PETA: Help Me to Help You

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PETA: Help Me to Help You
by Lisa Woerly

I am what you might call an armchair animal rights activist. I care about the welfare of all animals and even occasionally step in to protect an animal from harm, but I also believe that there is nothing wrong with eating meat and wearing leather. I am opposed to trophy hunting, but I understand the need to kill an animal to feed a family. I am opposed to cruel and truly unnecessary experiments done on lab animals such as drilling holes in cats' heads and implanting electrodes to read their brain waves (hmmm, the brain waves are showing stress-wonder why?), and yet I understand the advantages of using animals in experiments that will help advance the quality of life for millions of human beings and even for the animals themselves.

Some people seem to be born with an innate love and understanding of our furry little friends. Others couldn't care less about an animal's need for love, shelter, and food. As a child growing up in the country, I collected everything that moved. Stray cats and dogs and the occasional escapee calf would follow me home. I would build condos out of cardboard shoeboxes for my pet toads. I nursed many an injured rabbit after one of my cats would raid a nest and use the bunnies for batting practice.

I prefer all animals to many people I have met in my life, but I am not so hard-lined and militant in my love for animals that it would ever overrule common sense. I do not throw paint on women shrouded in mink coats and I do not raid animal labs to "free" the animals. I have never screamed obscenities at anyone I see eating a steak, and I do not insist that consuming animal by-products such as milk and eggs is an affront to the animal's quality of life.

I would give anything to be able to support PETA. I guess we get ourselves in trouble when we attempt to define "ethical treatment of animals." I consider it ethical to eat a pork roast and to wear cashmere, but PETA wishes to eradicate the right to make these personal choices. PETA wishes to control an individual's definition of ethics, and this fanaticism is what leads animal lovers like me to stay away from PETA.

I believe that PETA does valuable work. They have been instrumental in educating people about the tragic plight of many abused animals. Recently, on their official website (www.peta-online.org), in their Call to Action link, there is a brief synopsis of a man charged with starving his tens of thousands chickens to death. Yes, we eat chickens by the billions each year, but they also deserve to be treated as humanely as possible before they reach the butcher block (and do you really want a starved chicken in your frying pan instead of a big plump one with lots of breast meat?). PETA watches and reports on individual animal abuses like no other animal rights organization out there, and that is a good thing.

But that good thing can go too far when an organization begins to define and dictate acceptable human behavior. PETA wants us to "dump dairy" and to find alternatives to honey consumption. A couple of weeks ago a PETA supporter threw a tofu pie in the face of Dan Glickman, the Secretary of Agriculture, because he was "pushing meat and promoting animal cruelty." She screamed this radical statement at him as she flung the pie. I think PETA would better serve its cause by confining the scope and definition of their mission statement. Animals who are truly abused and neglected are the ones that need our help. We need to keep passing and enforcing animal abuse laws and to continue evaluating and improving upon the humane treatment of animals intended for the slaughterhouse or the lab, but when we are told to stop eating cheese because it infringes on the rights of the cow I start to see a problem.

I will continue to eat my filet mignon, wear lamb's wool cardigans, and walk the streets in my favorite pair of black suede boots. But I will also continue to report people like my neighbor across the street who actually took a baseball bat to his Husky one afternoon, just as I will continue to donate cat food to one of our city's feline rescue programs. Just because I do not eschew meat consumption does not mean that I do not care about the welfare of animals.

I have chosen to give my money to my local humane society rather than giving it to PETA and I will continue to do so until PETA can control their fanatical approach to animal welfare. The symbiotic relationship between animal and man will never change. They need us as much as we need them, and that is how Mother Nature intended it.

Now excuse me while I go off to share a hamburger patty with my meat-loving kitty cat.