Dear PETA: Everyone Is Tired Of Your Bullshit
Every now and then I find myself in the position of being somone who believes in a cause but severely dislikes an organization dedicated to the cause. I want to yell at said organization: OMG get out of my cause, you just make things worse! Such is how I’m feeling about PETA at the moment.
Just so we’re clear on where I stand here: I am very much behind anti-animal cruelty activism. I find many of the ways humans treat and mistreat animals despicable. I am not down with animal testing, not down with fur, not down with the way food animals are handled, and not down with the idea that because we have opposable thumbs, we have the right to act in any way we please toward non-humans. I support some extreme measures to put a stop to these things. And I’m all in favor of messages that don’t dance around a subject and say flat out: this is wrong, it needs to end.
Having said that, PETA is working my damn nerve, they are wrong, they need to end it.
In case you’re unaware, this is the latest in a long line of PETA wrongness:
Click the image to see the blog post announcing this atrocity of an ad campaign.
There are plenty of people out there talking about the reasons why this shit is unacceptable. Even vegans cannot countenance this.
And let us not forget PETA’s ill-advised use of racist and sexist language and imagery to try and win converts to their side. I know when I see someone dressed up like a KKK member, I want to listen to their views with an open mind.
As a person who cares about animals, and as a person who does not shy away from extreme forms of activism, I still feel compelled to say: PETA, stop with your bullshit. Being racist, sexist, and fat-phobic is never, ever cool. Never. No seriously. Stop. Your official statement on this matter is full of some of the most asinine fuckwittery I’ve come across that I cannot even bear to grace it with less vulgar words. Because you, PETA, are just a fountain of vulgarity right now, and that is not cool.
Quit doing things to push away people who would otherwise be passionate supporters of your cause. We want to help animals, too, but being in any way associated with you right now is repulsive to me.
I’m going to donate to the Humane Society until I feel clean.
Yeah, the Humane Society and the ASPCA are always good to donate to. PETA just always brings the fail.
I had no idea. This is some weird stuff…
My goodness. That is some shameful shit, right there.
How can they be so stupid as to not realize they’re hurting their cause with this type of asshattery?
Not only is this fat-phobic, but they’re also looking at themselves through rose-colored glasses. Sorry, vegetarians and vegans aren’t uniformly svelte. If someone sees this ad and decides to become a vegetarian to get skinny, when they discover how badly they’ve been lied to, all PETA will have done will be to make a new enemy and quite possibly push someone *away* from vegetarianism. Go on, ask me how I gained 25 pounds in my early 30s despite being a vegetarian.
But really, that’s minor compared to the fat-phobia in the ad. Guh.
*facepalm*
WHY?! Is PETA determined to obtain as much fail as possible? Push themselves into irrelevance?
So they’re gonna add this to their list along with: processing of animals as food to slavery and WWII holocaust, to nix cows in favour of using women for their breast milk, body painting women in the nude as animals and putting them in cages, dressing up as the KKK, and maybe a dozen others I missed.
Way back when I was in high school it was an undercover PeTA video that turned me vegetarian.
Of course in the years since then I’ve learned a lot more about their organization.
PeTA exaggerates their “facts.” Their stunt with the border fence sign was really despicable. Over at the Vegans of Color blog they have a lot of posts about PeTA’s many examples of FAIL. This ad is just the latest. And their fatphobia goes way back–they were doing similar things when I was in college.
I think they’ve actually gotten worse over the years… I really wish they would just fade into irrelevancy. There are so many more reputable, decent animal rights and welfare groups doing terrific work–instead of spending donations shaming fat people and women and POC.
Fail is all PETA has ever done; if calling them on it would make them stop then they would have been stopped fifteen years ago. In their warped troll-like minds, donating money to HSUS and having a conversation that starts with the speaker affirming xir alliance with the notion of animal rights is a win for them.
My take on anti-PETA activism is to hit them where (they claim that) it hurts. If I were the sort of person to organize and create a website, it would be to get people to publicly pledge that they would do one of the following every time PETA waved their bare asses in public: eat veal or foie gras, buy extraneous leather or fur, go to the circus, stuff like that. These things are a mildly distasteful departure from my normal nature, but it’s not quite like kicking a kitten and I’d do them to register my disgust with activist trolling. And if there were ten thousand people along with me, maybe the shitbags at PETA would calculate that putting up a deliberately offensive billboard is a karmic loss even from their perspective.
So whenever there are assholes using sexist/racist/ableist etc methods to promote a cause, we should attack the cause instead of the people responsible for that crap? How perfect a solution. /snark
I’ve been on a foie gras farm. I have never seen, in any of the undercover footage I have watched, anything as horrifying or disgusting or hellish as what I saw in that place. I couldn’t even begin to describe the kind of sh*t that happened there. And let’s not forget, human rights are tangled into this as well–the workers at these places, like the one I visited, are treated horrendously, and many of them are POC (mostly Latino, from what I understand). So if you want to spite PeTA by buying a gourmet dish enjoy a little worker cruelty with your animal abuse; it’s funny how those things are intertwined.
Now I hate PeTA. Their tactics suck; they’re a racist, sexist, vile organization and the vast majority of vegans and vegetarians I know can’t stand them. But the animals you’re talking about hurting just to get to PeTA did not choose to have this group advocate for them. They’re entirely innocent.
But go ahead and do some mindless harm to something innocent if it makes you feel better…
Fair enough. I thought that there was a source of foie gras that didn’t involve gavage when I wrote that, but research is showing me otherwise. I will refrain from suggesting that in the future of my silly campaign.
Frankly, I don’t know how to get rid of PETA as much as I think that they do harm to the legitimacy of the movement. I think that getting upset at them is what they want, and I think that ignoring them just makes them plan an even more offensive event for next time. Education is all well and good, but you’d have to assume that even they believe their campaigns. I am skeptical on this point; I think that they nurse their persecution complex as a very cynical fund-raising device and they aim straight for the sensitive points of various factions because they know that is what will provoke the loudest response. The only idea I have left is a dampening counter-protest, in the spirit of pledge drives tied to the number of anti-abortion protesters blocking the neighborhood clinic or the clever people who raise money by drowning out the shenanigans of the Westboro Baptist Church. This plan is imperfect, as you sensibly point out, but I’m hard-pressed for alternatives. I’m tired of writing “I hate PETA, but…” posts, I want to start writing some “I hate PETA, and so…” posts.
Yeah, I definitely understand your fatigue re: “I hate PeTA, but…” I am pretty darned sick of them myself.
“they aim straight for the sensitive points of various factions because they know that is what will provoke the loudest response.”
I think you nail it here. I think what will make them stop is their source of funding (supporters) dwindling. Which hopefully will keep happening as long as their activities are criticized.
They’re also ableist. They have gone on the record multiple times against blind people having guide dogs, using incorrect assumptions about how guide dogs are treated, but more significantly stating outright that a blind person cannot take proper care of a dog because they are blind.
*spluttering*
They’ve said *what*?!?
Wait, what? …
Yep: http://www.petconnection.com/blog/2009/01/10/guide-dogs-for-the-blind-peta-staffer-says-forget-it/
PETA is so irrelevant and so hypocritical it continues to astound me why anyone still listens to them. Anyone how loves animals certainly shouldn’t: http://www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=907
I agree with most, but I am down with animal testing. Sorry, I put a 10 year old living another day over a norway rat, primate, puppy, or kitty kat any day of the week. As a severe asthmatic I know animals were harmed in the research of my medicine and I am very okay with that.
Oh…and I am a PROUD omnivore. Though if I am stuck up in the Andes, I would want a vegan to be with me. Another omnivore would taste funny.
I place PETA in the same camp as the “black isrealites” or “Andrea Dworkin”. Every movement has its fanatic extreme. The real jerks are the people who fund them.
Sorry we had to disagree on the testing thing ABM.
I think one should differentiate when it comes to animal testing. There are necessary tests for developing drugs. But there are also tests that can be done without animal testing, and I think when this is possible, it should be done.
A completely different issue is animal testing for cosmetics. In these cases, “for the good f mankind” is hardly the issue, and that kind of testibg should be fought.
I had a friend who raised Seeing Eye puppies. He followed their progress afterward; when one of them ‘resigned’, Arthur was welcomed back into his home, where he lived and was cherished. (And abused his former guide-dog privileges to go EVERYWHERE, just as he had in his working days.)
Arthur was one beloved dog, all his life; he just died, and is mourned by all who knew him. http://arthurdogblog.blogspot.com/
It’s pretty much all been said, hasn’t it? This is one more case of PETA’s racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic bullshit. I complete agree with the voice above who believes they do it on purpose, for the rise. But how sick is it that they sit there thinking, you know what our society is rife with? Hatred of fat people! Misogyny! Racism! Ableist crap about the incompetence of blind people! How can we hitch our star to all that?
Juan, you hit most of the ones I know of, but forgot the fetishistic and exploitative girl-on-girl kissing stunt not so long ago and a particularly nasty ad campaign a few years back that compared fur to women’s public hair in order to generate disgust. (Because it’s PETA’s place to tell women to wax & shave their privates.) Last I checked, we’re mammals too.
If you’re not down with animal testing then you’re not down with massive sections of biology and medical science. I am not talking about testing cosmetics etc. That is obviously horrible. But come on, you must realize that these issues are more complex when you get into animal testing. The choice is not simply between people hurting animals and people not hurting animals and getting slightly worse lipstick. I’m not saying there is no debate to be had, and for the record I completely agree with you when it comes to PETA’s offensive ad campaigns (and the above is just the tip of the iceberg, don’t get me started on the slavery and holocaust analogies). I also agree that humanity does terrible things to non-human animals that it needs to account for and stop. But to just stick in a crack about animal testing as a practice with no mention of the moral gray area that this subject inhabits is a little thoughtless. Animal testing is a serious subject that should be treated seriously when it is discussed.
I know right!
I read an article that read something about peta bitching about seeing eye dogs, and them not getting enough love. BULLSHIT. They are just like normal dogs, just trained to help people get around like normal people.
There are people who kill animals in dog fights, I know of one that is starting up three houses down from me.
My neighbor had 23 cats. TWENTY-THREE CATS!!! all of them lived outside to. They didn’t feed the about two years after we moved in and they pushed them on us. We called the Humane Society, they told us to kill ’em. Serously! They told us to set up traps, or stand out on back porches with guns.
They finaly went to live down at the dumpsters,
PS: Don’t get me started on how many have been killed with rabies.
Wif love- White-y