PETA: People Exterminating Thousands of Animals

Regular readers know that I’ve had a long standing beef with PETA. (Pun fully intended.) This is an organization which has taken the noble, worthy cause of helping out animals in distress and turned it into a misguided and frequently dangerous cult, frequently doing more to harm legitimate animal care initiatives than to help any four legged friends in need. But the story uncovered by the Daily Caller this week really puts things in perspective. It turns out that in the few cases where PETA operates actual shelters, they have one of the worst records in the country in terms of killing off animals rather than putting in the effort to care for them and find them homes.

Documents published online this month show that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization known for its uncompromising animal-rights positions, killed more than 95 percent of the pets in its care in 2011.

The documents, obtained from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, were published online by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a non-profit organization that runs online campaigns targeting groups that antagonize food producers.

Fifteen years’ worth of similar records show that since 1998 PETA has killed more than 27,000 animals at its headquarters in Norfolk, VA.

This is enough to make my blood boil. It’s not just the raw numbers, but their policy which indicates that 84% of the animals they take in are euthanized within 24 hours of arrival. Dr. Daniel Kovich, of the Virginia agriculture department, investigated PETA’s headquarters.

“The facility does not contain sufficient animal enclosures to routinely house the number of animals annually reported as taken into custody,” Kovich concluded in his report.

“[PETA’s] primary purpose,” Kovich wrote, “is not to find permanent adoptive homes for animals.”

PETA media liaison Jane Dollinger told The Daily Caller in an email that “most of the animals we take in are society’s rejects; aggressive, on death’s door, or somehow unadoptable.”

Read more here.