People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an American animal rights organization based in Norfolk, Virginia, and led by Ingrid Newkirk, its international president. A non-profit corporation with 300 employees and two million members and supporters, it says it is the largest animal rights group in the world. Its slogan is "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment."
Founded in March 1980 by Newkirk and animal rights activist Alex Pacheco, the organization first caught the public's attention in the summer of 1981 during what became known as the Silver Spring monkeys case, a widely publicized dispute about experiments conducted on 17 macaque monkeys inside the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. The case lasted ten years, involved the only police raid on an animal laboratory in the United States, triggered an amendment in 1985 to that country's Animal Welfare Act, and established PETA as an internationally known organization. Since then, in its campaigns and undercover investigations, it has focused on four core issues—opposition to factory farming, fur farming, animal testing, and animals in entertainment—though it also campaigns against fishing, the killing of animals regarded as pests, the keeping of chained backyard dogs, cock fighting, dog fighting, and bullfighting.
The group has been the focus of criticism from inside and outside the animal rights movement. Newkirk and Pacheco are seen as the leading exporters of animal rights to the more traditional animal protection groups in the United States, but sections of the movement nevertheless say PETA is not radical enough—law professor Gary Francione calls them the new welfarists, arguing that their work with industries to achieve reform makes them an animal welfare, not an animal rights, group. Newkirk told Salon in 2001 that PETA works toward the ideal, but tries in the meantime to provide carrot-and-stick incentives. There has also been criticism from feminists within the movement about the use of scantily clad women in PETA's anti-fur campaigns, and criticism in general that the group's media stunts trivialize animal rights. Newkirk's view is that PETA has a duty to be "press sluts".
Outside the movement, the confrontational nature of PETA's campaigns has caused concern, as has the number of animals it euthanizes. It was further criticized in 2005 by United States Senator Jim Inhofe for having given grants several years earlier to Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) activists, two groups that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has identified as agents of domestic terrorism. PETA responded that it has no involvement in ALF or ELF actions and does not support violence, though Newkirk has elsewhere made clear that she supports the removal of animals from laboratories and other facilities, including as a result of illegal direct action.
History
Ingrid Newkirk
with
Ingrid Newkirk, 2008]]
Newkirk was born in England in 1949 and raised in Hertfordshire, and later New Delhi, India, where her father—a navigational engineer—was stationed. Newkirk, now an atheist, was educated in a convent, the only British girl there. She moved to the United States as a teenager, first studying to become a stockbroker, but after taking some abandoned kittens to a shelter in 1969, and appalled by the conditions she found there, she chose a career in animal protection instead. She became an animal protection officer for Montgomery County, then the District of Columbia's first woman poundmaster. By 1976 she was head of the animal-disease-control division of D.C.'s Commission on Public Health, and in 1980 was among those named as Washingtonian of the Year. She told Michael Specter of
The New Yorker that working for the shelters left her shocked at the way the animals were treated:
I went to the front office all the time, and I would say, "John is kicking the dogs and putting them into freezers." Or I would say, "They are stepping on the animals, crushing them like grapes, and they don't care." In the end, 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 that. I must have killed a thousand of them, sometimes dozens every day. Some of those people would take pleasure in making them suffer. Driving home every night, I would cry just thinking about it. And I just felt, to my bones, this cannot be right.
In 1980, she divorced Steve Newkirk, whom she had married when she was 19, and the same year met Alex Pacheco, a political major at George Washington University. Pacheco had studied for the priesthood, then worked as a crew member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's first ship. He introduced Newkirk to Peter Singer's influential book, Animal Liberation (1975), and in March 1980 she persuaded him to join her in forming People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, at that point just five people in a basement, as Newkirk described it. They were mostly students and members of the local vegetarian society, but the group included a friend of Pacheco's from the UK, Kim Stallwood, a British activist who went on to become the national organizer of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection . Pacheco was reluctant at first. "It just didn't sound great to me," he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992." I had been active in Europe ... and I thought there were just too many formalities. I thought we should just do things ourselves. But she made a convincing case that Washington needed a vehicle for animals because the current organizations were too conservative."
Silver Spring monkeys
. Don't let anyone tell you different."]]
The group first came to public attention in 1981 during the Silver Spring monkeys case, a dispute about experiments conducted by researcher Edward Taub on 17 macaque monkeys inside the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. The case led to the first police raid in the United States on an animal laboratory, triggered an amendment in 1985 to the United States Animal Welfare Act, and became the first animal-testing case to be appealed to the United States Supreme Court,
Pacheco had taken a job in May 1981 inside a primate research laboratory at the Institute, intending to gain firsthand experience of working inside an animal laboratory. Taub had been cutting sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to the monkeys' fingers, hands, arms, and legs—a process called "deafferentation"—so that the monkeys could not feel them; some of the monkeys had had their entire spinal columns deafferented. 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 research led in part to the discovery of neuroplasticity and a new therapy for stroke victims called constraint-induced movement therapy.
Pacheco visited the laboratory at night, taking photographs that showed the monkeys living in what the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research's ILAR Journal called filthy conditions. He passed his evidence 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 United States of an animal researcher, overturned on appeal. Norm Phelps writes that the case followed the highly publicized campaign of Henry Spira in 1976 against experiments on cats being performed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Spira's subsequent campaign in April 1980 against the Draize test. These and the Silver Springs monkey case jointly put animal rights on the agenda in the United States.
The ten-year battle for custody of the monkeys—described by The Washington Post as a vicious mud fight, during which both sides accused the other of lies and distortion— transformed PETA into a national, then international, movement. By February 1991, it claimed over 350,000 members, a paid staff of over 100, and an annual budget of over $7 million.
Philosophy and activism
Profile
,
Dan Matthews (above) is one of PETA's key players. One oft-cited quote of Newkirk's is: "When it comes to feelings like hunger, pain, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."
PETA lobbies governments to impose fines where animal-welfare legislation has been violated, promotes a vegan diet, tries to reform the practices in factory farms and slaughterhouses, goes undercover into animal research laboratories, farms, and circuses, initiates media campaigns against particular companies or practices, helps to find sanctuaries for former circus and zoo animals, and initiates lawsuits against companies.
The group has two million members and supporters, it received donations of over $32 million for the year ending July 31, 2009, and its website was receiving four million hits a month as of November 2008. Over 80 percent of its operating budget was spent on its programs in 2008-2009, 15 percent on fundraising, and four percent on management and general operations. Thirty-two percent of its staff earned under $30,000, 24 percent over $40,000, and Newkirk just under $37,000.
Pacheco left the group in 1999, and since then the two key staff members next to Newkirk have been Bruce Friedrich, director of vegan outreach—a devout Catholic who spent years working in soup kitchens, and who gives 20 percent of his income to the church—and Dan Mathews, the group's senior vice-president.
Many of the campaigns have focused on large corporations. Fast food companies such as KFC, Wendy's, and Burger King have been targeted. In the animal-testing industry, PETA's consumer boycotts have focused on Avon, Benetton, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Chesebrough-Pond's, Dow Chemical, General Motors, and others. Their modus operandi includes buying shares in target companies such as McDonald's and Kraft Foods in order to exert influence. The campaigns have delivered results for PETA. McDonald's and Wendy's introduced vegetarian options after PETA targeted them; Petco stopped selling some exotic pets; and Polo Ralph Lauren said it would no longer use fur. Avon, Estee Lauder, Benetton, and Tonka Toy Co. all stopped testing products on animals, the Pentagon stopped shooting pigs and goats in wounds tests, and a slaughterhouse in Texas was closed down. The New Yorker writes that PETA activists have crawled through the streets of Paris wearing leg-hold traps and thrown around money soaked in fake blood at the International Fur Fair. "The thing is, we make them gawk," she told Satya magazine, "maybe like a traffic accident that you have to look at."
Some campaigns have been particularly controversial. Newkirk was criticized in 2003 for sending a letter to PLO leader Yasser Arafat asking him to keep animals out of the conflict, after a donkey was blown up during an attack in Jerusalem. The group's 2003 "Holocaust on your Plate" exhibition—eight panels juxtaposing images of Holocaust victims with animal carcasses and animals being transported to slaughter—was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League. In July 2010, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that PETA's campaign was not protected by free speech laws, and banned it within Germany as an offense against human dignity. In 2005, the NAACP complained about the "Are Animals the New Slaves?" exhibit, which showed images of African-American slaves, Native Americans, child laborers, and women, alongside chained elephants and slaughtered cows.
PETA's "It's still going on" campaign features newspaper ads comparing widely-publicized murder-cannibalization cases to the deaths of animals in slaughterhouses. The campaign has attracted significant media attention, controversy and generated angry responses from the victims' family members. Ads were released in 1991 describing the deaths of the victims of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, in 2002 describing the deaths of the victims of serial killer Robert William Pickton, and in 2008 describing the murder of Tim McLean. In several cases, newspapers have refused to run the ads.
The group has also been criticized for aiming its message at young people. "Your Mommy Kills Animals" features a cartoon of a woman attacking a rabbit with a knife. To reduce milk consumption, it created the "Got Beer?" campaign, a parody of the dairy industry's series of Got Milk? ads, which featured celebrities with milk "mustaches" on their upper lips. When the mayor of New York, Rudolf Giuliani, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000, PETA ran a photograph of him with a white mustache and the words "Got prostate cancer?" to illustrate their claim that dairy products contribute to cancer, an ad that caused an outcry in the United States. After PETA placed ads in school newspapers linking milk to acne, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and strokes, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and college officials complained it encouraged underage drinking; the British Advertising Standards Authority asked that the ads be discontinued after complaints from interest groups such as The National Farmers' Unions.
Other campaigns are less confrontational and more humorous. In 2008, it launched the "Save the Sea Kittens" campaign to change the name of fish to "sea kittens" to give them a positive image, and it regularly asks towns to adopt a new name. It campaigned in 1996 for a new name for Fishkill, New York, and in April 2003 offered free veggie burgers to Hamburg, New York, if it would call itself Veggieburg. PETA has also produced various flash games showcasing their campaigns, including parodies of Cooking Mama, Super Mario Bros., and Super Meat Boy.
Undercover investigations
PETA sends its staff undercover into research laboratories, factory farms, and circuses to document the treatment of animals, requiring them to spend many months as employees of the facility, making copies of documents and wearing hidden cameras. By 2007, it had conducted 75 such investigations. It has also produced videos based on material collected during ALF raids. Some investigations have led to lawsuits or government action against the companies or universities. PETA itself faced legal action in April 2007 after the owners of a chinchilla ranch in Michigan complained about an undercover inquiry there, but the judge ruled in PETA's favor that undercover investigations can be legitimate.
Notable cases include the 26-minute film PETA produced in 1984, Unnecessary Fuss, based on 60 hours of researchers' footage obtained by the ALF during a raid on the University of Pennsylvania's head injury clinic. The footage showed researchers laughing at baboons as they inflicted brain damage on them with a hydraulic device intended to simulate whiplash. Laboratory animal veterinarian Larry Carbone writes that the researchers openly discussed how one baboon was awake before the head injury, despite protocols being in place for anaesthesia. The ensuing publicity led to the suspension of funds from the university, the firing of its chief veterinarian, the closure of the lab, and a period of probation for the university.
In 1990, two PETA activists posed as employees of Carolina Biological, where they took pictures and video inside the company, alleging that cats were being mistreated. Following the release of PETA's tapes, the USDA conducted their own inspection and subsequently charged the company with seven violations of the Animal Welfare Act. Four years later, an administrative judge ruled that Carolina Biological had not committed any violations.
In 1990, Bobby Berosini, a Las Vegas entertainer, lost his wildlife license, as well as (on appeal) a later lawsuit against PETA, after the group broadcast an undercover film of him slapping and punching orangutans in 1989. In 1997, a PETA investigation inside Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a contract animal-testing company, produced film of staff in the UK beating dogs, and what appeared to be abuse of monkeys in the company's New Jersey facility. After the video footage aired on British television in 1999, a group of activists set up Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty to close HLS down, a campaign that continues.
In 1999, a North Carolina grand jury handed down indictments against pig-farm workers on Belcross Farm in Camden County, the first indictments for animal cruelty on a factory farm in the United States, after a three-month PETA investigation produced film of the workers beating the animals. In 2004, PETA published the results of an eight-month undercover investigation in a West Virginia Pilgrim's Pride slaughterhouse that supplies chickens to KFC. The New York Times reported the investigation as showing workers stomping on live chickens, throwing dozens against a wall, tearing the head off a chicken to write graffiti, strangling one with a latex glove, and squeezing birds until they exploded. Yum Brands, owner of KFC, called the video appalling, and threatened to stop purchasing from Pilgrim's Pride if no changes were made; Pilgrim's Pride fired 11 employees, and introduced an anti-cruelty pledge for workers to sign.
In 2004 and 2005, PETA shot footage inside Covance, an animal-testing company in the United States and Europe, that appeared to show monkeys being mistreated in the company's facility in Vienna, Virginia. According to The Washington Post, PETA said an employee of the group filmed primates there being choked, hit, and denied medical attention when badly injured. After PETA sent the video and a 253-page complaint to the United States Department of Agriculture, Covance was fined $8,720 for 16 citations, three of which involved lab monkeys; the other citations involved administrative issues and equipment. The company said none of the issues were pervasive or endemic, and that they had taken corrective action. In 2005 Covance initiated a lawsuit charging PETA with fraud, violation of employee contract, and conspiracy to harm the company's business, but did not proceed with it.
Positions
On direct action and the ALF
Newkirk is outspoken in her support of
direct action, writing that no movement for social change has ever succeeded without what she calls the militarism component: "Thinkers may prepare revolutions," she wrote of the ALF in 2004, "but bandits must carry them out."
In 2004 The Observer described what it called a network of relationships between apparently unconnected animal rights groups on both sides of the Atlantic, writing that, with assets of $6.5 million, and with the PETA Foundation holding further assets of $15 million, PETA funds a number of activists and groups—some with links to militant groups, including the ALF, which the FBI has named as a domestic terrorist threat. American writer Don Liddick writes that PETA gave $1,500 to the Earth Liberation Front in 2001—Newkirk said the donation was a mistake, and that the money had been intended for public education about destruction of habitat, but Liddick writes that it went to the legal defense of Craig Rosebraugh, an ELF spokesman. That same year, according to The Observer, PETA gave a $5,000 grant to American animal rights activist Josh Harper, an advocate of arson.
are alleged to have substantial links.
Newkirk is a strong supporter of direct action that removes animals from laboratories and other facilities—she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992 that when she hears of anyone walking into a lab and walking out with animals, her heart sings.
On neutering, backyard dogs, working animals, and pets
PETA runs several programs though its Community Animal Project that helps cats and dogs in poorer areas of Virginia, near its headquarters. In 2008 they neutered 7,485 cats, dogs, and rabbits in that area, including pit bulls and feral cats, at a discounted rate or free of charge. They help neglected dogs and cats who are ill and injured, and pursue cruelty cases. Each year they set up hundreds of dog houses with straw bedding for dogs chained outside all winter. They urge population control through neutering and adoption from shelters, and campaign against organizations such as the
American Kennel Club that promote the breeding of purebred strains.
PETA argues that it would have been better for animals had the institution of breeding them as "pets" never emerged, that the desire to own and receive love from animals is selfish, and that their breeding, sale, and purchase can cause immeasurable suffering. They write that millions of dogs spend their lives chained outside in all weather conditions or locked up in chain-link pens and wire cages in puppy mills, and that even in good homes animals are often not well cared for. They would like to see the population of dogs and cats reduced through spaying and neutering, and for people never to purchase animals from pet shops or breeders, but to adopt them from shelters instead. PETA supports hearing dog programs where animals are taken from shelters and placed in appropriate homes, but does not endorse seeing-eye-dog programs because, according to one of their Vice Presidents, "the dogs are bred as if there are no equally intelligent dogs literally dying for homes in shelters." PETA also opposes the keeping of fish in aquarium tanks, suggesting that people view computer videos of fish instead.
On euthanasia
PETA opposes the
no kill movement. The group takes in feral cat colonies with diseases such as
feline AIDS and
leukemia, stray dogs, litters of
parvo-infected puppies, and backyard dogs, and says that it would be unrealistic to follow a no-kill policy in such instances. They offer free euthanasia services to counties that kill unwanted animals via gassing or shooting—they recommend the use of an intravenous injection of
sodium pentobarbital if administered by a trained professional, and for severely ill or dying pets when euthanasia at a veterinarian is unaffordable. They recommend euthanasia for certain breeds, such as pit bull terriers, and in certain situations for animals in shelters: for example, for those living for long periods in cramped cages.
Two PETA employees were acquitted in 2007 of animal cruelty after at least 80 euthanized animals were left in dumpsters in a shopping center in Ashoskie over the course of a month in 2005; the two employees were seen leaving behind 18 dead animals, and 13 more were found inside their van. The animals had been euthanized after being removed from shelters in Northampton and Bertie counties. The group said it began euthanizing animals in some rural North Carolina shelters after it found the shelters killing animals in ways PETA considered inhumane.
On wildlife conservation personalities
, place animals under stress. In 2006 when
Steve Irwin died, PETA's vice-president
Dan Mathews said Irwin had made a career out of antagonizing frightened wild animals. Australian Member of Parliament
Bruce Scott said PETA should apologize to Irwin's family and the rest of Australia.
On animal testing
PETA opposes animal testing—whether toxicity testing, basic or applied research, or for education and training—on both moral and practical grounds. Newkirk told
Vogue magazine in 1989 that even if it resulted in a cure for AIDS, PETA would oppose it. The group also believes that it is wasteful, unreliable, and irrelevant to human health, because artificially induced diseases in animals are not identical to human diseases. They say that animal experiments are frequently redundant and lack accountability, oversight, and regulation. They promote alternatives, including
embryonic stem cell research and
in vitro cell research. PETA employees have themselves volunteered for human testing of vaccines; Scott Van Valkenburg, the group's Director of Major Gifts, said in 1999 that he had volunteered for human testing of HIV vaccines.
Position within the animal rights movement
posing for PETA. The series of ads triggered criticism from feminist animal rights advocates.]]
Robert Garner of the University of Leicester writes that Newkirk and Pacheco are the leading exporters of animal rights to the more moderate groups in the United States—both members of an animal rights elite that he argues has shaken up the animal rights movement, setting up new groups and radicalizing old ones.
There is criticism of PETA from both the conservative and radical ends of the movement. Michael Specter writes that it provides for groups such as the Humane Society of the United States the same dynamic that Malcolm X provided for Martin Luther King, or Andrea Dworkin for Gloria Steinem—someone radical to alienate the mainstream and make moderate voices more appealing.
The ads featuring barely clad or naked women have appalled feminist animal rights advocates. When Ronald Reagan's daughter Patti Davis posed naked for Playboy, donating half her $100,000 fee to PETA, the group issued a press release saying Davis "turns the other cheek in an eye-opening spread," then announced she had been photographed naked with Hugh Hefner's dog for an anti-fur ad. In 1995, PETA formed a partnership with Playboy to promote human organ donation, with the caption "Some People Need You Inside Them" on a photograph of Hefner's wife. The long-standing campaign, "I'd rather go naked than wear fur," in which celebrities and supermodels strip for the camera, generated particular concern.
Newkirk has replied to the criticism that no one is being exploited, the women taking part are volunteers, and if sexual attraction advances the cause of animals, she is unapologetic.
Like Francione, PETA describes itself as abolitionist.
Francione has also criticized PETA for having caused grassroots animal rights groups to close, groups that he argues were essential for the survival of the animal rights movement, which rejects the centrality of corporate animal charities. Francione writes that PETA initially set up independent chapters around the United States, but closed them in favor of a top-down, centralized organization, which not only consolidated decision-making power, but centralized donations too. Now, local animal rights donations go to PETA, rather than to a local group.
See also
Kentucky Fried Cruelty
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals v. Doughney
PETA Asia-Pacific
Women and animal advocacy
Your Mommy Kills Animals (film)
References
Further reading
PETA homepage, accessed July 2, 2010.
McCartney, Stella. "Fur farm investigation", PETAtv.com, accessed July 2, 2010.
Morrison, A.R. Personal Reflections on the “Animal-Rights” Phenomenon, The Physiologist, Volume 44, Number 1, February 2001, accessed July 17, 2010.
Pence, Gregory. Classic Cases in Medical Ethics: Accounts of Cases That Have Shaped Medical Ethics. McGraw-Hill, 2007.
PETA. Meet Your Meat, a film about the egg and meat industries, narrated by Alec Baldwin, accessed July 2, 2010.
The Huffington Post. The Sexiest PETA Ads Of All Time! a slideshow, accessed July 2, 2010.
Workman, Dave P. Peta Files: The Dark Side of the Animal Rights Movement, Merril Press, 2003.
External links
FBI file on PETA
Category:Organizations established in 1980
Category:Animal rights movement
Category:Organizations based in Virginia
