Notes on PETA's claims
Some additional notes on Ingrid Newkirk's explanation of why she and PETA kill homeless pets
PETA's Options: Death or Death
PETA asserts that the only available options are:
a) the animals die a horrible death through inhumane practices.
b) the animals are warehoused in horrible conditions.
c) the animals are turned loose on the streets to die other horrible deaths.
d) the animals are placed in imperfect homes where they live horrible lives.
PETA can generate more publicity than any other animal welfare organization in the world. But they never use their pulpit to hold shelters accountable for doing more to save more animals. Instead, they simply blame the continued "need" for killing on the community's lack of responsibility. And they offer, as the primary solution, more "humane" ways to kill animals.
Certainly, reasonable people would look at animals being killed in decompression chambers and agree that intravenous sodium pentobarbital injection is preferable. But this is simply arguing one method of death against another, rather than arguing for life rather than death.
PETA's Statistics
PETA uses wildly exaggerated statistics -- presumably to justify the need to kill more animals by pretending that the problem is too big to be fixed without killing the animals. Here's an excerpt from a fact sheet on
PETA's web site:
http://www.peta.org/mc/factsheet_display.asp?ID=29
More than 70 percent of people who acquire animals end up giving them away, abandoning them, or taking them to shelters, which receive about 27 million animals annually. More than half - about 17 million - must be destroyed for lack of homes.
This figure is completely inaccurate. Back in the
1980s, there were, indeed, roughly 17 million dogs and cats being killed in shelters each year. But that number is now down to somewhere between 4 and 5 million. There are still big challenges to be overcome, but we are now well
on our way toward a time when there will be no more homeless pets being killed in shelters for lack of an available home.