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Webmaster of FSTDT.com is a PETA activist

thaiboxerken

Penultimate Amazing
thaiboxerken
Joined
Sep 17, 2001
Messages
34,530
While I enjoy her site, she has a link to "support animal rights" that takes you right to PETA's website. So, since I watched Penn&Teller's BS episode about PETA, I decided to write her:

I greatly enjoy your site as it shows just how illogical fundies
think. However, I have to wonder why you would want people to support
an organization of illogical people such as PETA? This group is made
up of hypocritical species-traitors that don't follow their own
"advice."

PETA kills thousands of pets themselves in their basement freezer.
They've funded eco-terrorists that have burned down people's houses
and vandalized private and public property. They've terrorized kids
outside of restaurants. They are against pet ownership as well.

It's one thing to support humane treatment towards animals, but PETA
wants people to treat animals as humans. I am asking you to
reconsider supporting PETA and to do a bit of research on what they
really do. Penn&Teller did a great expose of what PETA is really
about.


Her response is as follows

Penn & Teller's expose on PETA was ****tarded. There #1 complaint was that
"PETA kills animals!", however P&T don't have the faintest clue _why_ PETA
kills animals. I'll save P&T the trouble of actually asking a spokesperson,
and I'll quote PETA's official position from the peta2 forums
(http://streetteam.peta2.com/public/folder_view.cfm?pageid=341&option=view_thread&postid=1243205&folderid=728):
-------------
PETA has always supported and spoken openly about euthanasia. It is easy to
throw stones at those doing the dirty work for society, but euthanasia is a
necessary evil until the massive animal overpopulation problem can be
solved. We invite anyone who can offer a home to any animal, pay for one or
a hundred spay/neuter surgeries, or persuade others not to go to a pet shop
or breeder, to please join us in doing these things. In the last year, we
have spayed/neutered more than 7,600 dogs and cats, including feral animals,
many free of charge and all others at well below our own costs. Support for
this program is much needed.

To clarify, we do not run an adoption facility, although we do place
animals, approximately 360 in the last year, despite having run out of
friends and family members to approach. We are a “shelter of last resort,”
taking in and giving a painless death in loving arms to animals who would
otherwise have been shot with a .22 or gassed in a windowless metal box,
which is what happened in North Carolina before PETA offered free euthanasia
services to agencies there. North Carolina has the second highest rate per
capita of euthanasia in the country—35 animals killed annually for every
1,000 residents—and most do not die a humane death. Sadly, the shelters we
work with have no adoption programs or hours set aside for adoption. At the
Bertie County dog shelter, residents were throwing unwanted dogs over an
8-foot-high fence, where they became infected or injured by other sick or
aggressive dogs from whom they could not escape. Bertie County also had no
facility for cats and used to let them go to breed in the woods and fend for
themselves until PETA built a shelter for them this year. PETA has begged
for years, through formal proposals and numerous meetings to have the county
allow PETA to implement an adoption program as part of a larger picture of
sheltering that would also include a spay neuter program, a humane education
program, 24/7 emergency services, and rabies clinics.

We try never to take in adoptable animals unless we know we have a home for
them—only those who are mange-covered, have parvovirus, are injured, old,
unsocialized from life on a chain, or unwanted and for whom there are no
good homes available. We also work at the roots, spending more than $240,000
in one North Carolina county alone, to provide shelter in winter for animals
left out in the cold, to spay/neuter, to get vet care for animals in dire
straits, to send Bertie County’s one animal control officer to professional
training, to pay a cleaner to maintain two shelters, and much more.
-------------

Holy crap!!! So PETA euthanizes sick and dying animals because it would be
cruel if those animals endured in their miserable states, all the while they
fund hundreds of thousands of dollars to build animal shelters? Guess what:
Penn and Teller support euthanasia, and their justification for doing so is
identical to PETAs justification to euthanizing dying animals, yet they
still insist that PETA's ethics are inconsistent. How is it anymore
inconsistent than the ethics of any person on this board who believes that
innocent people should never be killed, yet also believe that euthanasia for
the terminally ill is acceptable.

In a nutshell, P&T's criticisms are all sleight of hand, based on
information cribbed out of context that anyone with 2 seconds on Google can
debunk. They don't have a criticism of PETA, they only want to get a rise
out of AR activists as a consequence of their libertarian politics. On top
of that, look for the justifications in the entire episode for eating meat,
you'll find the most retarded-assed answers like "we've been eating meat for
millions of years" and "morals are all relative", or you'll get an
unsubstantive emotional point... in other words, they don't have a
justification, but expect you to agree with them regardless of whether
they're being rational or not.

And no, PETA is not against pet ownership in and of itself, they are against
puppy mills that are notorious for breeding animals in horrible conditions.
Puppy mills like that supply petshops with most or all of the animals that
people adopt, so petshops participate in animal cruelty. See
http://www.peta.org/mc/factsheet_display.asp?ID=36 for a short explanation.

No, PETA are not "species traitors". Species membership is a purely
biological characteristic, it is no more a moral characteristic than any
other purely biological characteristics like race and sex membership.
"Species traitor" and the more familiar sounding term you find in white
nationalist circles, "race traitor", are based on exactly the same
principles. Why you'd want to borrow buzzwors from white nationalist groups,
I don't know, I only hope it was an accident.

Finally, I have done my share of research on PETA. I've been a vegan for
longer than I've supported PETA because I didn't want to associate myself
with a group who uses emotional appeals and violence to drive their point
across... but then I realized most of my prejudices against PETA weren't
based on anything that PETA was actually doing. More importantly, a brief
timeline of PETA's successes (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_for_the_Ethical_Treatment_of_Animals#Timeline)
shows that they actually get a lot of admirable work done, and that's worth
supporting.

The only half-truthful criticism of PETA is that they've been known to give
money to spokespersons for ALF. I don't think that's the worst thing in the
world, because ALF only causes property damage, they've never killed a
single person (can al queda or white supremecists groups say that?).

For having a ****** public image, they actually get work done, and that is
why I support them and encourage others to do so.


If you have anymore questions or comments about my site, let me know.

Best wishes,
Yahweh
 
Wonder what the response would be regarding the news reports a year or so back about PETA members taking perfectly adoptable puppies and euthanizing them in the van, then dumping their bodies in dumpsters around town?

The charges I believe was for illegal dumping, though iirc, no one in the van was legally able to administer the drugs used to euthanize the puppies in the van.

It was reported on CNN, and I can't find the link now, but it was posted on the forum before by me. I'll try to find the link.


ETA:

Peta also certainly supports violence with legal defense funds they've donated to. Look up the Michigan State incident.


ETA2:

Found the links:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=1254286#post1254286
 
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The Vampire said:
Don't know if this is the same link:

PETA Trial

As this happened in NC, I heard quite a bit about it on the news.
Click to expand...

That's a new link, thanks.

However, sadly, it doesn't have the quote from one of the vets PETA picked the animals up from that said the animals were healthy and not suffering. CNN has purged the story (as they do after cetain timeframes on their site) but maybe I can find copies on the wayback machine.
 
You might also want to add that one of the PETA directors, Mary Beth Sweetland, is a hypocrite on the subject of medical animal testing. She has gone on the record as saying that she doesn't see any conflict between her use of animal-derived insulin* to treat her own diabetes, and her violent opposition to animal testing. PETA vice-president Cleveland Amory has stated flat out that he'd rather see a child die of diabetes than allow animal-derived insulin, and Newkirk has stated that she's rather never see a cure for AIDS if it involved animal tensting. They are also strongly anti-human.

http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/headline/1730 -- scroll down to the bottom paragraph.
http://fins.actwin.com/nanf/month.200004/msg00047.html

*The only source of insulin is animal-derived. Extracted from bovine and porcine sources.
 
Oh, hello. The P&T:BS! episode about PeTA showed members picketing and harassing the head of the L.A.County animal services because the department euthanizes animals. They harassed him at work and at home, they threatened him and his family, and the stress caused his wife to have a heart attack.

And PeTA euthanizes animals themselves. So apparently it's only okay if they do it?
 
PETA has extremely inconsistent official stances on animal "rights"- they're against euthanasia while being for it, against pet ownership while being for it and against spaying and neutering while being for it.

The head says that those seeking companionship should look to their own species for it but has pets of her own. They promote vegetarianism but have non-vegetarian board memebers and spokespeople. They protest animal shelters while saying they support them.

One PR department isn't speaking to another over there.
 
ysabella said:
Oh, hello. The P&T:BS! episode about PeTA showed members picketing and harassing the head of the L.A.County animal services because the department euthanizes animals. They harassed him at work and at home, they threatened him and his family, and the stress caused his wife to have a heart attack.

And PeTA euthanizes animals themselves. So apparently it's only okay if they do it?
Click to expand...
Yes, great point!
 
Since when is Yahweh a "she?" Yahweh is a long-time member of this forum and most certainly a dude.
 
So you don't think arson is all that bad?!


*sigh*

First you send me an email about all the evils of PETA, then when it turns
out that I actually know about PETA and that P&T's criticism of them
contradicts their very own libertarian principles, you ignored it all
together. Couldn't you _at least_ say, "oh, I guess I was a little hasty to
judge PETA" rather than backtracking to a ****ing retarded ass question, "So
you don't think arson is all that bad!?!?!1one!"

Seriously, there are plenty of reasons to criticize PETA, but most people
don't have rational criticisms of them. They believe that PETA are a pack of
******** with too much affection for cute animals, and that PETA could
*never* have any rational reasons for campaigning for animal rights, as
animals differed morally from their mentally similar human counterparts. But
then you get idiots like Penn and Teller who criticize PETA for completely
irrational reasons as well; P&T either know that there criticisms are
half-truths at best making them consciously dishonest, or they don't know
how their criticisms apply directly to their own philosophy which makes them
****ing morons. Its like watching fundie Christians railing against fundie
Muslims.


>Also, is freezing an animal more humane than giving injections to put
them to sleep?


Funny you should ask that, because I was a volunteer at an animal shelter.
We took in a lot of stray cats and dogs, but it wasn't a very big shelter
and there weren't many volunteers. There were too many animals for three
people (including myself) to take care of, so the people who owned the
shelter usually locked animals in cages for 24 hours a day or put them
outdoors.

Two years ago, during wintertime, one of the dogs started to become very
sick (vomiting and had bloody diarreah), and one of the owners suggested
putting the dog outside in the snow, so it wouldn't get the other animals
sick. The dog sat out in the snow for an hour, and I went to check on it,
and it was shivering uncontrollably, so I got a blanket and put it around
the dog. I told the owners that the dog is freezing to death, and they told
me to take care of some of the cats while they would take care of the dog.

About 5 hours later, I asked if the dog was alright, and they didn't even
remember what was going on. I looked outside and the dog was dead. It was
sitting in shallow pool of melted snow that had already frozen solid around
it. Sometime later I found out that the dog was suffering from parvo.

I stopped volunteering at animal shelters after that, because it was just
disgusting.

So, back to your question, I'm gonna have to say a painless injection is a
little more humane than freezing an animal to death.



>Maybe you can educate us over at the JREF forums.
>
>http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=1254286#post1254286
>
>There seems to be strong skepticism about PETA there.


I would, but I haven't posted on JREF for 2 years. I'm not interested in
that board anymore. You can copy/paste my emails to that thread, I don't
really care.

Depending on what they reply, I might come out of hiding and respond to
them. Otherwise, they can ask me questions on my own forum, where I spend
most of my time.



Best wishes,
Yahweh
 
Howdy folks :) Its been a while.

Yes, I'm a vegan, I'm a member of PETA, and I support animal rights.




fowlsound,
fowlsound said:
Wonder what the response would be regarding the news reports a year or so back about PETA members taking perfectly adoptable puppies and euthanizing them in the van, then dumping their bodies in dumpsters around town?

The charges I believe was for illegal dumping, though iirc, no one in the van was legally able to administer the drugs used to euthanize the puppies in the van.
Click to expand...
Here's PETA's response at the peta2 forums:
PETA said:
It is against PETA’s policy to put the bodies of animals in dumpsters, and we are appalled that a member of our staff apparently did that. There is no excuse for that and, despite the fact that she is a caring soul, we have suspended her from work.

PETA has always supported and spoken openly about euthanasia. It is easy to throw stones at those doing the dirty work for society, but euthanasia is a necessary evil until the massive animal overpopulation problem can be solved. We invite anyone who can offer a home to any animal, pay for one or a hundred spay/neuter surgeries, or persuade others not to go to a pet shop or breeder, to please join us in doing these things. In the last year, we have spayed/neutered more than 7,600 dogs and cats, including feral animals, many free of charge and all others at well below our own costs. Support for this program is much needed.

To clarify, we do not run an adoption facility, although we do place animals, approximately 360 in the last year, despite having run out of friends and family members to approach. We are a “shelter of last resort,” taking in and giving a painless death in loving arms to animals who would otherwise have been shot with a .22 or gassed in a windowless metal box, which is what happened in North Carolina before PETA offered free euthanasia services to agencies there. North Carolina has the second highest rate per capita of euthanasia in the country—35 animals killed annually for every 1,000 residents—and most do not die a humane death. Sadly, the shelters we work with have no adoption programs or hours set aside for adoption. At the Bertie County dog shelter, residents were throwing unwanted dogs over an 8-foot-high fence, where they became infected or injured by other sick or aggressive dogs from whom they could not escape. Bertie County also had no facility for cats and used to let them go to breed in the woods and fend for themselves until PETA built a shelter for them this year. PETA has begged for years, through formal proposals and numerous meetings to have the county allow PETA to implement an adoption program as part of a larger picture of sheltering that would also include a spay neuter program, a humane education program, 24/7 emergency services, and rabies clinics.

We try never to take in adoptable animals unless we know we have a home for them—only those who are mange-covered, have parvovirus, are injured, old, unsocialized from life on a chain, or unwanted and for whom there are no good homes available. We also work at the roots, spending more than $240,000 in one North Carolina county alone, to provide shelter in winter for animals left out in the cold, to spay/neuter, to get vet care for animals in dire straits, to send Bertie County’s one animal control officer to professional training, to pay a cleaner to maintain two shelters, and much more.

We have always outspokenly advocated fixing the problems of overpopulation through practical methods. Sadly, those stories don’t get coverage in the media.

We urge you to look closer and do your part to help us help these animals. For information and resources on how to do that, visit www.HelpingAnimals.com .
Click to expand...
The animals weren't euthanized in the van. They were euthanized at PETA's headquarters, but they weren't disposed of properly. That's why the PETA worker was suspended from her job.



ysabella,
ysabella said:
Oh, hello. The P&T:BS! episode about PeTA showed members picketing and harassing the head of the L.A.County animal services because the department euthanizes animals. They harassed him at work and at home, they threatened him and his family, and the stress caused his wife to have a heart attack.

And PeTA euthanizes animals themselves. So apparently it's only okay if they do it?
Click to expand...
Do you think P&T really portrayed PETA for what they really are, really believe, and really do? I've seen the episode, and I was extremely disappointed with it:
- They criticize PETA for using emotional rhetoric when their entire episode uses the exact same emotional rhetoric ("is the life of a baby really worth nothing more than... chickens?")
- They criticize PETA for being an animal rights group who euthanize animals when P&T are both ardent supporters of human rights but believe in euthanasia as well. And they call PETA the hypocrites...
- They make the claim that morality is manmade fiction, that there are no objective moral absolutes to imply that PETA's objection to animal cruelty isn't based on any defensible moral facts at all, but P&T make some fairly categorical moral statements in their National Security episode.
- etc etc etc

P&T state openly that in other episodes that they are "biased as all ****", and it shows. They have their own personal convictions about morality and politics, but they don't have a capacity to actually defend their politics in a reasonable, rational way. I'd be interested to here what why think there is a moral difference between animal life and human life... my guess is that they'll put their skepticism and critical thinking to the side and make the fallacious argument that evolution is a moral theory...

Bottom line: P&T are entertainers. They are trying to get a rise out of people. They can be informative, but you really shouldn't get all of your information from them, because they don't have any qualms about taking people out of context and mischaracterizing other groups just to get a cheap shot in every now and then.



luchog,
luchog said:
You might also want to add that one of the PETA directors, Mary Beth Sweetland, is a hypocrite on the subject of medical animal testing. She has gone on the record as saying that she doesn't see any conflict between her use of animal-derived insulin* to treat her own diabetes, and her violent opposition to animal testing. PETA vice-president Cleveland Amory has stated flat out that he'd rather see a child die of diabetes than allow animal-derived insulin, and Newkirk has stated that she's rather never see a cure for AIDS if it involved animal tensting. They are also strongly anti-human.

http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_.../headline/1730 -- scroll down to the bottom paragraph.
http://fins.actwin.com/nanf/month.200004/msg00047.html

*The only source of insulin is animal-derived. Extracted from bovine and porcine sources.
Click to expand...
Thats the kind of ******** you get when you read anti-PETA websites all day without doing any real research for yourself.

Synthetic Insulin is used in 80% of patients, its been the standard prescription since 1982. Seriously, do the research yourself:
Although bovine and porcine insulin are similar to human insulin, their composition is slightly different. Consequently, a number of patients' immune systems produce antibodies against it, neutralising its actions and resulting in inflammatory responses at injection sites. Added to these adverse effects of bovine and porcine insulin, were fears of long term complications ensuing from the regular injection of a foreign substance,(3) as well as a projected decline in the production of animal derived insulin.(4) These factors led researchers to consider synthesising Humulin by inserting the insulin gene into a suitable vector, the E. coli bacterial cell, to produce an insulin that is chemically identical to its naturally produced counterpart. This has been achieved using Recombinant DNA technology.
Click to expand...
The first successful synthetic insulin was called Humilin. Its preferred over animal insulins because people produce anti-bodies to those animal-derived insulins, which can and has resulted in catastrophic allergic reactions. People die using animal insulins, thats why Insulin hasn't been an animal-derived product for over 20 years.

Seriously, I deal with fundies everyday. I've read 100s of 1000s of fundie posts, and the most common tactic they use is getting all of their information about evolution or other sciences from Jack Chick tracts, AnswersInGenesis, and Kent Hovind. I see the same kind of behavior coming from skeptics and otherwise rational people all the time whenever they talk about politics and animal rights in particular -- they quote anti-PETA websites all day, fish for out-of-context one-liners from AR spokespeople, get hooked on the worst abuses of shoddy logic, and mirror everything that makes fundie logic so tortured and wrong.



minnie,
minnie said:
PETA has extremely inconsistent official stances on animal "rights"- they're against euthanasia while being for it, against pet ownership while being for it and against spaying and neutering while being for it.

The head says that those seeking companionship should look to their own species for it but has pets of her own. They promote vegetarianism but have non-vegetarian board memebers and spokespeople. They protest animal shelters while saying they support them.

One PR department isn't speaking to another over there.
Click to expand...
This is another fundie classic, usually called "spin" or "strawman", which is putting words in an opponents mouth that the opponent doesn't agree with in the first place, or deliberately mischaracterizing an opponents position to make it more easy to attack. You have to ask yourself, what's the point of criticizing people for things they don't agree with in the first place? It would be nice if, instead of stating what PETA's position is for them, that you could actually quote PETA's inconsistency and cite your sources.

In any case, here is my brief summary of PETA's viewpoints:
- Euthanasia: "We are a “shelter of last resort,” taking in and giving a painless death in loving arms to animals who would otherwise have been shot with a .22 or gassed in a windowless metal box, which is what happened in North Carolina before PETA offered free euthanasia services to agencies there." (source)

Some animal shelters aren't properly run, and they don't know how to euthanize appropriately. There are many stories of shelters gassing animals by mixing household cleaners, clubbing them with a bat, and shooting them pistols. That's not humane. PETA disapproves of that inhumane euthanasia.

- Pet ownership: PETA prefers the term "companion animal" to "pet", but thats a small point. PETA doesn't oppose pet ownership in and of itself, they oppose puppy mills who breed 1000s of animals in inhumane conditions where they are underfed, confined to cages, and neglected.

If breeding mills can't sell their animals, what do you think happens to the animals? Do the mills take care of them to the ends of their natural lives? No. The animals are either released, or sold as unwilling participants in animal experimentation.

- Spaying and neutering: PETA spays and neuters animals all the time. Its a way of controlling populations of feral cats. However, they oppose certain types of neutering, like castration without anesthesia or sedative. Bulls, horses, and other large animals are routinely castrated with basically a pair of pincers.


rebecca,
rebecca said:
Since when is Yahweh a "she?" Yahweh is a long-time member of this forum and most certainly a dude.
Click to expand...
Wikipedia: FSTDT (talk page):
yahweh is a She! ~A_L

Not yet, I think --Huffers 11:21, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
Click to expand...

Wikipedia: FSTDT (history page):
08:23, 6 February 2007 Axver (Talk | contribs) (→Criticism - "Yahweh" is female. I also capitalised some instances of FSTDT.)

08:18, 12 February 2007 GekkoGeck0 (Talk | contribs) (→Criticism - Yahweh is most certainly male. Called "bishōnen" by one member, confirmed by Yahweh himself in this post: http://www.fstdt.com/forums/thread.asp?p=10685#10685)

22:53, 8 March 2007 143.167.224.142 (Talk) (→Criticism - I regularly go to the forums, where Yahweh often posts. I know Yahweh is female...)
Click to expand...

FSTDT forums
Awesome Dave: Heh, not really, but it does bear some resemblance.

David DG: By golly, it DOES resemble him, especially with that hood. Cool!

Dante's Virgil: They messed up his name though. It says "Vexen" when we all know it should really be "Vixen". ;)

Crembels: And isn't our beloved overlord a...lordette? >_>
Click to expand...

I rock \m/(- -)\m/
 
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I don't know much (or anything) about PETA, except for some bad publicity they seem to garner from time to time.

I figure if they appear extreme to some, that's a necessary antidote for the cavalier way many humans treat other species, as well as each other.

M.
 
Yahweh, hello and welcome back...

My questions are more subjective...

I feel that PETA's public relations have been particularly unsuccessful lately. While I can usually acknowledge the principles involved, their public appearance and statements speak to an inability to notice how they are perceived by most people. At the worst times I've speculated that a group that was actively AGAINST animal rights could hardly do more damage to the cause. How good do you think their current PR efforts are, and do you foresee changes?
 
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