At Least PETA Can’t “Ethically Treat” Homeless People Like It Does Homeless Pets
San Francisco has problems both with panhandlers and with preparing homeless pets for adoption. Seeing an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, the city is testing a pilot program to habituate homeless pets in city homeless shelters, offering the people living there companionship and a $75 weekly stipend to nix panhandling. Take a guess which multi-million dollar animal rights group isn’t happy about this.
If you guessed People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (that they don’t kill), you win a vegan cookie. PETA is offering the city $10,000 to kill the program before it gets off the ground. PETA may couch its opposition in the language of animal protection, but there’s a dark ideology behind the façade of concern. PETA just doesn’t want people to have pets (“companion animals” in animal-rights-speak). PETA co-founder and President Ingrid Newkirk said that in her ideal world “companion animals [pets] would be phased out.”
No surprise then that PETA has killed over 27,000 dogs and cats since 1998. No surprise either that PETA wrote to a Florida newspaper attacking advocates who oppose killing shelter pets. (PETA would rather see a “no-birth” pet community—which logically implies eventual pet extinction.) Also, it’s no surprise that PETA would rather kill feral cats in its hometown than trap, neuter, and release them. And it’s no surprise that court evidence from North Carolina shows that PETA employees killed dogs and cats they called “adorable” and “perfect.”
When the New York Post editors recently were informed that PETA (“People Eradicating Thousands of Animals”) is still killing hundreds of pets each year, they took note of an infamous Newkirk quote: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” They added, “Except now, the dog is dead.” We always said that animal rights activists were misanthropes. Hassling homeless helpers is par for PETA’s course.