By Anjali Nayak
There are a lot of ways you can stop being taken seriously in America. You can deny climate change, maybe pretend that the Earth is flat. Even worse, you can associate with PETA. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is a lousy attempt at animal and climate justice. Using scare tactics as well as promoting hatred and violence for certain minorities, PETA is an absolute disgrace of an organization.
Although preaching for the lives and rights for animals, PETA has been euthanizing the overwhelming majority of pets accepted into its shelters. In 2011, PETA killed 713 out of the 760 dogs impounded, as well as 1,198 out of the 1,211 cats impounded, only finding homes for a grand total of 5. Being an organization said to be against the cruelty of animals, it’s awfully hypocritical to kill animals just because they would “be better off dead.” On their website, PETA openly admits to killing more than 197,000 pets since 2001. PETA has reported killing about 85% of perfectly healthy animals. To make matters worse, PETA has a history of accidentally stealing and killing pets, thinking they were strays. To apologize, PETA sends a fruit basket.
While previously implying that there was correlation between consuming dairy and autism, in 2014, PETA posted an ad very directly stating that the cause for autism was the consumption of milk. One study linked with the ad published in 2002, observed that there may be some possible improvement in autism symptoms when children were put on a diet free of gluten, gliadin, and casein, proteins found either in grains or milk. The study was incredibly vague; researchers broadly blamed the problem on “processes with opioid effect.” It was also tiny—relying on the same group of just 20 kids. The study even admits to being single-blind and not especially scientific. Got credibility? PETA doesn’t.
People with autism are not the only minority that PETA has decided to make quick, irrelevant comparisons with. For one, PETA has taken drastic measures such as dressing up as the KKK in order to boycott a dog show, comparing the treatment of animals to the holocaust, showing extreme fatphobic sentiment, and often comparing women to meat.
As someone who eats vegan, owns a pet dog, and cares about the environment, I feel that there should be a large organization promoting the needs and rights of animals, not a company (yup, they aren’t a non-profit) using hypocritical scare tactics and spreading misinformation. PETA is by far the most popular animal organization when they very clearly do not deserve to be. If you are an animal lover, I beg you, do not support PETA. Instead, here is a list of other organizations to promote: