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(A series on PETA that was a finalist for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.)
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A celebrity is at her most vulnerable when naked. This is when she is least likely to make sensible decisions. Often she is chilly and nervous. Hence, it is while naked that a famous person — who genuinely loves animals — finds herself shilling for people who are genuinely committed to slaughtering them.
How does a saint become a butcher?
I am convinced that Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA (“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”) was once a good person. What happened?
The story of Newkirk’s moral awakening — outrage in response to betrayal — is genuinely affecting. In 1972, when she was a young stockbroker in Maryland, Newkirk rescued a group of abandoned kittens and brought them to an animal shelter.
Nathan Winograd believes that PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk, is mentally ill. That to him is the only credible explanation for her monstrous compulsion to kill healthy shelter animals. In contrast, I have argued that she is fully rational: Her viciousness has its own internal logic; moreover, it is counterproductive to psychologize evil.
THE CAMPAIGN MANAGER of a congressional candidate in Arkansas returns home to find his children’s cat bludgeoned to death. The creature’s skull is caved in. The word “liberal” has been scrawled on the corpse. Why should you care?
It is easy to dismiss this as a small crime, relative to the atrocities we read about daily.
Bill Maher is a merciless bastard. And I say that with the greatest respect. Lesser guys may be conned by righteous charlatans — not Bill. He’s the one in the front row, shining a rude light on the emperor’s flashed genitals. Lo, if you have stupid beliefs, Maher’s going to haul your ass onto the Carpet of Reason. Hence, he is pretty much the last person you’d expect to get sucked in by PETA, Ingrid Newkirk’s cult of euthanasia.
PETA may soon lose the right to kill healthy pets. As I and many others have verified, the headquarters of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk, Virginia kills 97 per cent of the animals delivered into its care.
Norfolk, however, may soon pass legislation to make the city a “No Kill” zone.
This is a remarkable development in the growing battle to deny PETA the right to liquidate pets at its so-called “Shelter of Last Resort.”
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals employs only one argument in defense of its right to kill adoptable shelter pets. This is an abuse called “hoarding.” It is in fact an especially vile form of cruelty — animals are warehoused in filthy, overcrowded cages, where they then die, slowly and in misery.
This, we are told, is the reason that PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk, is busy trying to prevent No Kill legislation from being passed in the group’s home town of Norfolk, Virginia.
Animal lovers across America have been all but crippled with loathing this week. The rage has been boiling over everywhere I turn on the internet: in chat rooms, on Facebook, on bulletin boards.
You would have to have something deeply wrong with you not to be thoroughly disgusted at the prospect of Michael Vick taking in a pet dog. Decent people feel that this man — who did not merely run a dogfighting ring, but personally hanged dogs, drowned them and beat them to death — should be prevented from getting anywhere near an innocent creature.
Animals will never have the right to euthanize PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk. This, arguably, is the intellectual flaw at the core of her special interpretation of animal rights. For PETA, it is a political movement primarily focused on the right to determine when and how an animal should die. The decision is never reciprocal, however: Newkirk has the right to kill — and PETA has killed tens of thousands of pets — but her own life is protected by law.
When the No Kill shelter in Shelby County, Kentucky, recently announced that they had run out of space — and were hence going to have to start killing healthy dogs and cats — officials received a nice basket of gourmet cookies, with a note signed by PETA: “Thank you for doing the right thing for animals.”
Surely I’m joking here.
Nathan Winograd is the leader of the No Kill movement, a genuine revolution in animal welfare. Three million healthy and adoptable pets will be killed next year in America’s shelters. Not, however, if Winograd and his growing army have any say. I caught up with him a few weeks after the No Kill Advocacy Centre‘s annual conference in Washington D.C.
They say that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. What this quip fails to acknowledge, however, is just what an achievement the camel is. No mean feat to design one.
Wikipedia is a camel.
I’ve always been a fan of Wikipedia. Detractors argue that you have to double-check everything you encounter there. I see this as an argument in its favor: you should double-check any fact, encountered anywhere, but only Wikipedia comes with this useful caveat branded on its communal forehead. Britannica’s
Animal rights activists, opposed to the No Kill movement, recently threatened to kill Nathan Winograd’s beloved pet dog. The threat appeared on a Facebook page entitled “I Hate Dog Breeders.”
Nathan Winograd is of course the leading voice for the No Kill movement. His campaign to end the unnecessary killing of shelter animals has inspired all sorts of slurs, one of which is that he is in the pocket of the puppy mill industry.