Aspies For Freedom

Ask and you shall receive.

This is part one. The other two parts are available from the same user.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRk7ygbkA-c

In my 9th grade French class the girl who sat next to me was vegetarian. Throughout my life I've had times I wanted to be vegetarian, but it never really clicked with me. Anyway, we got on the topic of vegetarianism, and I mentioned that the reason I never actually became a vegetarian was because I felt like the plants and other animals are equally alive, and my policy is to eat omnivorously, so long as I respect whatever food it is that's feeding me.

The girl I sat next to said, "But plants don't have brains." I didn't feel like getting into the specifics you mentioned of animals without nervous systems, especially as I frequently come off as attacking when I explain my own viewpoints, even with the stated respect of others' opinions and choices.

I think that if the people behind PETA used more reason that they could do a lot of good. But for the reasons found in this thread, it seems like the organization does not act on the behalf of animal rights, which is too bad, because such an organization that truly operates on this I would like to support. Too many contradictions in their beliefs and actions, though, for this organization.[/b]

When I was younger and got lice, usually the chemicals would work to kill at least most of them, though some were particularly tenacious and so I'd need another application, in addition to the constant combing of them. The ones that got combed out I would keep them pinched in my fingers and keep them underwater for about thirty seconds until they wouldn't be strong enough to swim up to the surface. When I was younger, I would even cry if we killed ants, but the first time I got lice I was merciless to those little bugs.

The fox hunts were banned (except in Northern Ireland).  They seemed pointless anyway.   Just for rich people to ride around in funny clothing and let their dogs run in a pack and tear a fox to bits.  Why would people want their dogs to run in hunting packs anyway?  If people want to hunt, why not just shoot animals they are going to eat?

The ban is on Canadian products made from seals, not all Canadian products.

I heard the argument once that "when the baby seal is being clubbed to death, how would its mother feel?"  Most of it is emotional.  Animals have instincts so they will defend their young.  Most people will argue that they "know" their pet has love for them.  But how much of human emotion is projected onto animals that really does not exist in the animal?  Are dogs somehow imprinted to humans if raised by them like birds can be?  Or is their behaviour only instinct because their "owner" feeds them and is the "alpha dog" of the pack?

Most humans are programmed to think that any thing baby is cute -- even if it is the most vile thing that lived that will destroy their home and eat their children.  People seem to think that black bears and polar bears are cute.  They are not cute when they are ripping apart your house to find food.  Polar bears are predators of humans.

Making other people feel guilty about something (like eating meat, using animal skins) is also a way of controlling people.  It hardly makes sense to me to say it is important to show compassion to animals when you are abusing humans to do that.  The Hindu religion is nothing like that.  It places humans at the top and all underneath yet some Hindu sects will try to show compassion to even the smallest and simplest living organisms.  It is about respect as well.  The animal/eco rights  movement (at its most radical) is some perversion of the Hinduism.  It rather insults and mocks Hinduism.   They also mock other religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism.  

Another one of the tactics this cult peta/elf/alf uses to control people is guilt and it requires them to atone for former "meat eating sins" by doing terrorist acts and harassment of people who do not hold the same philosophy as themselves.

All the research I have been doing.  I learned about the difference between animal rights and animal welfare.  Supporting animal welfare just makes more sense.

Is PETA lying? Let’s look at the evidence shall we?

THE ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN.

Their advertising campaign consists almost entirely of shock tactics. Here are a few of them!
A poster proclaiming the words “beaten, lonely, and abused.” with a picture of a naken woman painted in leopard spots inside a bamboo cage.

Another poster of a pin-up nude model proclaiming, “I’d rather go naken than wear fur.”

To trump all of that, there is the “running of the nudes” campaign, in which every year, hundreds of people run naked through the streets of Pamplona Spain to parody the “running of the bulls.”

Let’s not also forget the cartoon poster of the mad scientist which proclaims that, “Your daddy kills animals!”

All this of course is trumped by the “Holocaust on your plate” campaign, which attempts to compare pig farming to Nazi concentration camps, despite the fact that pigs are the very best treated animals on farms. Perhaps the claim would have slightly more validity had they used battery chickens instead of pigs, but that would be out of the question since chickens just aren’t very cute!

Advertising campaigns like this, scarcely even able to appeal to emotion, have only shock value as their drawing factor. And historically speaking, people who can only draw others to their cause using shock tactics have had no legitimate arguments for their cause.
Now this is kind of strange since many of their claims can, in fact, easily have legitimate arguments in their favor, and yet PETA for some reason thinks that brainless shock-jock tactics has infinitely greater validity than carefully crafted, rational arguments.
This is not to say I have anything against shock-jocks, but simply that offensiveness has little to do with rational arguments.

THE MONEY

PETA was at one point a fractioned organization, with cells existing in each major city that they would, and all donations from that area going toward that individual cell, to be used for local efforts. Each cell reported to and took orders from a central office, but that was the limit of their centralization.
Later on PETA abandoned any pretense of localization, and entirely centralized their operation. Everything any office did was under the direct oversight of the central office. More importantly, donations were no longer distributed and used locally. Instead, all donations were sent to the central office.
PETA might claim efficiency for this decision, but historically, such sudden changes in private monetary from localized to centralized only served to do one thing efficiently, and that’s to funnel money into the pockets of those in charge.

UNWARRANTED CLAIMS

I have only one real example of this, but its still wroth mentioning.
PETA is not a no-kill organization. It euthanizes animals for “humane reasons”, diseases control, and pit bulls... yes, you heard me right, Pit Bulls. Every single Pit Bull that comes into the ownership of PETA is immediately euthanized. They site the dangerousness of the breed.
However, all credible, peer-reviewed lab studies done on a the subject, along with nearly all peer-reviewed statistical studies, show that Pit-Bulls are no more dangerous than German Shepards or Mastifs, or Boxers, or Rottweilers, or any number of other large dog breeds.

The apparent link between Pit-Bulls and aggression has nothing to do with breed. It’s actually a human link. Pit-Bulls are more often than any other breed trained for aggressive behavior, a facet of human behavior, not a facet of the breed itself.

OUTRIGHT HYPOCRISY

Again, I have only one example, but again, its worth mentioning.
A parody website “People Eating Tasty Animals”, registered under PETA.org, was created as a way to poke fun at all the fallacies and inconsistencies of PETA. The people who ran the website were in fact avid animal welfarists, but used their website to point out the flaws in PETA’s words and actions which they felt only harmed the animal rights movement.

Despite the fact that the website was protected by law as parody, PETA attempted to sue its creators for copyright infringement and portraying them offensively.

Now all of this is fine and dandy until you know that, at the same time PETA was suing the pardoy website PETA.org, they themselves were registering the domain names ringlingbrothers.com and voguemagazine.com, to criticize their respective namesakes, an act that is explicitly illegal as it made no attempt to portray or cite itself as parody.


So how much evidence is there to suggest that PETA are liars? Well, there is some, but there is also a great deal of evidence to suggest that they are generally unreliable and untrustworthy.

Venison's good. It just has to be prepared properly, or it gets pretty tough.

Real fur is biodegradable and renewable resource.  Even farmed animals could be killed humanely as animals that are used for meat consumption.  

I have a fake fur coat because the price was right and I like it.  Peta seems to recommend that but I am still harassed by their members when I wear it.  They don't seem to bother to ask if it is fake and if they do and I tell them they don't believe me and demand to see the tag.  I refuse.  I will not remove my clothing for strangers to inspect the tags.  If they would rather go naked than wear fur, they can show me the tag in their underwear first!

I was starting to wonder if I was paranoid because I would go out and have total strangers insult me.  I didn't know why.  When I looked on peta site and saw what insults they recommend to use -- I was really shocked.  I still think that my autism has something to do with the insults.  It is just wrong wrong wrong.

I don't endorse fur, not because I think its unethical, but because its inefficient.
Although I have nothing against leather, for the simple reason that it's far more renewable.
Farming cows is vastly more cost efficient than farming otters or minks or chinchillas. And the current state of cattle farming can easily be made even more cost effective, if you simply try a bit harder to stop being so wasteful.

But again, it boggles my mind why PETA would choose to use shock tactics and insults for so many of their causes when rational arguments exist for most of them.

Barn chickens of no less quality than battery chickens, and do not yield a significantly smaller total weight of meat. What is different is that unlike battery chickens, barn chickens have room to move about a reasonably sized area and interact with other chickens. And so there is no practical reason for battery farming, but there is an ethical reason against it.

Once again in defense of chickens, many farmers euthanize their chickens in inhumane ways, through drowning or burning or similar methods. There is no reason to be doing this, since countless more ways exist that are not only more humane but more effective.
Guillotines and high-amp shocks come to mind as methods that are both instant and painless.  So there is no reason to euthanize chickens in slow, painful ways when so many other painless ways -some of them just as cheap- exist.

Animal Testing for consumer products has little use, with the sole exception of testing drugs for potentially dangerous side effects. But a chemist can tell just as well if a shampoo will hurt your eyes as a crying mouse. And any sensible person can tell you that drinking motor oil is hazardous to your health, as hospitals and morgues can attest to.

Does PETA ever say anything so reasonable? No! Whenever they see something they don't like, they just bring out the nude models and send out a barrage of the lowest kind of insults, as if screaming the loudest somehow makes them right.

The joke about the "cosmetics tested on animals"  is that most companies making cosmetics wouldn't spend the money on testing if they were not required by law.  A friend worked in the lab of a factory that made stuff like shampoo, soap etc. They used to test the products for pH, viscosity, tests for presence of bacteria and molds, etc and baby powder on themselves.  Some people seemed to think that they tested them on animals which was stupid.  They only had to test a new baby shampoo formula to show that it did not sting eyes.  They had to pay a lab several hundred dollars to get a group of human volunteers to drip a diluted solution of the shampoo in their eyes.   Some who claimed to be from peta phoned them and demanded to know why their products did not say "not tested on animals" like they were testing batches of shampoo on animals every week.  It was just that they did not have the $10,000 to print up new labels for their products.  Then this person was wanting to monitor their books/lab etc like they had some right to.  The government does that anyway.  

All chemicals used in manufacturing or sold in large quantities must be accompanied by Material Safety Data sheets (MSDS) by law.  These are for the safety of the workers handling the chemicals and also for fire fighters and other authorities to know what to do in case of an emergency.  They show how the chemicals are volatile or poisonous and list the LD50 on them.  The LD50 could have been determined 50 years ago but it is still important information to the workers.  The LD50 only has to be done once and recorded but it should be done even for new chemical.  

Correction on Watson's comments:  farmers do not euthanize their chickens -- usually they are sent to a processing plant for that.  

peta seem to think they won some battle with KFC Canada by getting them to change the way the chickens are killed.  KFC Canada are switching to controlled atmosphere killing (KAC) where the chickens are suffocated by a gas chamber and then slaughtered.  The method is more economically feasible because the chickens are handled less and their meat is less damaged.   It is also a joke that they are going to put a veggie burger on the menu since they would probably get more customers in Canada by using halal products.  To use halal chicken they would need designated fryers and utensils and have to employ muslims to handle the food preparations etc.  All the halal method of slaughter is different and has to be done properly for the meat to be labelled halal.  Muslims get their chicken from Popeye's chicken because it is all halal.  Of course peta can't picket Popeyes because that would be a hate crime in Canada.  I think harassing someone because of their choice to use animal products or not should be a hate crime.  

How can farming minks or other fur animals be cost inefficient?  The end products are sold for thousands of dollars.  Do you mean energy inefficient?  

petakids is your child's gateway to becoming a terrorist.  They should be ban on their presentations and literature in schools.  How peta targets child, teens and young adults:  They tell children to insult people wearing fur -- terrorism in words.  teens to rip poster off walls and supply them with templates for spray painting on "targets" (vandalism),  intimidating their friends from wearing or eating animal products (hate crimes) -- for adults to boycott and write harassing letters and join up with terrorist cells to do various acts of violence and civil disobedience.  I wonder why the FBI has not listed them as a terrorist organization yet-- not enough evidence?  They have been monitoring them for years.  Anyone who attends one of their organizations must know that they are being photographed and recorded by the FBI and RCMP.

peta also have to try and use emotional arguments and half truths to get their funding from pet owners while really trying to hide their real reasons for existence.  If people really knew that they want to give animals the same rights are humans, they would just think they were some weird cult (which they really are).  There is a huge difference between animals rights and animal welfare.  http://www.sover.net/~lsudlow/ARvsAW.htm

I stand corrected on that fact, but my point still remains the same.
The methods of slaughter for any number of farm animals are sometimes painless, and sometimes not. When they are not, PETA does not civilly argue for a transfer of methods, they merely toss out insults and naked women to draw attention to themselves.

and harass people who wear fake fur.