Transported, of course, is something of a euphemism; these mythical beasts of the jungle are beaten to submission by nasty little weapons called bullhooks. The ‘mood’ Mr. Feld is claiming has shifted is nothing of the sort. What has changed is awareness: enough people know what the animals are put through, and with that knowledge comes a moral clarity that what’s happening is, without question, wrong.
Meet the mood shifters.
**
Daphna Nachminovitch and Laura Brown sat on the floor and let their faces be licked by the kind of puppies PETA’s critics will have you believe they are eager to kill. We were in PETA’s now infamous shelter, located at 501 Front St. here in Norfolk. Unlike many of the shelters I’ve visited across the country, PETA’s animal care units are spacious, calm, and well-attended with toys, food, and clean bedding. It’s also the only shelter I’ve ever been to that sits on the fourth floor of an office building, with cut out windows between the dogs, kittens, and bunnies and the employees working a few feet away.
Brown & Nachminovitch.
According to Nachminovitch, Senior Vice President of Cruelty Investigations, in 2014 alone PETA spent more than $1,000,000 on companion-animal services in Virginia and North Carolina. This included visiting and tending to more than 5,500 backyard dogs in 65 cities; helping more than 1,500 indigent families keep their animals by providing free medical services; custom-building and delivering 285 doghouses (6,138 total doghouses since the program’s inception in 1998); behavioral counselling for more than 2,500 people to help them keep their animals; and providing euthanasia services for more than 500 animals belonging to loving guardians desperate to alleviate their animal companions’ suffering.
“I don’t think people have a good idea of what we do here,” said Brown, a shelter specialist. “We’re here 12 hours a day, and on emergency pagers after that.”
Rachel Bellis works in cruelty investigations and, like many PETA employees, regularly takes a break to play with the animals. “Every animal is an individual. Every animal is looked at,” she said. “I’ve never worked with more compassionate and dedicated people in my life.”
It hasn’t been all puppies and kittens at PETA of late.
A recent incident that brought fresh attention–
including an act by the Virginia General Assembly–to PETA’s shelter program was presented by the Pilot like
a scene from a Stephen King story: “A little girl’s pet Chihuahua disappeared from her family’s mobile home on Virginia’s Eastern Shore…” What happened broke a number of PETA protocols: the dog was taken without speaking to the owner; the animal was euthanized prior to going through established processes, including not keeping the dog alive for 5 days, per state law. PETA since fired the contractor who violated these rules and has publicly apologized.
“It’s too complicated for a short sentence,” Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA, told me when asked about PETA euthanizing animals at all. “That is what is happening, people want a soundbite and they reduce it to kill shelter or no kill.”
In order to understand the euthanizing at PETA, one must hold what might appear to be two contradictory concepts in their head at the same time: that one of the most prominent animal rights organizations in the world euthanizes animals, and that they do so while purporting that these acts strengthen, not dismiss, their ethical integrity.
In Newkirk’s own words:
“We weigh the situation from the animal’s perspective as best we can, as you would in any situation where you’re trying to help and abate suffering. Every animal we evaluate. If it’s an animal that is unlikely to be adopted, given that most people want small, fluffy, house-broken, and pleasant animals, or if the animal is crushed in an accident, or kept in a way that has made the animal unsocial or aggressive, or if the animal is on his or her last legs, or the time has just come, then euthanasia is a godsend. It’s a blessing. It’s a way to provide the most peaceful, traumaless exit. It’s a privilege to be able to give it to them.”
PETA, of course, did not cause the animal overpopulation problem. According to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, in 2013, the total number of animals who entered VA shelters was 242,087, with 64,727 euthanized and 4,417 unassisted deaths. An unassisted death is the epitome of euphemism: these are animals under the care and custody of shelters they depend on to keep them from suffering and dying slowly, in pain. PETA’s spay/neuter program has serviced over 112,000 local animals over the past 10 years. Do some simple math and you realize that PETA has kept millions of animals off of our streets, out of our shelters, and never setting paw in clinics where euthanizing, sadly, must occur.
“We’d be hypocrites if we didn’t [euthanize],” Newkirk said. “We can’t ignore the animals around our office.”
The unnecessary death of the Chihuahua outshines, and to some, nullifies the major victories, like the big news about the elephants.
“If we’re fighting so hard to stop needless killing of even mice, why on earth would we wish to see anything but happiness and a loving home for any dog, or cat, or bird?” asked Newkirk. “It’s thoughtlessness that plays a role, and the nastiness and absolute bulling. Our poor girls who are out there helping out in the snow in the frigid weather… if people could see what they were doing, they’d be ashamed.”
**
Amanda Kyle, a field worker for PETA, was holding Soup, a Maltese mix who had been adopted from the Humane Society in Portsmouth, then two years later given up with the arrival of a new baby. When Soup was passed on to PETA she suffered from kidney disease, horribly matted-over genitals, urinary tract infection, fleas, ear and nasal infections, and rotten teeth (all but 3 teeth had to be removed). Like many animals left for PETA to take care of, without a miracle, there would be no happy ending for the likes of Soup. 
Soup settled into Kyle’s lap. One of the lucky ones, Kyle had adopted her.”The vet gave her three months. I wanted her to feel joy,” Kyle said. “She was thrown away on Christmas eve. And this dog had been adopted and then abandoned, a ‘happy’ number for the shelter (whose priority is adoption statistics.)”The relationship between PETA and local shelters is a complicated one.
“I think of PETA does a lot of great things, there’s no question about it,” said Rob Blizzard, executive director of the Norfolk SPCA, which adopted out 770 animals last year. “I’ve been a big fan of their organization for years. I even had them in my will of charities I would leave money to. The question everyone’s asking is, why, with the huge amount of resources they have, isn’t more of an investment being made in those animals? It’s not that they’re not doing a lot of wonderful things, it’s that all of these animals being accepted, we just are not seeing the aggressive effort to adopt them out.”
At some point, it’s something of a numbers shell game–the Norfolk SPCA took in less than half the animals in 2014 it did in 2011, leaving one to wonder where our society expected those unaccounted for or turned away animals to end up. At some point, it’s something of a game of semantics–the Norfolk SPCA euthanizes around 5% of the animals it takes in.
“PETA has and will continue to make an effort to get adoptable animals adopted through our own doors and through transfers to other facilities, mostly the Virginia Beach SPCA,” said Nachminovitch. “Animals for adoption are routinely advertised online, via social media (on PETA’s pages and others’), in print publications, fliers, and more.”
PETA also makes a habit of taking on other city’s problem animals. Last year PETA accepted 249 feral cats from the City of Portsmouth. Up until recently the outgoing answering machine at a Portsmouth Police Department phone line dedicated to animal care instructed citizens to call PETA for help with feral cats.
**
Elsewhere in this building PETA employees are devoting their lives to protecting animals who are being sprayed with perfume and make-up products in their eyes and mouths; animals involved in experiments (in one test series alone PETA saved the lives of 4 million animals); animals used for entertainment (like the elephants who will no longer be beaten or paraded through the streets); and the billions of animals tortured and bloated full of antibiotics and growth hormones in the factory farming industry.
The scenes that play out in the factory farming industry are more horrifying than anything Stephen King ever wrote. Sweet little animals, tortured by the billions, because they don’t have the voices to speak for themselves, because they don’t have the hands to free themselves, because their don’t have the complicated collection of facial muscles to form frowns of distress that humans can recognize. They are tortured by the billions because they taste good.
To call the notion that people who work at PETA don’t actually love animals absurd is to give it too much credit. Like any organization of its size, PETA isn’t perfect, of course, and an amount of thoughtful criticism is not just expected, but helps them evolve. But what’s said about PETA is something very different. It’s a singular rancor, a vulgarity, a beguiling hatred that many in our society exhibit toward the group. It’s so intense–so screaming and pounding–that one gets the sense it is a din meant to distract from something else. It’s my junior psychologist interpretation that the maniacally intense pronouncements toward PETA are a projection of the way factory-farm supporting people subconsciously judge themselves.
PETA, according to the Internet.
I offered this theory to Newkirk, who responded: “A friend of mine said, ‘How can you talk about killing dogs when your breath smells of dead animals, when your coat is made of dead animals, when you have shelves of products tested on animals… how can you talk about no kill?’ I do believe it’s a defensive reaction. Don’t tell me what to do, I’ll tell you what to do.”
The mood, as Mr. Feld from the circus might put it, has been slower to evolve surrounding some of the other issues that PETA advocates for, such as the humane treatment of the pigs that become the best part of a BLT, the cows that become our Big Macs, and the chickens that become our Chick fil A. What happens to these animals on the route to our plates is, to any moral being, sinfully inhumane. You, reading this, know it; you don’t need me to give you details or link to articles. The fact that the factory farming industry is an abomination against the supposedly evolved stature of our species has reached the collective consciousness, if it has not yet shifted the mood.
“It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but there is no amount of noise that will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep,” wrote Jonathan Safran Foer in his spellbinding book, Eating Animals.
To recognize the central nobility of PETA’s work is to also acknowledge the central immorality of an industry, and food lifestyle, that can feel intractably interwoven with the way we see our country and ourselves.
It’s so much easier to hate than it is to go through the process of evolving, which is really, really hard.
*
When conversation turned to the euthanasia process, three of the four PETA employees gathered for the interview started to cry.
“It’s a big overdose of anesthesia,” said Brown. “We treat the animals like they’re our own. It’s the most precious gift I could give someone. I stand outside the door hearing people cry with their animals. I couldn’t image us not being there. Not just turning the animal away but the people away. We’re right there with them, grieving with them.”
Brown also does fieldwork for PETA, finding animals who are being abused, and helping them. They conservatively estimate that last year PETA employees put in over 25,000 hours in the field, where they regularly find animals humans have allowed to wallow at the doorstep of death. There can be love in death, and death in love. The nasty things people say about PETA affect Brown sometimes.
“You can’t help but take it personally,” she said. “But we’re laser focused on the animals. Throw at us what you want, and we’re still going to do the right thing for the animals. Of course it hurts. It’s scary to think about our services being limited. Even if you can’t be respectful of us… Don’t criticize us for those numbers when those are your numbers as well.”
Your numbers, my numbers, all of our numbers. In a perfect world there would be public money put toward rehabilitating every animal with behavioral problems, but that’s hard to imagine in a society that doesn’t rehabilitate its abused human children. In a perfect world there is money for surgeries for every sick animal, but that’s also hard to imagine in a country where so many vehemently oppose health care for all humans. These animals don’t get saved by leaving a comment online calling PETA the devil and then going back to daily life. Many of them, in fact, are beyond saving, it’s just that other facilities don’t have the guts–or moral certitude–to do it themselves.
*
We walked to the room where the animals spend their last final conscious moments on earth. “This is sacred territory,” a sign above the table reads. “Leave your stress and troubles at the door. In here, only the animals we serve matter.”
“Those animals stay with me. I have memories, and nightmares,” Brown said. “We’re there speaking for all of them.”
All the anger toward PETA, and the “kill vs. no kill debate,” is also a nightmare. The solutions to this problem are every pet being spayed or neutered; in no one ever getting a pet from a breeder or pet store as long as there are animals in shelters; in a sea change of compassion that recognizes the humanity of these animals–all animals–who love us so damn much.
“If all of the energy targeted toward PETA was put toward solving the crisis…” said Nachminovitch, “it’s the animals who would actually benefit.”
When I asked Newkirk what three words she would want to come to mind when the average person thinks of PETA, she said, “Kindness, kindness, kindness.”
And the mood continues to shift, mirroring the lived compassion of humans, the glow of soul we share with all of the animals whose pain we recognize, and soothe.
Anyone interested in fostering or adopting is encouraged to contact PETA at adopt@peta.org This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
Exposing the Big Game 
I have adopted a cat who only had months to live. I kept him, and tried to make his last days his best days. I also adopted a dog who was very old. He lasted over a year due to the care that we gave him. It is the worst thing in the world to put a pet down. However, in each case it was a blessing for the animal. There comes a time when what you as a human want, and what a pet needs are two very different things. The need of the pet has to come first. I still cry for all my pets who have gone before me. Tears falling right now. These are hard decisions to make, but they must be made, as anyone who has a pet knows all too well.
Go PeTA – I am a huge supporter and will continue to be.
Euthanasia for ANY reason other than the alleviation of pain when terminally ill is unacceptable.
What I should have said in my comment above: Alleviation of pain when terminally ill IS euthanasia. Any other reason is murder.
Agreed.
Although they should be allowed to live for as long as their quality of living is not jeoprodised.
Check out this article by none other than Ingird Newkirk herself about Pitbulls:
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Controlling-an-animal-as-deadly-as-a-weapon-2629558.php
B2B.
In the words of John Grogan “There are no bad dogs, just bad owners”.
Breed Specific Legislation is a form of racism. The dog in “The Little Rascals” was a pitbull and he had a lovely nature.
“We do not advocate ‘right to life’ for animals”
~Ingrid Newkirk
Someone like that is not promoting animal rights. The exact same reason I will not support or work for the RSPCA. How different is that ideology of simply putting an animal down because nobody wants him/her or considering the act far simpler any different from those who would abuse that individual? Sorry, but if this is the stance they take then I will not support them. I am for the lives of other living beings, to act with mercy and advocating doing as much as possible to make their lives easier, not viewing them as expendable objects of a cruel system to be thrown out at our convenience.
Meanwhile, for the past two years, a man named Naoto Matsumura from Japan, age 53, is the only resident remaining in the town of Tomioka (in the radiation zone of Fukushima) to feed and care for the multitude animals abandoned by their owners, simply because he couldn’t bare the thought of them suffering.
I guess my question would be, What becomes of the animals no one wants? I hate the idea of all the unnecessary animal deaths also. But sometimes the life of an unwanted animal is worse. Some no-kill shelters do not have the resources or room for the animals to live decently. They may be stacked up in crates, kept alive but without a real life. If the unwanted animals end up out on the street, they are subject to being hit by cars, being tormented by people. They may starve or die alone of untreated illness. Animals don’t have the “right to life” in the sense they are denied the right to euthanasia, as humans are. But sometimes not being alive is in the best interests of an animal. My first concern for them is suffering and trying to prevent it.
And some animals can live quite well without an owner, they aren’t dumb.
What becomes of the animals no one wants? People jab a needle into them when they are quite healthy and call it an act of mercy.
No-kill shelters also have foster carers, where animals are given over to screened volunteers until they are given away to another owner. There are places that don’t have appropriate facilities or are poorly run, but that is a blanket statement. How many pets are given the ‘merciful’ release of euthenasia because their owner was too petty, lazy or vindictive to take care of them? I see no mercy in taking a life because it is convenient.
Countries like Great Britain, India and Italy have made it illegal to kill healthy and/or treatable animals.
My cat is 18 years old and has diabetes. She’s doing very well so far. Someday I will have to deal with this (which I hate to think of). She’ll let me know when it’s time. But for now, those eyes are full of the life and the will to live, and she’s active for her age (can’t jump up to the ceiling in a single bound anymore, but that’s ok). She’s awesome.
I wasn’t sure where to post this, but I find it outrageous. The cost to animals being kept in human captivity for entertainment is way too high:
https://www.thedodo.com/seaworld-orca-drugs-medications-1035364310.html
Thank you, thank you, thank you for telling the PETA story!
I have been a member (and proud of it!) for 28 years. Founded in 1980, PETA was the first of the national animal rights groups to take an abolitionist stance, as seen in its motto: “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment upon or exploit for entertainment.” The good works done by this organization are many: Advocating for animals to stop abuse and exploitation (such as its campaign to get elephants out of the circus); spaying and neutering thousands of animals; using its Angels for Animals program to provide over 5000 dog houses for the dogs chained outside year around with virtually no shelter; running the Animal Rahat program in India which helps street dogs and cats and any animals in trouble but focuses on the donkeys, horses, bullocks, and elephants who are made to work until they drop and receive virtually no care. PETA provides food, medicine, veterinary care, sanctuaries, and works to provide mini-tractors to pull the loads and free the animals. Space is more limited than PETA’s good works.
It is not surprising that there is resentment against PETA from those who use animals for profit and pleasure. After all, PETA wants to see an end of hunters and hamburgers, puppy mills and furs, animal acts and experiments. But the most despicable rants from the haters are the lies about the killing of puppies and kittens. Of course, they chose to focus on the pet animals that even the exploiters may love, and declare that PETA destroys them. What gets lost in the lies is what puppies and kittens they are really talking about–the ones that have been so abused, so injured, so sick that they cannot survive, the ones that most shelters would prefer not to deal with. Anyone who has seen the pictures of the unfortunate animals brought to the PETA shelter, if they have any compassion at all, must have been immeasurably saddened and appalled that the animals could have come to such a state–starved, injured, run over by cars, some with open fractures, others with tumors and diseases left untreated. So, according to the haters, PETA kills puppies and kittens, never mind that some of those dogs and cats receive the only kindness they may have ever known before they are released from this earth and their suffering. I wonder how many of the PETA haters have ever stopped by the side of the road to pick up an injured animal to transport for whatever help is possible? How many have picked up a sick cat on the street and taken him or her to a veterinarian? Who knows, maybe some of the haters have let their own pets languish to die untreated because they were too cheap to pay for help. After all, for most of the haters, only people matter.
I have my own personal story of PETA. A few mice started showing up around my apartment complex, and so I ordered PETA humane traps to remove them before they were discovered and someone bought lethal traps. The PETA traps worked well, and I was relocating the little fellows to a much nicer area. One day a mouse in the trap was not moving normally, and something was very wrong. I was wondering if there was any history of the traps causing problems. I put the mouse in a box in a quiet place and e-mailed and call PETA. Since most veterinarians will not treat wild animals and the only veterinary clinic in the area licensed to treat them was about 20 miles away, I wanted to get some information, if possible, before we went there. I no sooner sent the e-mail, than the phone rang. It was Jodi from PETA to discuss how best to help the mouse. I discovered then that PETA has an enormous datebase–Jodi had the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every veterinarian in the Spokane area. She said she would call a nearby clinic, say she was calling from PETA, and ask if they would make an exception and see the mouse. A clinic just two blocks away agreed! The pocket pet veterinarian said that the mouse had neurological damage, that she appeared to have gotten into a slow-acting toxin, and that euthanasia was in her best interest. I was very sorry the little couldn’t be saved, and I called Jodi to thank her again and tell her the outcome. At that point she even offered to help pay the bill (which I appreciated but wanted to do myself). I discovered that day that PETA may have a million members and many ongoing projects, but a PETA employee could still take the time to help a tiny wild rodent in a faraway state. I doubt if that little mouse would have fared as well with the haters.
Marcia Mueller/ahimsaforever
Isn’t that something – what people fail to realize is these dogs were abandoned in the first place by an owner either under stress or irresponsible. People expect shelters to take the place of their responsibility? They do their best, but sometimes the damage done by neglect is too great.
I heard on the news in my area the other day that several cocker spaniel-type dogs were found abandoned, one hit by a car – in the freezing cold weather the northeast has been having, can you imagine that? It was suspected that they were breeder dogs who were abandoned. Terrible.
That is terrible. Unfortunately, it will probably continue until people are held accountable for abusing and neglecting animals. So many prosecutors and judges don’t take animal suffering seriously or they think it just isn’t worth the expense to the citizens to put them in jail, or they don’t want the abuser’s family to be inconvenienced. We need to get past that kind of thinking.
I note that the PETA haters are in the comments sections of many stories about animal abuse or prospective animal-related laws. I think we need to follow them up and add the other side of the story. If they are fueled by their fear of the animal rights movement and virulent dislike of PETA, we need to use our own strong motivation to make this world better for the other animals and make our voices heard just as loudly.
I’m shocked that you’re so misinformed about PETA. They are LIARS, and I have all the statistics to show it. They kill so many healthy animals, many of which they steal, a Bill had to be drawn up to stop them. They got their lobbyists, and what you see now as a shelter, didn’t exist a month or 2 ago. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/animal-bill-could-put-peta-out-of-the-shelter-business/2015/02/23/2f4f05b6-bb6a-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html Ingrid Newkirk’s motto is “Better dead, than fed.” She believes that “pets” should not exist. That’s all I’ll say for now, as I’m in the middle of something else that involves PETA and their killing machine.
Thanks for this post. These issues are never simple. It is incredibly easy to diss and call names and to be fooled by name callers (who often have very shady motives). I have worked in shelters. Each day, several times a day, I was brought to my knees. One should be or something might be wrong. PETA does an enormous amount of good. Try being part of some messed up little regional shelters and see where your criticism gets you. Kindness, Kindness, Kindness. Yes.
http://www.peta.org/features/peta-presidents-grisly-will/
Ingrid Newkirk is insane, and she is a master manipulator and con woman. They bring in $31 million/ year, tax deductible, and all she does is put naked women in public to advertise no fur. They didn’t bring down Ringling bros. or any of the other circuses. I’ve know about PETA for years, and they try to convince everybody who has something to say about them that they have their own agendas.
How can stealing a pet dog, whose name the employees knew, as well as the humans that cared for her and loved her, then euthanising it in the back of the van after grabbing it off the porch, ever be OK?
Damn, I hate seeing so many people conned by them.
Well, atheist animal advocate, hate to ruin your day, but after reading your comments I donated another $100 to PETA.
It’s like trying to say Mother Teresa was a horrible person, which she was.
Just because you don’t support PETA doesn’t mean you aren’t for treating animals with respect and kindness and it doesn’t mean you support the fur industry or any other form of exploitation. PETA tends to be both the poster child and the whipping boy of animal rights and every other organisation or group or whatever is unfortunately lumped together with them. There many unsung heroes and heroines doing far more good and showing more kindness than that organisation could ever imagine.
I’m shocked at a defense of Peta’s kill policy here. Leadership has a demented angel of death mentality, and has written almost rhapsodically about her job killing animals pre-Peta. A friend has witnessed a Peta staffer lying to people to get healthy animals away from them, only to take back to the office and kill. Very disappointed at this support of “better off dead” killers.
Sharing articles here does not constitute for policy (many times it’s quite the opposite).