While animal shelters work tirelessly to rescue pets and unite them with loving families, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) kills thousands of cats and dogs.
According to the latest government filings, PETA euthanized 2,092 dogs and cats in 2022–its highest killing year since 2014. What’s more, PETA has killed nearly 50,000 animals over the last twenty-five years in its Virginia “shelter.”
Based on our calculations, the number of pets PETA has killed would fill 225 dump trucks.
Meanwhile, PETA’s adoption stats are shockingly low. PETA only adopted 58 animals last year, amounting to a 2.1% adoption rate. By contrast, its kill rate is 74%.
These numbers ultimately come from PETA itself as animal shelters in Virginia are required to report animal custody figures.
PETA’s high kill rate stands in stark isolation compared to other shelters in Virginia. For instance, Norfolk Animal Care & Adoption Center, just 5 miles from PETA, took in 4,337 animals in 2022 (more than PETA) and its euthanasia rate was a much lower 10%.
Even government agencies have been startled by PETA’s unethical behavior. One Virginia inspector deemed PETA a “euthanasia clinic” and observed that PETA violates its own standards for a humane animal shelter.
As shocking as these numbers are, they should not surprise any serious follower of the animal rights group.
PETA has long condemned pet ownership. PETA President Ingrid Newkirk called owning pets “an abysmal situation.” She also argued that stray cats would be better off dead than facing unforeseen harms such as being hit by a car.
In addition, PETA representatives have faced legal issues due to their radical, deadly posture toward animals. In 2014, PETA members were sued after stealing a chihuahua off a family’s front porch and killing it. The group eventually paid a $50,000 settlement. And in 2007, two PETA employees were arrested and charged with 31 counts of animal cruelty felonies after being caught dumping animal bodies.
Comments Off on PETA Killed Over 2,000 Pets in 2022
While animal shelters are diligently rescuing pet animals and uniting them with families, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is killing animals–by the thousands.
According to new data from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, PETA euthanized 2,092 dogs and cats in 2022 (along with 30 other animals). The numbers come from PETA itself; animal shelters in Virginia are required to report animal disposition figures.
Over two decades, PETA has killed nearly 50,000 animals in its purported “shelter” at its Virginia headquarters, which a state inspector once compared to a “euthanasia clinic.”
PETA’s killing is going in the wrong direction. PETA’s kill count grew by 23 percent in one year, and the last time PETA killed more than 2,000 animals was back in 2014.
PETA also euthanizes far more animals than other Virginia pet shelters: 74 percent compared to a mere 8 percent.
Worse yet, PETA employees have even been charged for putting down adoptable pets. As one example from 2014, workers seized a Virginia family’s Chihuahua from their home; the owner then reported that the culprits returned with a fruit basket and news that the dog had been killed. The county sheriff ultimately charged the PETA workers with larceny.
And despite PETA’s staff of hundreds and millions of dollars in revenue, its track record with animal adoption remains appalling. It has an adoption rate of barely 2 percent for dogs and cats.
Why would PETA–a “humane” organization claiming to protect sentient beings–take such inhumane and deadly actions?
Simple. PETA has told us all along it doesn’t care about pet ownership, a concept Ingrid Newkirk calls “an abysmal situation.”
In interviews and other public statements, PETA’s leadership has supported abolishing the human-pet bond altogether, suggesting that people should instead look to inanimate objects for companionship. PETA has also argued it’s better to euthanize an animal than allow it to face a hypothetical threat in the future. Talk about twisted logic.
While PETA gladly pontificates about the “unethical” treatment of animals, it shows no remorse in putting down healthy, affectionate pet animals. Make sure others know the truth about PETA.
Comments Off on Are Your Kids Getting PETA Propaganda in School?
The activists behind PETA have made it clear: From Holocaust comparisons to nude demonstrations, they will go to extremes to push their agenda. So it should concern every parent that PETA has campaigns targeting children of all ages.
PETA has been targeting children with harmful and inappropriate messaging for years. In the past, PETA has used body shaming to convert kids to vegan diets, including a “Tubby Tammy” trading card that told children she could “barely button her pants” because she ate chicken. PETA has also developed a sexually suggestive video game for children called “breasts or bunnies.”
PETA received blowback in the past for these campaigns, but that hasn’t slowed the organization down. Here are the four ways PETA continues to target minors today.
Students Opposing Speciesism
SOS is a “PETA-backed revolt against human supremacy for students ages 13 to 24.” The organization aims at recruiting children in high school and college to participate in activism and demonstrations on PETA’s behalf.
SOS has many campaigns taking place in schools throughout the country. One campaign is aimed at getting schools to stop dissection lessons on frogs and instead practice dissection on toys. Another campaign is aimed at demanding vegan school lunches in cafeterias. PETA staff also offer to host virtual lessons directly in classrooms.
PETA has many incentives for students to join SOS. They provide “Anti-Speciesism Starter Packs” for students to distribute at schools. They also offer “one-on-one help or an interview” to help students with their homework.
SOS currently has several ongoing campaigns. One encouraged students to protest inside Starbucks to encourage the company to stop charging more for milk alternatives. (Arrests have been common at several recent Starbucks protests.) Another campaign urges students to confront their peers who are members of FFA to discourage animal agriculture, writing, “The only way to ensure that animals aren’t subjected to acts of violence in schools is by not having them on campus to begin with. If you’re a member of FFA or another animal agriculture program, please quit, go vegan, and speak out against speciesism.”
PETA Kids
PETA Kids is targeted at children under the age of 13. The website has information for both children and parents on how to be activists.
Children are incentivized to plan and carry out 12 different activism goals to obtain a PETA Kids membership card. PETA Kids is more about indoctrination than activism and a lot of the materials are more subtle than the arguments made at SOS.
PETA Kids has a YouTube channel with nearly 16,000 subscribers. Many of the videos feature celebrities urging children to “speak up” for animal rights or to become vegan. Other video playlists include “captivity kills,” “adopt, don’t buy,” and “cool animal facts.”
The PETA Kids website also hosts several video games that have suggestive themes, including “Peta’s Pokemon, Gotta Free ‘Em All” and “Butcher Goes Vegan.”
In addition to directly targeting kids, the PETA Kids website also hosts resources for parents. The website includes information about how to cook kid-friendly vegan meals and how to spot “red flags” in the classroom curriculum. It also has a blog on how petting zoos give the “wrong lessons about consent.”
PETA Little Kids
PETA Little Kids is aimed at even younger children, including those in pre-K. Much of the content is focused on activities with subtle PETA messaging, including coloring book pages and songs. One arts and crafts activity includes making a Christmas ornament of a pig that reads “I’m not meat.”
Additionally, PETA Little Kids features remixed nursery rhymes to change the words into pro-PETA messages. A few examples include: “Bah Bah Black sheep, can I have your wool. No sir, no sir, that’s not cool.” and “Three blind mice, three blind mice. See how they run. See how they run. They all ran after the farmer’s wife. They told her ‘thank you’ for saving their life.” and “Pop goes the bubble” instead of Pop goes the weasel.
Teach Kind
Unlike the previous three groups, Teach Kind goes after children through a third party: teachers. The program provides educators with a curriculum to teach children about PETA’s principles – no matter which grade they teach. PETA has developed lesson plans for students as young as pre-Kindergarten and as old as grade 12. Many of the lessons involve watching PETA-approved documentaries, such as Seaspiracy, to turn children against animal agriculture.
As if there was any doubt as to how biased these lessons are, PETA included “debate and persuasive argument” lessons which only include the pro-animal-rights side of the debate.
Each year, PETA recognizes “Teachers of the Year” for “continuing to teach young people to respect and be kind to all sentient beings—no matter their species.” Previous winners have been lauded for using PETA’s curriculum in the classroom. One teacher had his students compete in a “compassion challenge” which ranked students on how much of a vegan diet they would vow to maintain, starting with recognizing Meatless Mondays and ending with full veganism.
PETA officials have claimed feeding children nutritious meat is “child abuse.” They’ve also stated: “We’re at war, and we’ll do what we need to win.” You may not want your children to hear this extreme rhetoric, but PETA certainly does. Parents should be aware that PETA is working to groom the next generations of radical activists. Make sure your child isn’t one of them.
Comments Off on PETA: Pest Control is “Human Supremacy”
There’s a conspiracy theory that PETA is secretly funded by the meat industry to make animal liberation activists look bad. The truth is much simpler: PETA is just run by people with no filter. And that is quite helpful for giving the average person an honest look at what the animal liberation movement really wants.
The latest example of PETA idiocy comes out of Australia. Australia is currently experiencing a plague of mice. A drought created conditions in which mice had ready access to grain and, with a huge supply of food, the mice have bred like rabbits.
The only practical thing is to kill the pests. Along with the damage to crops, mice can carry diseases that kill humans. But PETA is opposed to culling the rodents, calling it “human supremacy” to kill them, instead saying farmers should trap the mice and release them elsewhere–a completely impractical approach.
Australia’s deputy prime minister responded, “The real rats in this whole plague are the people who come out with bloody stupid ideas like this.” And Australia’s agriculture secretary called PETA “brainless.” (An understatement, but we get the sentiment.) But more importantly, he challenged PETA to catch the mice and feed the rodents themselves.
The best way to respond to activists is to tell them to put up or shut up.
And ironically, based on how PETA treats the cats and dogs in its control, most of the mice would likely end up dead in such a scenario.
In a “that’s so Australia” moment, the mice plague has been followed up by a spider apocalypse. And PETA is against killing spiders, cockroaches, and other creepy-crawlers, too. Hey PETA, if you care about bugs so much, why don’t you adopt them all?
Yet again it has been confirmed that the so-called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) cares more about offending reasonable people than caring about animals or people. According to a recent report, there was infighting at the organization over PETA president Ingrid Newkirk and her latest plan to exploit Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The infighting arose after Newkirk sent out an email to all of the organization’s staff in an attempt to quell employees’ questions and concerns about its plans to hijack MLK Day to talk about animal abuse. The email, which had the subject, “Please absorb this,” called employees’ concerns “extremely saddening” and attempted to pull out all of the stops to convince employees she’s not a racist.
One of Newkirk’s references compared Japanese internment camps to a hippopotamus in captivity. She also likened PETA to Christians helping Jews in Nazi German and suggested that without white landowners Harriet Tubman wouldn’t have been able to free slaves.
When a couple of staffers tried to point out the inaccuracies and inability to understand nuance, Newkirk went nuclear and chastised the employees for responding to her email despite her previous email telling employees to “let us know” if they had an issue with the first email. She then mentioned that the 60s were, “actually a time when going vegetarian was very much a Black value.”
In the words of William Shakespeare, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
This isn’t the first time PETA, whose leadership landing page is very homogeneous, has attempted to co-op minority issues in an attempt to shoehorn its agenda. During the Minnesota protests over the killing of George Floyd, the organization argued that its own campaigns are parallel to fighting racism. Earlier that same year PETA faced universal backlash over its Super Bowl ad that compared Colin Kaepernick to a medley of animated woodland creatures.
It’s not just race. PETA has a well-documented history of being out of touch on almost any nuanced issue. So many that we were able to compile a list of our top ten most offensive PETA campaigns.
In a response to the article, PETA promised to post the entire back and forth, as of the time of this posting, we can’t find it on their website. Regardless, it is apparent that Ingrid Newkirk doesn’t care about animals or about race–even when her own employees tell her she’s wrong.
Comments Off on UK Government Groups PETA Together with Neo-Nazis
As the old adage goes, “Show me your friends and I’ll show you who you are.” This rings especially true for PETA, which has been listed beside neo-Nazis in a UK government anti-terrorism guide. Released mid-2019, the guide was produced by The National Counter Terrorism Policing Network, a government agency that is comprised of local police forces from around the country.
For those who may be unaware, PETA has a history with accusations of terrorism. A2001 investigation by the FBI found that PETA had, “financed or contributed to the legal defense funds of some of animal rights extremists charged with crimes.” During the 1990s, PETA paid over $70,000 to Rodney Coronado, an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) serial arsonist convicted of burning down a Michigan State University research laboratory.
In addition to paying for Coronado’s legal defenses, the organization made a donation to the North American Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an FBI-designated domestic terrorist group responsible for firebombs and other crimes. In 2002, the FBI estimated that ALF/ELF criminal acts caused $43 million in damages.
In 2001, PETA’s then-Vice President Bruce Friedrich told a gathering of activists that “blowing stuff up and smashing windows” was a justifiable way to bring about animal liberation.
While PETA and other groups acted shocked that they were featured in the UK guide alongside neo-Nazi organizations, their previous actions and statements clearly demonstrate why law enforcement included them.
The document’s purpose is to allow police to properly prepare and respond to threats and prevent possible offenses from being committed. Many non-violent protests these groups hold create disruption and panic. According to the document, at these protests, there is “potential for the event to be hijacked or infiltrated by more extremist groups.” Police say the document’s purpose is to help program partners “identify and understand the range of organizations they might come across.”
Memo to PETA: If you don’t want to be lumped in with other extremist groups, perhaps you shouldn’t fund extremists?
Comments Off on Farmer Dragged Through the Mud By Animal Activists
The California-based Direct Action Everywhere has made breaking into farms and “rescuing” (stealing) livestock a signature campaign. It may have inspired a similar situation involving a Maryland farmer who found himself in the crosshairs of vegan activists.
In late April, Baltimore County Police were called to a family farm when Scott Braglio discovered that his family pet, a calf named Milly, had been stolen. Braglio had previously recorded the license plate of the vehicle two animal activists used to trespass onto his farm—just two days before the heifer heist.
The two activists, Jennifer Lauren Sully and Erika Lynn Wilkinson, had charges including theft and trespassing brought against them in May. The calf was found by police at a sanctuary called Life with Pigs, after the two activists has posted photos with the calf to social media. Officers later recovered the stolen calf from Life with Pigs and returned the calf to the Braglio farm after finding there was no abuse done to the calf.
Wilkinson runs the local group “DMV Actions for Animals” in the DC area. A message on the group’s Facebook page indicates she is interning for PETA this summer.
Unfortunately the story doesn’t end here.
Animal rights protesters have gone so far as to protest the Braglio farm and restaurants it partners with. This has even included the act of protestors pouring a bucket of fake blood on themselves outside the farm-to-table restaurant. In addition to the restaurant, the protesters have targeted the farm itself.
Ryan Phillips, the owner of Life with Pigs, allegedly tried to buy the calf from Braglio. After a phone call in which Braglio refused to sell his beloved pet, Philips allegedly filed a complaint and had charges filed against the farmer. The charges were soon dismissed and Braglio feels he has been cleared of wrongdoing on all accounts.
The Braglio farm, which was vindicated of animal abuse, doesn’t deserve this. No farmer does. Now, because of the events that occurred, the farm faces decades of harassment.
Farmers love their animals. The fact that vegan activists refuse to understand that doesn’t give the right to break in and steal them.
Comments Off on Will the IRS Crack Down on Animal Activists?
It seems harassment from animal activists is on the rise. And it’s high time the IRS and FBI do something about it.
Last week, we filed a complaint with the IRS and FBI regarding PETA and two California-based groups called Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) and Animal Hope and Wellness Foundation. These are radical groups lobbying to dictate lifestyle decisions on Californians–and we believe these organizations have abused the nonprofit tax code.
Consider:
Direct Action Everywhere breaks into farms and terrorizes farmers. The group has also intimidated shoppers at Whole Foods, Chipotle, and other businesses. Its actions may well be in violation of the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The group’s activists are facing criminal charges in several states and may have violated the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. DxE is a network funded by a tax-exempt charity called Friends of DxE.
Animal Hope and Wellness Foundation has been accused of leaving dogs to die horribly in Asia instead of rescuing them—the group’s supposed charitable mission. Its executive director also served time in California prison for felony kidnapping.
PETA has given tax-exempt donations to fund the efforts of Direct Action Everywhere, according to its most recent tax return. PETA has also given money to the Earth Liberation Front (considered a domestic terrorist group by the FBI) and to defend an arsonist who burned down a university laboratory. PETA activists have also been arrested on numerous occasions.
These groups have been involved in lobbying for fur bans in California, at the local or state level. But make no mistake. This radical lifestyle dictation from PETA and other extremists won’t end with fur. These activists don’t believe people should be able to buy leather, wool, and other clothing derived from animals. They don’t want people to be allowed to buy a hamburger. PETA is even against owning pets.
While everyone has free speech rights, harassing people and getting arrested aren’t legitimate nonprofit activity. It’s time for the feds to end the charade and hold activists accountable.
Comments Off on PETA Exploits Fashion Leader’s Death
PETA CEO Ingrid Newkirk may be a vegan, but she is acting like vulture circling a carcass.
Less than one hour after the passing of famed designer and cat owner Karl Lagerfeld became public, PETA tweeted:
Karl Lagerfeld has gone, and his passing marks the end of an era when fur and exotic skins were seen as covetable. PETA sends condolences to our old nemesis's loved ones.
The fact that PETA—which killed more than 70% of the cats and dogs received last year—would go after a man who loved his cat so much he called her his daughter is tasteless. Lagerfeld pampered his cat to a level most pet owners would dream, often keeping the cat with him during his travels and giving the cat her own room. Considering PETA has given thousands of cats under its custody little more than a euthanasia needle, it’s clear who the real animal lover is here.
PETA has a long history of targeting Lagerfeld for his use of animal furs and skins in many of his designs. It’s one thing to disagree with someone, but another to insult the recently deceased. Once again PETA has shown that it does not care about anything other than inserting itself into conversation in the most unpleasant way possible.
Comments Off on Will PETA Kill Animals in Hurricane Florence Disaster Zone?
We are officially in hurricane season. For animal rights groups with no moral decorum, that means fundraising season.
Right at the forefront of such groups is PETA, whose website currently greets visitors with a front-and-center pop-up begging for money to “help” animals. Of course, what PETA doesn’t tell you is that it kills healthy animals. And it kills animals at its very own headquarters in Virginia. Since 1998, PETA has killed close to 40,000 animals, according to filings it has made with Virginia. (The evidence is at PETAKillsAnimals.com.)
In one notable case, two PETA employees were criminally charged after they were caught killing animals and dumping the bodies in North Carolina. Now, PETA may be back in the state after Hurricane Florence hits. It’s just a short drive from PETA HQ.
PETA is not a legitimate rescue organization and so any charity towards relieving the impact of hurricanes on people and animals alike would go much further at an actual organization that specializes in disaster relief.
PETA has in recent weeks been wasting money on anti-seafood press stunts, angering local populations who have a longtime history of eating crab, lobster, etc. That’s not helping animals. That’s a marketing campaign.
If recent history like the 2016 Louisiana flooding is any indication, PETA will be raising money and deploying itself to North or South Carolina to allegedly rescue animals. But we have not seen an accounting of what happened to the animals in the past, or what PETA did with the money it raised. How many of those animals were killed?
Pet owners should take proper precautions as major storms are not to be brushed aside as minor concerns. There are plenty of organizations and shelters that will be helping out and need financial support from those who are able to give. PETA isn’t one of them.
