A PETA Army of Child Activists?
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has a history of misdeeds. The group has given money to defend an animal-rights motivated criminal, praised the violent Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) organization, and made a grant to the Earth Liberation Front, which the FBI called a “terrorist group.” PETA has misappropriated religion to the point of demeaning victims of the Holocaust to push its agenda. PETA also hypocritically kills a staggeringly high proportion of the animals it takes in at its Norfolk, Virginia “animal shelter.” This is hardly an unblemished record—and it should worry any caring parent.
Why? PETA president Ingrid Newkirk is now insisting that PETA’s latest campaign be included in school curricula. PETA apparently wants your kids to link meat-eating, wearing animal fiber, or exhibiting animals for entertainment with slavery and discrimination. What’s more, this strategy is nothing new. PETA is no stranger to getting its curricula into schools: We exposed some of those efforts (along with PETA’s general child- and youth-propaganda campaign) in our “Your Kids, PETA’s Pawns” report.
Federal courts (for one) may be smarter than to believe PETA’s nonsense, but impressionable children are an easy target. It therefore should be no surprise that PETA’s swanky new Los Angeles office is the site of the launch party for a new illustrated veganism-shilling book that targets kids ages 4 to 10. One dietician worried that “[the book] could easily scare a young child into eating vegan, and, without proper guidance, that child could become malnourished.” That’s not a groundless worry—and scaring kids into veganism may well be the very idea.
That certainly was the apparent modus operandi in PETA’s past child-propaganda campaigns that included literature such as the “Your Mommy Kills Animals” comic or the gory “Unhappy Meals.” This new form of PETA-approved propaganda appears to take a softer tone, which is one reason parents should be doubly sure to see that it doesn’t wind up infecting classrooms and elementary school libraries. After all, parents may already have to deal with the PETA circus at the schoolyard gates.