P.E.T.A. can't be all crazy right ?

[FedoraChar]

I have several opinions on this. Some coming from my years as a biology student. Some from personal religious beliefs (yeah, I brought up the "r" word, but that's not the point of this thread so I'm not arguing it or anything, just telling you where my perspective comes from).

1.) As one of my biology professors always says, we have to be careful not to put human-emotions on inhuman things. Although some people would like to think otherwise, animals do not think and feel like we do. That is not to say that we shouldn't feel guilty about abusing animals. I believe that as humans we have a stewardship over the earth, and so we are responsible for taking care of it and respecting the life found in it. At the same time I do not support the extreme measures that some people take to accomplish that. There's nothing wrong with using the resources of this planet. They are there for us to use. We just need to be wise about using it.

2.) Farm animals. They seriously have it made. You can go on and on about how unfair it is to raise them up for butcher, keeping them crammed in cages, but nature would treat them much worse. On a farm, they don't have to worry about finding food/water or avoiding predators. They don't even have to worry about disease--the people who raise them are very cautious with sanitation and vaccination, seeing how they'll be food eventually. And in some farms, they don't have to worry about getting too cold or hot. Reproduction is a concern for many wild animals, but we handle all of the genetics with that. The best genes are always being passed on, and new generations are always growing up.


So do I feel bad about eating chicken? Nope. That bird had a darn good life.

So PETA? They're right only in that we need to respect life. The rest is all craziness

[Homura]

We have to understand PETA's position in this sense as well. While I don't condone the use of their tactics, much of it stems from them needing to use such tactics to get public attention in the first place. If you aren't being a domestic terrorist of sorts, trap beautiful women in cages to make statements, etc. Then you aren't being outlandish enough to even get a mention on the news. They essentially need to become the lady gaga of organizations to stay in the spotlight. There's a method to their madness, and unfortunately it's come to a method like this.

The method of appealing to emotion is just propaganda/marketing tactics. Nothing more. It's one of the most commonly used tactics in existence because it is effective and doesn't require logic, not that logic can be used to convince the large majority of the population anyway. Look at it this way, this is used by almost every charity organization on the planet to convince people to donate to their cause. For example, unicef always has short clips of poor kids in Africa frowning and/or diseased, and then usually followed by similar kids smiling and "happy" with the mention of donation. Why? Because it's effective. It's carefully sculpted to do so.