PETAs Killers

From the Austin Review we have the following story:

With no apparent sense of irony, they chose the dumpster of a Piggly Wiggly supermarket to drop off the carcasses, wrapped in black plastic bags. Among them were a mother cat with her two very healthy kittens, and seven little puppies – dead by injection. Nor did either of them appear to evince the slightest cognitive dissonance in acting as agents, and employees, of the very inaptly named “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” (PETA). For at least two months they had been slaughtering and dumping animals that they obtained under false pretenses from shelters: they assured the attendants they would find the adoptable animals ‘good homes.’

Andrew Benjamin Cook and Adria Joy Hinkle are charged in a North Carolina court with only 31 felony counts of animal cruelty, eight misdemeanor counts of the illegal disposal of dead animals, and a charge of criminal trespassing. Yet they are apparently responsible for the death of more than a hundred animals. This is ethical? We must not allow ourselves to be so distracted by the sordid details of this case that we view it as an aberration. Instead, it is all too emblematic of the core “values” of the PETA cash and terror machine. In “Better Dead Than Fed”, Debra Saunders observes that “this is not the first report that PETA killed animals it claimed to protect. In 1991, PETA killed 18 rabbits and 14 roosters it had previously ‘rescued’ from a research facility. ‘We just don’t have the money to care for them,’ then PETA-Chairman Alex Pacheco told the Washington Times.”

The Center for Consumer Freedom Documents on its website PETAKillsAnimals.com that “from July 1998 through the end of 2003, PETA killed over 10,000 dogs, cats, and other ‘companion animals’ – at its Norfolk, Virginia headquarters. That’s more than five defenseless animals every day. Not counting the dogs and cats PETA spayed and neutered, the group put to death over 85 percent of the animals it took in during 2003 alone.” In fact, the CCF reports “on its 2002 federal income-tax return, PETA claimed a $9,370 write-off for a giant walk-in freezer, the kind most people use as a meat locker or for ice-cream storage. But animal-rights activists don’t eat meat or dairy foods. So far, the group hasn’t confirmed the obvious – that it’s using the appliance to store the bodies of its victims.”

Why does PETA kill? “In 2000, when the Associated Press first noted PETA’s Kervorkian-esque tendencies, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk complained that actually taking care of animals costs more than killing them. ‘We could become a no-kill shelter immediately,’ she admitted.” “Besides,” relates Saunders, “PETA always has been about killing animals. A 2003 New Yorker profile included PETA top dog Ingrid Newkirk’s story of how she became involved in animal rights after a shelter put down stray kittens she brought there. So she went to work for an animal shelter in the 1970s, where, she explained: ‘I would go to work early, before anyone got there, and I would just kill the animals myself. Because I couldn’t stand to let them go through (other workers abusing the animals). I must have killed a thousand of them, sometimes dozens every day.’

“That’s right. PETA assails other parties for killing animals for food or research. Then it kills animals – but for really important reasons, like because it has run out of room.”

As the CFC’s David Martosko told Saunders, "For years, we thought that PETA just cared for animals more than they cared for humans. But now it seems they don’t care much for either.” Consider, for example that “Newkirk also told The New Yorker the world would be a better place without people. She explained why she had herself sterilized: ‘I am opposed to having children. Having a purebred human baby is like having a purebred dog – it’s nothing but vanity, human vanity.”

Those aren’t the limits of her misanthropic sentiments. In September 1989 she told Vogue magazine that “animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy, they’re all mammals.” She added, for good measure, “even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.”
So, as the CFC reports, “PETA kills animals. Because it has other financial priorities.

“PETA raked in nearly $29 million last year in income, much of it raised from pet owners who think their donations actually help animals. Instead, the group spends huge sums on programs equating people who eat chicken with Nazis, scaring young children away from drinking milk, recruiting children into the radical animal-rights lifestyle, and intimidating businessmen and their families in their own neighborhoods. PETA has also spent tens of thousands of dollars defending arsonists and other violent extremists.” And contributing funds to the Earth Liberation Front, which the FBI’s Deputy Assistant Director John Lewis considers “one of today’s most serious domestic terrorism threats.” Carson Carroll, Deputy Assistant Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives adds that “since 1987, ATF has initiated over 100 investigations related to ELF and ALF incidents. Some of the investigations involved explosives incidents, as well as, acts of arson. While the number of ELF and ALF incidents has fluctuated from year to year, the magnitude of the incidents appears to be on the rise with a number of high-damage arsons occurring since 1999. Between 1999 and 2005, ATF opened 58 investigations related to ELF and ALF acts of violence.” The Hudson Institute’s Michael Fumento relates that “last month the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told a Senate panel that animal rights extremists, along with eco-terrorists, pose one of the most serious national terrorist threats – one growing by leaps and bounds. Unlike such groups as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), PETA takes no credit for such actions as torching laboratories. But it does support these groups both vocally and financially.

“‘I find it small wonder that the laboratories aren’t all burning to the ground. If I had more guts, I’d light a match,’ Newkirk has said. Other gems: ‘I wish we would all get up and go into the labs and take the animals out or burn them down,’ and ‘Would I rather the research lab that tests animals is reduced to a bunch of cinders? Yes.’ She also insisted, ‘I will be the last person to condemn ALF.'
“PETA vegetarian campaign coordinator Bruce Friedrich has declared that ‘blowing stuff up and smashing windows’ is something PETA doesn’t do ‘but I do advocate it.’
“PETA has donated to the Earth Liberation Front, a certified terrorist group that, according to the FBI, along with the ALF has committed more than 600 criminal acts causing more than $43 million in damages. During the 1990s, PETA paid $70,200 to an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activist convicted of burning down a Michigan State University research laboratory. During sentencing, the federal judge implicated Newkirk in the crime.”

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: they are not ethical. They kill animals. And it is only a matter of time before the allies that they fund and support kill people.