The famous quote from Bhagavad Gita:
Whenever virtue subsides and wickedness prevails, I manifest Myself. To establish virtue, to destroy evil, to save the good I come from yuga (age) to Yuga (age).
But this evil agains animals has been going too long but no god came. But god came in the form of PETA.
If you are against PETA and mock them without knowing their history and the change they bought to the world then its time for you to read this piece: You’re wrong about PETA
PETA — you’ve heard of it, and chances are, you have an opinion about it. Nearly 45 years after its founding, the organization has a complicated but undeniable legacy. Known for its ostentatious protests, the group is almost single-handedly responsible for making animal rights part of the national conversation.
The scale of animal exploitation in the United States is staggering. Over 10 billion land animals are slaughtered for food every year, and it’s estimated that over 100 million are killed in experiments. Abuse of animals is rampant in the fashion industry, in pet breeding and ownership, and in zoos.
Most of this happens out of sight and out of mind, often without public knowledge or consent. PETA has fought for over four decades to put a spotlight on these atrocities and trained generations of animal activists now active throughout the country.
Peter Singer, who is widely credited for galvanizing the modern animal rights movement, told me: “I can’t think of any other organization that can compare with PETA in terms of the overall influence that it has had and still is having on the animal rights movement.”
Its controversial tactics are not above critique. But the key to PETA’s success has been its very refusal to be well-behaved, forcing us to look at what we might rather ignore: humanity’s mass exploitation of the animal world.
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The group’s rapid rise from obscurity to household name was propelled by its first two major investigations into animal abuse. Its first target, in 1981, was the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland.
At the now-defunct lab, neuroscientist Edward Taub was severing the nerves of macaques, permanently leaving them with limbs they could see but could not feel. He aimed to test whether the maimed monkeys could nevertheless be trained to use these limbs, theorizing that the research could help people regain control of their bodies after suffering a stroke or spinal cord injury.
Pacheco got an unpaid position assisting with experiments, using the time to document the conditions there. The experiments themselves, however grotesque, were legal, but the level of care for the monkeys and the sanitary conditions at the lab appeared to fall short of Maryland’s animal welfare laws. Having gathered enough evidence, PETA presented it to the state’s attorney, who pressed animal abuse charges against Taub and his assistant. Simultaneously, PETA released shocking photos Pacheco had taken of the confined monkeys to the press.
PETA protestors dressed as caged monkeys picketed the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had funded the research. The press ate it up. Taub was convicted and his lab shut down — the first time this had happened to an animal experimenter in the US.
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For its next act, in 1985, PETA released footage taken by the Animal Liberation Front, a radical group more willing to break the law, of severe abuse of baboons at the University of Pennsylvania. There, under the auspices of studying the effects of whiplash and head injuries in car accidents, baboons were fitted with helmets and strapped to tables, where a sort of hydraulic hammer smashed their heads. The footage showed lab staff mocking concussed and brain-damaged animals. The video, titled “Unnecessary Fuss,” is still available online. A slate of protests at Penn and the NIH followed, as did lawsuits against the university. The experiments were discontinued.
Almost overnight, PETA became the most visible animal rights organization in the country. By bringing the public face to face with violence carried out against lab animals, PETA challenged the orthodoxy that scientists used animals ethically, appropriately, or rationally.
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The animal experimentation and animal agriculture industries are deep-pocketed and deeply entrenched — in taking them on, PETA picked uphill, long-term fights. But bringing the same tactics against weaker opponents has brought quicker results, shifting norms on once-ubiquitous uses of animals, from fur to animal testing in cosmetics, with mega-corporations like Unilever touting PETA’s approval of their animal-friendly credentials.
The group has helped end animal use at circuses (including at Ringling Brothers, which relaunched in 2022 with only human performers) and says it has shut down most wild big cat cub petting zoos in the US. Its many-faceted approach has drawn attention to the sheer breadth of ways that humans harm animals for profit outside the public eye, like in its campaigns against the use of animals in gruesome car crash tests.
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PETA has also become, out of necessity, a force for defending the democratic right to protest. When the industries intimidated by PETA and other animal rights groups doing undercover investigations pushed so-called “ag-gag” laws to prevent whistleblowing on factory farms, the group joined a coalition including the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge them in court, winning several state-level First Amendment victories for animal rights activists and corporate whistleblowers.
Over 40 years, PETA has grown into a major institution, with a 2023 operating budget of $75 million and 500 full-time staff, including scientists, lawyers, and policy experts. It is now the de facto face of the American animal rights movement, with public opinion on the group split.
Chris Green, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund (with whom I used to work at Harvard’s Animal Law and Policy Program), told me: “Like Hoover for vacuums, PETA has become a proper noun, a proxy for animal protection and animal rights.”
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Despite almost 45 years of work, PETA has not convinced even a meaningful minority of Americans to eschew meat. Since it was founded, meat production in the country has doubled.
But to see this as a failure misses the scale of the challenge and the forces arrayed against it. Meat-eating is a deeply culturally-entrenched habit, facilitated by the ubiquity of cheap meat made possible by factory farming, the hydra-like political influence of agricultural lobbies, and the omnipresence of advertising for meat. PETA spends $75 million per year on all of its staff and campaigns, with some percentage of that aimed at opposing meat-eating. The American fast food industry alone spent about $5 billion in 2019 promoting the opposite message.
Shifting the behavior of the public on something as personal as diet is a problem no one in the animal rights movement (or the environmental or public health movements, for that matter) has solved. Peter Singer, when I speak to him, concedes that to the extent he envisioned a political project in Animal Liberation, it was one of consciousness-raising resulting in a consumer movement like an organized boycott. “The idea was that once people know, they won’t participate,” he told me. “And that hasn’t quite happened.”
Nor has PETA’s work resulted in truly transformative federal legislation, like taxes on meat, stronger animal welfare laws, or a moratorium on federal funding for animal experiments. What’s needed to achieve this in the US is brute lobbying power. And when it comes to lobbying power, PETA, and the animal rights movement as a whole, is lacking.
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“The better metric is how many activists are getting active, how many people are engaged in non-violent sustained action on behalf of your cause,” he said. “Today, unlike 40 years ago, you have hundreds of people storming factory farms, hundreds of thousands of people voting on state-wide ballot initiatives … PETA more than any other organization is responsible for that.”
When it comes to pollinating ideas, PETA has sown countless seeds of animal rights activism. Virtually everyone I spoke to for this piece, including many critics, credited some aspect of PETA’s operations with motivating them to get involved in the movement, be it through flyers at a punk show, undercover videos disseminated on DVD or online, or Newkirk’s own writing and public speaking.
Jeremy Beckham might not have helped start the Salt Lake City VegFest, or even become vegan, if not for the PETA protest at his middle school. Bruce Friedrich, who founded the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit promoting alternative protein, was PETA’s campaign coordinator for that protest. Today, former PETA staffers teach at universities, run plant-based meat companies, and have senior positions at other nonprofits.
PETA has also shaped the work of other groups. A number of animal rights movement insiders I spoke to argued that large animal welfare groups like the Humane Society of the United States would not have committed serious resources to anti-factory farming work if not for PETA cutting a path for them. Legacy animal welfare organizations now do the grunt work — filing litigation, posting public comments on proposed regulations, getting ballot initiatives in front of voters — necessary to make incremental change. They deserve their own share of the credit for the successes of recent decades. But they have also benefited from PETA acting not only as an inspiration to them but as an animal rights bogeyman to others.
A senior staffer at a major animal welfare advocacy group told me: “Having PETA out there doing all these bombastic, questionable things, it makes other animal protection organizations look like more reasonable partners when advocating for legislation, regulations, or other institutional change.”
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We’re all living in PETA’s world
In making sense of PETA, start not with the group, but with the crisis it is trying to address. Humans mete out violence against animals on an almost unimaginable scale. It is a violence that is ubiquitous and normalized, carried out by individuals, organizations, companies, and governments, often entirely legally. Not only have few people attempted to tackle this violence seriously, most don’t even recognize it as violence. How do you challenge this status quo, when most people would rather tune out your arguments?
PETA, an imperfect but necessary messenger, offered one answer, as best as it could.
Today, more animals are bred and killed in horrendous conditions than at any other point in human existence. Over more than 40 years, PETA has not achieved its goal of ending speciesism.
But it has, nonetheless and against the odds, forever altered the debate around animal use. In the US, animals are, for the most part, out of circuses. Fur is considered taboo by many. Animal testing is divisive, with half of Americans opposed to the practice. Meat-eating has become the subject of spirited public debate. Perhaps more importantly, there are now many more groups committed to animal welfare. There is more donor money. More politicians are speaking out about factory farming.
Progress in any social movement is slow, incremental, and bumpy. But PETA has provided a blueprint. It started with a strong and nonnegotiable ethical and political goal and realized it could have the most impact over the long term through professionalization and developing a wide supporter network. It was unafraid of controversy and confrontation, making sure people knew the name PETA.
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