Two ON-topic questions - I promise

[singing4every1]

I edited the last post I made about Curves. I apologized for a couple things. Go read if you wish. Anyway, if there's anyone here who still thinks I am a nice person (I promise, I am!) , I was wondering if anyone could answer these questions for me.

First off, PETA. Why do a lot of vegetarians and vegans dislike PETA? Besides the fact that some

Comments

[neva_butterfly]

I'm from the area of PeTA, more or less, so my volunteering for them went back quite a few years. I was a huge, huge PeTA supporter and I no longer am. Ingrid Newkirk comes from a traditional animal control background and that's the attitude that is dominant at PeTA. They do feel they are putting animals out of their misery, but the truth is that they openly kill perfectly healthy animals, even puppies and kittens who would have a better chance of adoption. This is because they subscribe so whole-heartedly to the philosophy that there aren't enough homes and that the only way to solve this is by killing the majority of animals that come through shelters and rescues.

I believed this for years until I started learning more about these issues. I would suggest reading some of Nathan Winograd's materials about finding more humane, more life-affirming solutions to the problem of homeless companion animals.

Further when PeTA left this area for Norfolk, VA they killed most of the animals in their sanctuary (largely rescued farm animals) to save the cost and inconvenience of relocating them. This was a huge betrayal in the view of many people who had supported the sanctuary.

PeTA employees were caught (and ultimately prosecuted for) taking animals out of rural shelters, promising the shelters they'd find homes for them, and then just putting them to death inside the van and disposing of them in dumpsters. Absolutely no effort was ever put into finding them homes.

I started working on feral cat rescue about a decade ago. Before I got involved I knew very little about feral cats. It turns out there are a lot of good scientific studies that show that killing feral cats, the way PeTA does by trapping and "euthanizing" the cats, does not decrease their population. The science shows that 1) nobody ever manages to kill all the cats, and 2) when there is a sudden drop in the population this creates a reaction in the surviving cats where they have more frequent and larger litters of kittens until the population is replenished. However, managing the colony by getting the cats to the vet, sterilized, and vaccinated, and then putting them back stabilizes the population. This is what I do and over the course of a year and a half I did sterilize all the female and most of the male cats in my neighborhood. Despite all the studies and all the other organizations who have recognized this as the best, most successful, and most humane approach, PeTA still advocates trapping and killing feral cats.

[singing4every1]

WOW! Again thank you, very informative and I feel lucky to see an insider's view!