PETA Shakedowns and "Social Responsibility": Moving the Goalposts

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has been known to employ attention-getting methods with everything from nude models protesting fur to activists throwing vegan custard pies in the face of Ronald McDonald in front of children. PETA describes its mission as ending the suffering of animals on “factory farms, in laboratories, in the clothing trade, and in the entertainment industry.” To that end, the group has used everything from engaging in agitprop to aiding the terrorist tactics of animal rights groups, as investigative reporters have charged.

Of late, the group that claims to be the “largest animal rights organization in the world” focuses efforts on behind-the-scenes strategies to fill coffers. Their more recent endeavors exploit the pressure companies feel to display their “social responsibility.”

At the same time, the non-profit engages in clever partnerships with companies whose competitors are targeted by PETA. And often those who “partner” with PETA treat animals in a manner similar or identical to that which PETA claims is abusive when done by targeted companies.

PETA’s fundraising seems to be working. In 2008, according to its own financial report, PETA collected over $34 million in total revenues. That is more than double the amount of $15 million reported in a 2003 New Yorker article and triple the amount of $9,200,000 for 1990 as reported by Lorenz Otto Lutherer and Margaret Sheffield Simon in their book Targeted: The Anatomy of an Animal Rights Attack. Membership in 1990 was thought to be “in excess of 350,000” and then reportedly rose to over 750,000 members and supporters 2003. Today, PETA boasts of a membership of about two million, and seems to be expanding its workforce as one of its happy bloggers posted in the depth of the recession in July.

The average PETA supporter probably just falls prey to the organization’s heart-string tugging solicitation materials that include photos of sad and abused puppies and other animals. PETA gets good-guy mention in the 2008 chick flick 27 Dresses and in magazines like CosmoGirl! and Elle.

The teenage girl and young women likely to watch such movies and read such magazines can indulge her shopping desires, while feeling good about supporting PETA by shopping at PetaMall.com, where a network of “a variety of animal-friendly vendors” agree “to donate a percentage” – 1 percent to 13 percent – earned from their orders to PETA. She can shop at such places as MooShoes, eBags, and Alternative Outfitters. PETA “Business Friends,” for payments ranging from $500 to $5,000, “and higher,” can expect the benefits of the association with PETA. The gullible and idealistic animal lover can charge her purchases of “cruelty-free” beauty products and fashions, on her PETA Visa card, knowing that one percent of every sale goes into PETA coffers.

Companies understand that today purchases are made not only on the basis of value to the consumer but on the basis of the company’s “social responsibility.” In the case of restaurants this includes treatment of animals. A recent BusinessWeek article reported that consumers’ increasing mistrust of companies has led many companies to expand the job of maintaining corporate image from public relations to marketing departments where “image counselors” help establish the ever-important “social responsibility” bona fides of a company.

McDonald’s devotes a web page for “Good Works” that includes “socially responsible” meat purchasing practices. Kentucky Fried Chicken has a “Social Responsibility” page that, in addition to “Social Diversity” and a scholarship program, includes a statement on their “Animal Welfare Program.”

Both McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, however, are on PETA’s current enemies list and displayed as two of ten “campaigns” to which visitors are directed with attention-getting distortions of company logos. The McDonald’s arches are distorted to a hanging chicken for a link titled, “McCruelty: I’m hatin’ it.” Colonel Sanders sprouts devil’s horns next to the words “Kentucky Fried Cruelty.”

But as the corporate representative finds himself fending off charges by PETA, PETA may be profiting from donations and business deals with his competitors. For example, PETA on its website discourages supporters from attending the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus; it encouraged them to protest its Denver show on September 29, 2009, for alleged animal cruelty. In 2002, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk and several colleagues reportedly hectored families attending the circus in Savannah. Then, PETA targeted MasterCard for sponsoring the Circus and encouraged supporters to send their cut-up credit cards back to the company. Ringling Brothers spokeswoman Amy McWethy, disputing PETA’s claims of animal cruelty, pointed to the company’s licensing by the USDA under the Animal Welfare Act, open access to visitors and inspectors, and an elephant conservation center that harbors retired Asian elephants and contains the largest herd of the endangered species outside of Southeast Asia. A July 28, 2009, press release on the website claims that the PETA undercover video was “deceptively edited.” McWethy says the partnership with MasterCard was for a limited duration, but PETA claimed in 2004 that their pressure led to MasterCard’s decision to end the program.

MasterCard competitor, Visa, however, offers a PETA credit card that donates one percent of all purchases back to PETA. Visa, furthermore, is a sponsor of the 2010 Winter Olympics, the very same organization that PETA targets as one of its ten prominently displayed “campaigns” for cruelty on its homepage–as it does Barnum and Bailey. The link emblazoned with the Olympics logo leads the visitor to a page that tells him to “urge the Olympic Committee to help end seal slaughter.” Visa also has relationships with other companies whose practices conflict with PETA’s stated mission: the Kentucky Derby, Omaha Steaks, Nine West shoe company, and PETCO (against whom it waged a campaign several years ago).

Along with its “campaigns” against Armani, PetSmart, Iams, Lowe’s, and the U.S. military, McDonald’s and KFC are targeted for their allegedly inhumane slaughter methods. While PETA advances the vegan agenda, it curiously promotes certain slaughter methods over others.

Visitors to the website are led to a video and the post titled “The Case for Controlled-Atmosphere Killing,” which begins, “Electric immobilization, the conventional method of slaughter in North American poultry slaughterhouses, causes an array of animal welfare, economic, and worker-safety problems.”

Descriptions of suffocating birds with bruised and broken wings and legs, and gratuitously abused by workers, could come from Dante’s Inferno. PETA maintains that millions of birds, after having been hung upside down and subjected to an electric current that is intended to stun them unconscious, miss the blades; because “electric current levels are too low to render birds insensible to pain,” and the birds are conscious as their throats are slit.

As an alternative, the group advocates the more “humane” method of “controlled-atmosphere killing” (CAK), or gassing the birds in their crates.

Referring to a 2005 study by McDonald’s, PETA presents support for CAK from “top meat-industry and USDA advisors, such as Drs. Temple Grandin, Ian Duncan, and Mohan Raj.” In a November 19, 2008, press release, PETA, owning 79 shares of McDonald’s stock, announced that it had submitted a “shareholder resolution calling on [McDonald’s] to issue an updated report on the feasibility of purchasing chicken meat from suppliers that use . . . ‘controlled atmosphere killing (CAK).'” In the release, PETA charged that McDonald’s hadn’t “moved toward CAK even though several of its rivals–including Burger King and Wendy’s–have.” It claimed that “Chicken retailers Burger King, Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, and Wendy’s . . . are now giving purchasing preference or consideration to suppliers that use CAK.”

CAK is a method that is used commercially only in the European Union. One of the scientists PETA cites, Mohan Raj, is located in Britain. Even if other companies are giving “purchasing preference” to such suppliers there appear to be virtually none that actually use CAK in the U.S.

Colorado State University animal science professor Temple Grandin, one of the three scientists cited by PETA, however, focuses her efforts on controlled-atmosphere stunning, the process that renders the birds unconscious in their crates before they are killed. The advantage of this method, according to Dr. Grandin, is that the chickens do not need to be handled by workers.

Dr. A. Bruce Webster, Professor of Poultry Science at the University of Georgia, whose research specialty includes “developing practical solutions to legitimate animal welfare concerns,” according to the University website, sees no problem with electrical stunning, the method used by almost all poultry plants in North and South America and most of the world. The process, if done correctly, is a rapid one, with birds stunned unconscious by an electrical current, within seconds. The system, which processes hundreds of birds per minute, works well if it is adequately staffed and monitored for the occasional bird that misses the electric stun or the actual killing.

The description that PETA presents, it turns out, as something inherently cruel about current slaughter methods, is instead that of a malfunctioning system.

Controlled atmosphere gassing, however, is a subject that Webster has researched and written papers on–with a conclusion similar to that of most others in the field: that results are inconclusive about the benefits to the bird. Webster cites side effects that could indicate distress. In June 2008 the American Association of Avian Pathologists and the American College of Poultry Veterinarians put out a position statement, concluding that “CAS systems, while viable, do not offer any known animal welfare advantages and may in fact be associated with poultry excitation and injury.” Kentucky Fried Chicken on its “social responsibility” web page for the “animal welfare program” links this position paper and cites a 2006 study by Tyson that concluded that CAS was not found “to be more humane than conventional electrical stunning.”

Grandin admits the inconclusiveness of the tests, but opines that she would choose gas stunning as a safeguard against improper handling in poorly run plants. With regard to the method being advocated by PETA, CAK, she cautions against rushing to implement systems before the bugs are worked out. When CAK was rushed to the commercial stage once before, the animals ended up suffering more than they did under conventional methods.

Most slaughter houses are audited by animal welfare agencies, and ironically, the main auditor for PETA enemy McDonald’s is Dr. Grandin. The company calls her “chief animal welfare advisor” on its “Good Works” web page.

In fact, in her latest book Animals Make Us Human, released this year, Grandin refers to a request by McDonald’s in 1997 that got her involved in auditing chicken slaughterhouses. Prior to that time she had been working with large animals and doing audits for McDonald’s. She writes that she also has done audits for Burger King and Wendy’s.

PETA cites Grandin as a promoter of CAK. Yet PETA self-admittedly “urg[es] major food retailers, such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Kroger, Safeway, and Wal-Mart, as well as the nation’s largest poultry producers–including Butterball, Tyson, and Pilgrim’s Pride–to switch from electric immobilization to controlled-atmosphere killing (CAK)”–the very same technology Grandin admits is not yet ready for commercial installation.

PETA includes on this web page Burger King and Wendy’s, companies that Grandin has worked for, as targets for the same campaign of letter-writing to change over to CAK.

Why then the targeting of McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken as one of ten highlighted cruelty “campaigns”? Why no sadistic Burger King in crown or crazed pig-tailed little girl?

Again, at this point in time, PETA vaguely claims that McDonald’s rivals are “moving toward” CAK.

But the same company lauded for “moving toward” CAK, Burger King, was the target of PETA’s “Murder King” campaign in 2001. PETA then demanded audits for their chicken slaughter plants. According to the PETA website, Discover Magazine in its January 2002 issue declared that PETA “claimed victory” when its more than 800 protest rallies prompted Burger King to promise audits and more humane treatment of animals. The magazine claimed that McDonald’s had established similar guidelines a year earlier.

In 2008, PETA, in a press release, also announced a campaign against Wendy’s for its treatment of animals and bragged that in September 2007 PETA had suspended its campaign against McDonald’s after the company acceded to its demands. PETA said that just days previously, it had “halted its six-month campaign against Burger King when the company announced that it would exceed McDonald’s animal welfare guidelines.”

In 2007, PETA blog GoVeg.com claimed, “In the years following PETA’s successful ‘Murder King’ campaign, PETA continued to hold behind-the-scenes discussions with Burger King about how the company could further improve its animal welfare guidelines.” The resulting “groundbreaking new plan” included what appears to be a merely symbolic promise of “purchasing preference” to suppliers who use CAK.

McDonald’s, a company once held up as a model for Wendy’s, seems to be vilified for doing the same thing that others in the industry do. But Wendy’s position in the PETA hierarchy is probably precarious, as is Burger King’s. Friend can quickly become foe for PETA. Business executives are ever aware of the threat of a PETA shock display for the news cameras.

David Martosko, Director of Research at the Center for Consumer Freedom, an organization supported by the restaurant industry and individual consumers, says, “there is no such thing as bad publicity,” in PETA’s estimation. The industry executive knows that “the most dangerous place in Washington is between PETA and a camera.”

Such strategies come “straight out of Saul Alinksky’s Rules for Radicals.” Alinsky’s strategies, adopted by various “social justice” groups, (most notoriously ACORN) include public ridicule, loud and shocking protests, the undermining of reform efforts already underway, and “behind-the-scenes” pressures. Consecutively, PETA employs more subtle methods by providing consumers alternatives on its web page and through its online mall, which offers the predictable array of merchants of vegan dog treats, holistic healing services, a dating service for Democrats, and a magazine for homosexuals. As an alternative to the glue traps sold at Lowe’s (which supporters are encouraged to boycott altogether), consumers can find many mouse-friendly traps. While PETA encourages supporters to boycott Iams pet food, PETA’s website offers vegan dog food and treats for sale through “Business Friends” companies. Companies that give a cut to PETA include Pet Guard, Pet Food Direct, Entirely Pets, Only Natural Pet Store, Evolution Diet, Karmavore Vegan Shop, V-Dogfood, and Wow-Bow Distributors.

But will the strong-arm tactics end once companies acquiesce? Probably not, according to Martosko. He says PETA has compared the similar CAK (gassing) method used for fur minks to the “gassing of Nazi victims,” and predicts that if CAK is employed poultry producers will eventually be presented in a similar manner. The PETA strategy is to “keep moving the goal posts” until they reach their goal, which is to make meat food production “cost prohibitive.” The end is not animal welfare, but animal rights.

It is this concern with “rights,” that strangely gives PETA’s indifference to the suffering of individual animals a certain internal logical consistency. The group’s philosophical father is Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics, at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values. It was Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation that inspired Ingrid Ward Newkirk to found PETA in 1980. On its “about” web page, “Why Animal Rights?” PETA cites Singer’s contention that animals, in the interests of “equality,” should not require equal or identical treatment, but “equal consideration.” A 2003 New Yorker profile described Newkirk as someone transformed from a happy carnivore into a vegan zealot, who, to “remind the world” about the sources of leather, willed that her skin to be made into leather upon her death. She also predicted that in her lifetime McDonald’s would cease selling meat. Lutherer and Simon, in their investigative book, maintain, “For Singer, a ‘love’ of animals is immaterial and even dangerous in that pet ownership represents domination over animals and, therefore, a violation of their rights.”

While PETA claims on its website to have helped save 4.5 million animals, most of these animals appear to be rodents used in lab tests conducted by the European Chemicals Agency.

It’s a different matter for the abandoned dog or cat, as the Center for Consumer Freedom’s website, petakillsanimals.com, reveals. According to the records they post, PETA found homes for less than one in 300 animals. But the most notorious PETA animal abuse occurred in 2005. Then, locals in the town of Ahoskie, North Carolina, started to talk about the dumping of dead animals wrapped in plastic bags into a dumpster behind a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. When the owner of a Chinese restaurant became the target of the speculation, he called the police, and a stakeout showed PETA employees backing up a van and flinging bodies of dead animals in plastic garbage bags into the dumpster. The van had been used as a euthanizing site. One of the defendants admitted to using the dumpster several times for the purpose. Nevertheless, PETA employees were acquitted of animal cruelty charges (even though they admitted to euthanizing the animals), but were found guilty of “littering” (charges which were overturned on appeal).

But in their own logic, PETA’s actions make sense, says Martosko. The euthanizing and dumping of pets mean they are acting “locally” as they think “globally,” to paraphrase a popular bumper sticker. Disposal of abandoned or lost pets “locally” fit into their “grand, global views” of making pet ownership disappear. Their larger agenda is Peter Singer’s–to put people on the same ethical and legal plane as animals, to give animals “rights,” now accorded only to people. But as Martosko points out, because animals cannot understand the concept of “rights,” people have to be brought down to the level of animals (hence PETA’s resort to “consideration”). Martosko, understandably, gets upset at their ultimate goals–of equating lab rats with children. Others have expressed outrage at the comparison of animals to slaves or Holocaust victims.

In the brave, new PETA world, animals are not to be consumed, but neither are they to be used in any way–assisting handicapped people, working in law enforcement, entertaining children, or even providing companionship as pets.

The larger social criticism that Temple Grandin makes as an animal behaviorist and advocate can be applied to PETA. Grandin has drawn on her special experience with animals as an autistic; animals both helped her to cope, and her autism gave her a special insight into what would help calm and sooth them. Her first project was a chute for cattle. Grandin writes, people are becoming “abstractified. You always hear about autistic children ‘living in their own little world,’ but these days it’s normal people who are living in their own little world of words and politics.” It used to be that those who wanted to help animals studied animal behavior, she writes, but “Today they go to law school.” They lose sight of “real animals.” PETA spent $2,325,442 on legal fees and $6,182,617on “consultants” out of a total of $30,411,127 in functional expenses, according to 990 forms for the tax year August 1, 2006, to July 31, 2007.

Grandin’s book jacket photograph shows her posed with three Golden Retrievers, borrowed, she says, because she spends 85% of her time on the road. Her prose conveys a real love of animals, including the descriptions of growing up with the family’s Golden Retrievers and other pets.

Yet, she writes, “The animal welfare audits being used by large meat buyers to audit slaughter plants really work.” Nonplused, she observes, “Today in a large, well-run, audited pork plant you can carry on a normal conversation next to the pig stunner and hear only a few intermittent squeals.”

Michael Specter in his 2003 New Yorker article suggested, though, that PETA‘s efforts led to changes in meat industry practices. He claimed that their 2000 “withering publicity campaign” led to McDonald’s becoming the first major company in the United States to require its suppliers to meet a set of minimum standards. But Grandin gives credit not to such large political advocacy groups, but to one animal-lover, the late Henry Spira who in 1997 started reform efforts with “a little organization called Animal Rights International that was basically his apartment.” She credits Spira for pressuring Revlon to end animal testing, but criticizes activist groups that continued “bashing” the company. Extremist measures by animal rights groups, such as the Humane Society’s pressure to end the slaughter of retired carriage horses, she points out, led to the “unintended consequences” of their being sent to Mexico to end their lives in overwork and starvation.

The intended consequences of PETA, however, seem to have less to do with animal welfare than with their grandiose visions of a new world. By confusing the issue of animal “welfare” with animal “rights,” even within the pages of its own website, and by simultaneously calling for ending of the use of animals altogether and for more “humane” slaughter methods, the group sets about to change confused minds. As it does so, it targets those who are most inclined to be unsophisticated and led by tender emotions: children, especially girls. (Females make up about 70% of supporters, according to Martosko.)

The PETAKids site, for example, appeals to children with coloring books and toys–one of which is a plush “sea kitten” that transforms with an outfit from a fish to a furry kitten. The intent is to make children think of fish on the same level as kittens, and therefore as inappropriate for food. (PETA is also offering to save a California beach if they can rename it “Sea Kitten State Beach.”) Indeed, any ingestion of meat or fish, or the products of animals, like milk and eggs, is presented to children as an abuse of animals. The organization tells children, “animals matter as individuals and are not ours to use for any reason”; that includes “the tiniest ant to the largest elephant.” But along with the cute stuffed toys and books are online video games that present non-vegans as deserving of physical attacks. One of these is called “Make Fred Spew”–any time the redneck in front of his camper attempts to imbibe a dairy product.

PETA also offers a plethora of materials to teachers. The curriculum kits characteristically venture far beyond the humane treatment of animals. Tellingly, curriculum kits are called “Share the World” (for ages 7-10) and “Social Justice Movements” (for ages 11-18); they fit an educational system that already advances “social justice movements.” (The National Education Association offers recommended reading of Saul Alinsky.)

Such curricula frame the larger revolutionary worldview that it is hoped will replace the Western worldview. While Specter in his New Yorker article wrote, “like Jeremy Bentham, Peter Singer, and millions of others, [Ingrid Newkirk] strives for a way to eliminate needless suffering,” he failed to note that the “utilitarian” worldview of an animal rights activist like Newkirk rationalizes the disposal of individuals for what they see as the “greater good.” The euthanizing of a relatively few homeless pets is justified by the end: a world where there is no longer a distinction between animal and human.

And that is precisely the world that Singer has been aiming for during the past few decades. As a philosopher, he recognizes that his first step must be to undermine common premises. In his 1993 book Practical Ethics, Singer maintains that the Ten Commandments must be rewritten. Our “speciesism” (“the deep-seated Western belief in the uniqueness and special privilege of our species”) that underpins our “moral orthodoxy”–reverence for human life– must be done away with.

From there, Singer jumps to the question, “Does a person have a right to life?” Once such a “truth,” long assumed to be “self-evident,” is put to question (and undermined by Singer), the next step is to apply other standards like suffering, “self-awareness,” and the quality of life for the individual and others affected (like parents and other relatives). Therefore, for Singer, “a full legal right to life comes into force not at birth, but only a short time after birth–perhaps a month.” (Other revolting conclusions of Singer’s philosophy include an infamous defense of bestiality in a 2001 Nerve.com column titled “Heavy Petting,” Singer wrote that our status as animals (“more specifically” great apes) “does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”)

While Singer has been defended by some detractors for his ability to open debate and inquiry, the ill effects of his philosophy are displayed in PETA, a group that promotes a larger agenda of destroying the Western way of life and of the free enterprise system that is part of it. In fact, PETA quotes Progressive Grocer on its website: “‘Through a string of highly visible demonstrations and extreme public relations tactics PETA has become both a proficient corporate arm-twister and effective public relations machine'” (Terrie Dort, president of National Council of Chain Restaurants).

And now Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, who edited a book titled Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, to which Singer contributed an essay, serves as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein, who seemingly presents a reasonable argument, nonetheless, suggests that animals be given the same consideration in the courtroom as children through advocates; because children are unable to represent themselves in the courtroom, advocates can bring lawsuits on their behalf.

The question that then arises, quite logically, is that once animals are accorded the same status as children in this respect, what is to stop the courts from assigning the treatment animals experience to children?

In the PETA universe, where lost Rover is euthanized in a van and thrown into a Piggly Wiggly dumpster, one must think that once the human has no more standing than such an animal his treatment will be the same. By all accounts that is PETA’s vision.

All the evidence beneath the hype and heart-string solicitations shows that PETA’s goal is not to treat animals humanely, but to remake the world. Part of that effort involves substantially revising our Western system to comport with larger “social justice” goals. Along the way, just as Saul Alinsky advised, PETA uses the tools of the capitalist system for their own ends. “Arm-twisting” is the tool that Alinsky promoted in Rules for Radicals. In that book, he uses his experience of trying to increase the services of the Infant Welfare Society in Chicago. Hiding from his dupes the fact that the charity would have given those services for the asking, Alinsky writes, “Our strategy was to prevent the [Infant Welfare Society] officials from saying anything; to start banging on the desk and demanding that we get the services, never permitting them to interrupt us or make any statement. The only time we would let them talk was after we got through.”

As Alinsky braggingly admits, such self-aggrandizing strategies are in service to larger revolutionary goals. For Alinsky, the real goal was not infant welfare. For PETA too the goal seems to extend far beyond animal welfare. They seem to be co-opting the capitalist system in order to bring down the capitalist system–and at this point in history, where ACORN dominates the news, not quite an original idea.