• rumba@lemmy.zip
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    4 days ago

    The problem we have here is that PETA has started vicious campaigns and said things that were either untrue or misleading, then pulled them down and posted whitewashed versions on their website.

    You’re posting their current outward-facing propaganda. And at the moment, their messages are marginally OK. Still a little too far on the gross just to make a point. However, those messages evolve, and their activism evolves. All too often they cross lines, they pull back like it never happened.

    https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2000/petas-position-on-pets-and-standards-of-truth-in-the-animal-rights-movement/

    PETA started a campaign that Milk causes autism based on a couple of week studies, which they’ve since removed from the record

    https://research.open.ac.uk/news/why-asking-what-causes-autism-wrong-question

    They find some bad actors in the wool industry and rightfully go after them, then turn around and say it’s all that way.

    I did volunteer dog transport for a while, moving animals out of one of their kill shelters to non-kill shelters in other states. Volunteers set up relays to move the dogs, sometimes hundreds of miles away, to save their lives.

    It’s one of the fundamental problems with PETA, people don’t trust their campaigns. They put out a bunch of real information, good causes, then release some false or misleading data, everyone gets stirred up, you go a look into it and the hot button stuff ends up falling apart. The gross stuff doesn’t shock people into action; it makes them wary of the organization. Maybe it gains them a few activists, but they could be so much more effective if they played it all straight.

    It’s hurt their image to the point that it’s not just that people don’t care, but they don’t trust what they have to say.

    Back in my 20’s I looked into them, actually considered supporting them. I was thinking they couldn’t possibly be doing the things people accused them of. Just digging for a while, I couldn’t bring myself to support them. There are numerous issues that could be brought to light. Plenty of winnable fights for good causes, * instead the pick Anti-pets, autism milk, trying to take down the entire wool industry like every sheep out there is getting eviscerated. They’re absolutely tone deaf to the non-PETA population to the point of being unsavory.

    Print stickers of caged chickens and put them on eggs, put dairy farm images on milk cartons. put up booths outside supermarkets with impossible burger sliders. Ohh wait, yeah, they won’t support plant based burgers either.

    And honestly, that’s not even scratching the issue of uncontrolled extremists doing things in their name.

    edit: for clarity

    • Oppopity@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      Your first link is some guy’s website misrepresenting what peta’s actual stance on pets is. I already linked to peta’s website why they explain the problem is with manufacturing pets. Because there is such a demand for cute pets there’s an incentive to produce as many as possible and that leds to puppy mills where animals are forced into baby producing factories all while stray dogs get put down because they can’t find a home. They explain this on their website which I linked in the previous comment.

      Peta doesn’t have a problem with the concept of having a pet, the problem is how such a reality exists. If people have a demand for pets then that means there needs to be a supply for pets. This is what that quote about the vice president meant. She simply doesn’t envision a world where pets can be manufactured in any ethical way. I do but I also don’t care if she thinks that because what she and peta stand for is treating animals ethically and that’s a good thing.

      PETA started a campaign that Milk causes autism based on a couple of week studies, which they’ve since removed from the record

      I can’t look at the campaign anymore because they’ve removed it but I found this article which had quotes from their website where it shows they mentioned that more research was needed and that one of the studies only had like 20 kids in it. Of course the media ran with headlines like “Oh peta said milk causes autism!” When they didn’t. They used the autism panic at the time and the “got milk” ad which existed to create a narrative that milk was a necessary part of a healthy diet to shift to a discussion about why we think milk is needed for a healthy lifestyle when the milk industry pumps cows full of hormones and shit that wind up in milk, not to mention the fact that cow milk is obviously for cows whereas human milk is for humans. Milk serves a role in mammals to quickly grow their offspring and yet humans don’t just continue drinking milk but we also drink milk from other animals. They go over all this on their website: https://www.peta.org/features/peta-ad-cows-dairy-products-disease/

      I do take issue with how they framed autism with a frowny face as that normalises the notion that autism is a bad thing and I’m glad it’s been taken down. But at the end of the day peta is a charty for treating animals ethically. The way our society treats animals is so evil that holocaust survivors, the event we treat as the ultimate evil, draw parallels to it. There is such an urgency to put an end to this cruelty that I honestly don’t give a fuck if such a charity employs the “any publicity is good publicity” method which sometimes results in campaigns that look too goofy or sometimes go a bit to far.

    • sleen@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      All they do is ramble about the issues, yet they provide nothing to the table. They are an egotistical organisation that only cares about the issues they seem to acknowledge. Real issues and real solutions are being tucked beneath the carpet.