolutely aware of that. It happens more with dogs probably, but it does happen with cats too. One of the cats we have now was dumped in midtown Atlanta as a older kitten. He started showing up on my brother's porch and my brother and his wife started feeding him. He quite clearly was a stray and not a feral cat. They couldn't take him in because they already had several and didn't have room for another one. He called me and asked if I wanted him, and I said yes. He's been with us for five years now and he's happy and healthy.
Cousin Dave at March 4, 2015 7:15 AM
That's how we got our previous cat. We were living in an apartment complex and she showed up on our porch and didn't leave. Eventually, we fed her; then we let her in, took her to the vet, and kept her as a pet. Good cat.
People abandon cats all the time, thinking they will hunt for themselves or find a new owner. Cats who haven't been taught as kittens to kill birds and other animals won't suddenly become mighty hunters when abandoned. They'll starve.
Conan the Grammarian at March 4, 2015 9:17 AM
"Cats who haven't been taught as kittens to kill birds and other animals won't suddenly become mighty hunters when abandoned. They'll starve."
Quite true. The cat we got from my brother was malnourished when we got him. (He's since made up for that...)
Cousin Dave at March 4, 2015 1:30 PM
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