Peta why we euthanize

Data collected by Virginia's state government shows that PETA's euthanasia rates for cats and dogs at the shelter is exceptionally higher than other shelters in the state.

Besides dogs and cats, 36 other animals were euthanized in , bringing the total to 1, animals euthanized out of 2, taken in. Public and private animal shelters in the state, such as PETA, must submit a yearly report to the VDACS "that details the number of animals that the shelter took in during the year and what happened to them," John M.

Simpson has publicly criticized PETA's euthanization rates in past blog posts written for Duanemorris. The reports are displayed on their site. The Washington Post reported that in , PETA "euthanized more than 80 percent of the animals in its care last year, a rate so shockingly high that Virginia lawmakers passed a bill [SB ] in February—nearly unanimously—to define a private animal shelter as a place where the primary mission is to find permanent homes for animals in this life, not send them on to the next.

On PETA's blog in a post titled "Why We Euthanize," they write that they euthanize painlessly and out of compassion for animals aged, injured, sick and dying. Just as a hospice has a high mortality rate, so does a shelter that takes in those near end-of-life, feral, aggressive, dying and discarded animals. I too have a title. I just gave it to myself.

What happened? In , when she was a young stockbroker in Maryland, Newkirk rescued a group of abandoned kittens and brought them to an animal shelter. It was a shock that derailed her. It set her on an entirely different path: She left the sphere of commerce and committed herself to animal rights.

The former stockbroker went on to found PETA, which became by far the most successful animal advocacy group in secular history. Her organization now routinely takes in animals, with the gentle lie that it intends to re-home them. It then exterminates them. Generally, within twenty-four hours. All of them. Correction: almost all.

How these blessed few got chosen is an interesting question in itself. While we are being precise: the workers at that first shelter were not in fact treacherous — they did not lie about their intentions.

They were less vicious than the organization that Newkirk founded in response to their blithe slaughter. Consider this grotesque moral path. It really is difficult to come up with a more perverse character arc. Imagine Harriet Tubman deciding late in life to become a slave trader.

Or Raoul Wallenberg collaborating with the SS. Or St. My intention here is not to suggest that equivalence, but to examine a psychological paradigm. How can a person turn so utterly against themselves? How can they actively devote their lives to undermining the cause that matters to them most — a cause that they still profess to embrace with a passion?

The very last person on earth who ought to be responsible for the butchery of 27, innocent pets is Ingrid Newkirk. And yet she is. The following anecdote from my last article cannot be repeated often enough — it has in fact reoriented more than a few people who used to be fierce PETA advocates:. A former PETA employee spoke of one particular incident that burned into her mind forever: A teary-eyed man showed up at PETA headquarters one day with his beloved pet rabbit.

This was not an isolated incident: as I have documented, it is the way that PETA operated, and still does. How does this happen? I am convinced that Ernesto Guevara was, like the young Newkirk, a truly decent soul.

And then something happened. The Che that was assassinated in is still lionized by people who have chosen to maintain a comfortable distance from the historical details, but the older Guevara is not admirable. This is not an ideological observation. Whether regarded from the left or the right, Che was a murderer. He was among the 82 guerillas who invaded Cuba with Fidel Castro in He chose bullets.

And then he began to execute people. The first was Eutimio Guerra, a peasant comrade who had betrayed their position to the enemy. In his journal, Che wrote about the experience of killing him: The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a.

This banal scientific description reads like a sociopathic parody of a medical report: discomfort is remedied by a surgically targeted bullet to the brain. Somehow a quasi-saint became a war criminal. We can only hypothesize regarding this process, but I suggest that these once-compassionate leaders go through a critical transformation when they achieve power: they conclude that their chief attribute — mercy — has in effect turned them into a kind of deity. It is a distorted syllogism: I am merciful.

God is merciful. Therefore I am a god. Would Che literally have called himself a god? As a Marxist, probably not. But he did not hesitate to announce that he was prepared to commit deicide. When Ingrid Newkirk found herself with god-like power over animals — the power of life or death — it was clearly a revelation. And she chose death. Another quotation bears repeating, again and again. This is Newkirk describing her experience working at a supposed shelter in the 70s.

It is also strikingly similar in reasoning: the remedy for discomfort is slaughter. Yes, that is the same woman who was awoken to the vulnerability of innocent creatures by an encounter with euthanasia. It beggars belief. Rarely do you see the analogy reversed in this manner, however: death of the innocent described as a little orgasm. The psychology here is thoroughly pathological. No question. It is a sickness of the soul. Particularly disturbing, however, is that the reasoning behind this cult of euthanasia is thoroughly sound.

If your goal in this world is to prevent suffering, then one perfectly rational solution — perhaps the only rational solution — is to end life. Death makes sense. It is the termination of pain. This is very much the PETA argument: life is suffering; hence death is good.

Ingrid Newkirk demonstrates a chilling consistency here. This is not the reasoning of a fruitcake. Many PETA supporters are a bit on the loopy side, but those are the ones I tend to like: they can be silly in their methods, but most of them have allied themselves with the organization because they have bought into the lie that it cares for the helpless.

These people are not always stupid — some are surprisingly thoughtful — but they are horribly misinformed. Ingrid Newkirk, on the other hand, is neither stupid nor misinformed. Here in particular she is utterly rational.

Her argument is irrefutable: End life, and you end suffering. Kill all animals, and no animals will suffer. Kill all humans, and humans will cease to cause animals to suffer. We have heard this argument before. Our species was never in danger of eradication by Stalin. He was happy to kill millions, but he did not indicate a wish to extinguish the human race. Domestic animals however — should Ingrid prove successful — will not be so lucky.

A No-Birth nation means a zero birth rate. He is simply one out of billions of humans, and his pet merely one out of billions of rabbits: hence insignificant. Which is to say: you must deny the individuality of the entity that you are killing.

You must see him or her as simply an instance of the species, a dot on a near-infinite diagram. Crucially: you must withhold love. Say what you like, Ingrid, but your reverence for entities is suspect.

Your ability to distance yourself from the animal that you are killing suggests that for Ingrid Newkirk, there are no individual creatures. No entities. Simply a species, which would be better off extinct. If extinction requires a little help from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, they are more than happy to oblige. I recognize that my own language here is arguably hypocritical and inaccurate. What matters is this: Ingrid Newkirk is a mass murderer according to Ingrid Newkirk.

Euthanasia — the Newkirk version, which includes the extermination of healthy pets — is the same as murder. I do not happen to buy into this reasoning, but Ingrid does. In fact, if you accept her equation of dogs and humans, she is responsible for almost the same number of murders as one of the most gruesome Maoist cults: the Shining Path in Peru. And I do take one idea very seriously: the insistence upon extinction as the end of suffering. I am sincere when I say that this is a good argument; from the strict standpoint of logic, it is perfect.

What then are we to do, as rational, moral actors? If extinction makes sense — if it makes perfect sense — then how are we supposed to proceed as human beings? Why should we not simply acquiesce, and join PETA in willing the death of all animals, including homo sapiens? The answer is complicated. The answer is not to refute this. You cannot. The answer is simply to refuse it. Do not embrace it. Suffering is perhaps the worst thing imaginable, but it is not the worst thing.

The end of suffering, if it requires death, is not a virtuous goal. It is nihilism. And it is evil. Christians know this. I am not a Christian, and I am not religious — but you would have to be a fool to reject the wisdom offered by Augustine and Aquinas. In traditional Christian theology, evil is not in fact suffering, but non-being.

The further you get from the divine in the Great Chain of Being, the closer you get to nothingness. Buddhists know this.

It is a core tenet of their faith: the first of the Four Noble Truths. Buddhists recognize — like Stalin and Newkirk — that life is a problem: it is characterized, fundamentally, by suffering. And, crucially, you vow to do this within life. A Buddhist saint, a Bodhisattva, vows to return to earth — to life — in order to continue this quixotic task. Yes, it is less coldly rational than Newkirk with her freezer, or Stalin with his gulag.

Notice that the vow is not to kill them all — which it would be, if that were what the Buddha had meant by salvation. Perhaps nobody this side of enlightenment truly understands what he meant — certainly, what I do not know about Buddhism could fill many libraries, and in fact has.

I will insist, however, that we have empirical proof that the Buddhist end to suffering is not the extinction promoted by Newkirk. Either that, or millennia of Buddhists have managed to get it wrong: Of all the world religions, Buddhism is by far the least murderous. It is the sober recognition of an absurd task. It is precisely the kind of reasoning that Kierkegaard advocated in his leap of faith which is untraditional Christian theology. Death is logical; goodness, finally, is not. If it has content, then it is a saccharine lie.

The animal rights group at peace with slaughter can be said to have many interesting attributes, but goodness is not one of them. Just 23 dogs and 16 cats were adopted. They did not see fit to use some of that to comprehensively promote animals for adoption or to provide veterinary care for the animals who needed it.

VDACS collects and publishes information about how many animals are taken in and what becomes of them, for every public and private shelter, humane society, pound and other sort of animal rescue group in the state. Indeed, as can be seen in this chart, Virginia as a whole has far lower euthanasia rates. The numbers, however, are in line with those from previous years — numbers that have earned the high-profile animal rights group a significant amount of criticism.

There are other approaches now underway, as well. A public comment period for that begins on Feb. They owe the animals to look at the evidence, weigh it for themselves, and ask themselves if it is keeping with the vision for animals they wish to see. The final numbers are not very different from those in the earlier report: cats were taken in in , of which were euthanized; dogs were taken in, of which were euthanized. Just 16 cats and 23 dogs were adopted, while forty-three cats and dogs were sent from the PETA shelter to other shelters and rescue groups.

If PETA is willing to do that, there should be no reason for the group to oppose the bill, she wrote. But Sharon Q. PETA does not dispute the high euthanasia rate at the shelter. However, Daphna Nachminovitch, senior vice-president of the Cruelty Investigations Department, says it should be put into context. Of the dogs brought to the shelter, 82 percent were euthanized.

In total, 1, animals were euthanized at the shelter in —approximately 89 percent. In , only eight cats and 12 dogs were adopted from the Norfolk shelter.

But Nachminovitch says the Norfolk shelter keeps a very low number of adoptable dogs on site. That was not what we volunteered for. The records indicate how many cats and dogs were reclaimed by their owners, adopted out, transferred to other Virginia releasing agencies i. We added the dogs and cats euthanized and divided by the total number of dogs and cats taken in excluding those held only for sterilization surgery to determine the percentage of dogs and cats PETA killed in a given year.

In , Virginia modified its policy and eliminated animals held for sterilization from the records. Click here to see the proof. PETA said no. Responding to the complaint, Dr.

After reviewing two months worth of records, Kovich found that of the animals—84 percent—that PETA took into custody were killed within 24 hours. Only 17 were reported as adopted or in foster homes. Based on his investigation, Kovich made the following determination: The findings of this site visit support the assertion that PETA does not operate a facility that meets the statutory definition of an animal shelter as the primary purpose is not to find permanent adoptive homes for animals.

There are good reasons to believe this claim is inaccurate. A surveillance video showed a van branded with the PETA logo pull up in the driveway followed by a worker seizing the dog and driving off.

The Accomack County Sheriff charged the employees with larceny. In , two PETA employees were tried for animal cruelty and littering in North Carolina after they were caught in a late night stakeout dumping the bodies of dead dogs and cats in a dumpster. In , the most recent year on record, the Norfolk SPCA found homes for 86 percent of its dogs and cats and euthanized only 5.

Winograd, a no-kill advocate, believes shelters should only euthanize animals that are not adoptable because they cannot be rehabilitated for aggression or health reasons.

Often shelters put down animals when they do not have enough room. Nachminovitch brushes aside the idea that there is a financial motive behind their practice. The Association of Shelter Veterinarians recognizes that shelters have different philosophies and methods when it comes to euthanasia and does not provide any strict rules or guidelines about it. Ronald Hallstrom, a Norfolk-area veterinarian, says euthanasia is a philosophical issue.