People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ( PETA ) is an animal rights organization based in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. With two million members and supporters worldwide, it claims the status of the largest animal rights group in the world. Ingrid Newkirk is its international president.
Founded in 1980, the organization is a nonprofit, tax exempt, 501(c)(3) corporation with 187 employees, funded almost entirely by its members. According to its website, PETA focuses on four core issues: factory farming, fur farming, animal testing, and animals in entertainment. It also campaigns against the killing of animals regarded as pests, the abuse of backyard dogs, cock fighting, dog fighting, and bullfighting. It aims to inform the public through advertisements, undercover investigations, animal rescue, and lobbying. Its slogan is "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment."
The organization has been criticized for the style and content of its campaigns, and for the number of animals it euthanizes. It was also criticized in 2005 by Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, who said it had acted as a "spokesgroup" for the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, after those groups were listed in a draft planning document as domestic terrorist threats by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Profile
PETA is an animal rights organization. It rejects speciesism, and the idea that animals may be regarded as property. It therefore opposes the use of animals in any form: in animal testing, as food, entertainment, clothing, furniture, decoration, companionship for people, seeing eye dogs for the blind, or as working in any form such as shepherding sheep. PETA would like for all animals to be completely free from dependency on humans to survive.
In PETA's 2004 annual review, Newkirk stated: "Everyone eats, so we have done our best not only to reform the worst abuses in factory farming and slaughterhouses, but to promote a compassionate vegan diet ... We have also revolutionized the way some companies do business, getting them to stop selling fur, boycott Australian merino wool, and abandon painful animal-poisoning tests in favor of sophisticated non-animal methods. We have shown how to prevent flooding without destroying beavers' homes and how to prevent birds from entering "big box" stores without using cruel glue traps. In the past year alone, former circus and zoo elephants were sent to sanctuaries, hog-dog rodeos were banned, and cruel companies were fined. We also educated millions of kids about animal rights through our teacher network and education programs." Regarding PETA's controversial campaigns, Newkirk has said: "The fact is we are the biggest group because we succeed in getting attention. ... The fact is we may be doing all sorts of things on a campaign but the one thing that gets attention is the outrageous thing. It simply goes to prove to us each time, that that is the thing that's going to work; and so we won't shirk from doing that facet — in addition to all the other things we do that you never hear about because no one cares."
History
Further information: Silver Spring monkeysFounded in 1980, PETA first came to public attention in 1981 during what became known as the Silver Spring monkeys case. Alex Pacheco, PETA's co-founder with Ingrid Newkirk, conducted an undercover investigation inside a primate research laboratory at the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. The researcher, Dr. Edward Taub, had cut sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to the monkeys' fingers, hands, arms, and legs, a process called "deafferentation", so that they could not feel them; with some, he deafferented their entire spinal column. He then used restraint, electric shock, and withholding of food and water to force the monkeys to use the deafferented parts of their bodies. The aim was to determine whether the monkeys could be forced to use the limbs, and whether this had an effect on the structure of their brains. The research led in part to the development of the concept of neuroplasticity and a new physical therapy for stroke victims called constraint-induced movement therapy.
Pacheco visited the laboratory at night and took photographs that showed the monkeys were living in "filthy conditions", according to the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research's ILAR Journal . He turned his evidence over to the police, who raided the lab and arrested Taub. Taub was convicted of six counts of animal cruelty, the first such conviction in the U.S. of a research scientist, although it was later overturned on appeal. Some scientists, including Nobel Prize winner David Hubel, criticized Pacheco's actions, and accused PETA of fabricating evidence. The ensuing controversy, and the battle over custody of some of the monkeys, lasted ten years and triggered an amendment in 1985 to the Animal Welfare Act to ensure that researchers do not cause unnecessary suffering to laboratory animals. It became the first animal-testing case to be argued before the United States Supreme Court, which rejected PETA's application for custody. The case transformed PETA from what Newkirk called "five people in a basement" into a national movement able and willing to use undercover methods, the courts, and the media to achieve its aims.
Philosophy and activism
Campaigning
The organization is known for its unusual mix of celebrity supporters, such as Paul McCartney, Pamela Anderson, and Sarah Jessica Parker, combined with undercover investigations and aggressive media campaigns. Many of these have focused on large corporations, such as KFC, McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, PETCO, Procter & Gamble, Covance, and Huntingdon Life Sciences. Supermodels such as Christy Turlington,Eva Mendes and Naomi Campbell have posed naked on billboards with the slogan "I'd Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur" emblazoned across their chests.
Subsequently, Burger King, McDonald's, and Wendy's have introduced vegetarian options in their menus; Petco dropped the sale of many exotic live pets; and in 2006, after talks with PETA, Polo Ralph Lauren announced that it would no longer use fur in any of its lines. Other campaigns attract criticism. Newkirk was criticized in 2003 when she sent a letter to then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat in response to a Jerusalem bombing attack in which a donkey was loaded with explosives and blown up. Newkirk appealed to Arafat to keep animals out of the conflict. She told the Washington Post : "It's not my business to inject myself into human wars."
Holocaust comparisons
Main article: Animal rights and the HolocaustSome of the campaigns have been controversial. The 2003 Holocaust on your Plate exhibition consisted of eight 60-square-foot (5.6 m 2 ) panels, each juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming. The campaign was inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, a vegetarian and animal rights supporter. Singer wrote (as the main character in one of his novels): "In relation to them , all people are Nazis; for them it is an eternal Treblinka." Photographs of concentration camp inmates were shown next to photographs of caged chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. Captions alleged 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." The Anti-Defamation League denounced the campaign, its chairman, Abraham Foxman (himself a Holocaust survivor), calling the exhibition "outrageous, offensive and tak chutzpah to new heights... The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent."
The PETA Holocaust exhibit was created by Matt Prescott, himself a Jew who lost several relatives in the Holocaust. Prescott said: "The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible - that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different or inferior' - is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day. ... The fact is, all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness. We're asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms." The Guardian subsequently reported, however, that "the appeal has done little to calm the fury of Jewish groups." In May 2005, Newkirk issued a response, in which she apologized for the pain the campaign had caused some people, while defending the goals of the campaign.
Undercover investigations
Further information: Unnecessary Fuss, Covance, and Huntingdon Life SciencesPETA sends its employees undercover into facilities such as research
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