• AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    101
    arrow-down
    17
    ·
    14 hours ago

    It’s worth taking a moment to remember that PETA, despite not being perfect, has been the victim of a smear campaign by the meat industry, so every mistake they make is amplified and every policy that isn’t immediately obviously sensible is reframed to look as bad as possible. E.g. you’ll often see that PETA-run dog shelters euthanise a lot more dogs than the average shelter, leaving out the context that plenty of no-kill shelters send all their sick dogs to a PETA shelter to be euthanised so they can claim not to have killed the dog, but that skews the statistics. You’ll also see news reports about PETA abducting a pet dog and killing it, which leave out the fact that it’s one past event being reported over and over as if it’s news each time, and that it was a much more nuanced situation than most people think. A pet dog’s collar fell off while it was unattended playing with a pack of strays, which animal control had been dispatched to round up, and then sent to PETA to be put down, then a series of clerical errors meant animal control told the owners they never had the dog and told PETA that the dog had already been held waiting to see if an owner claimed it, so it was already dead by the time the owners tracked down where it had really ended up.

    • HonorableScythe@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      6 hours ago

      PETA is the Westboro Baptist Church of the animal rights movement: Purely focused on getting eyes at them at any cost, no matter how stupid it makes them and the people associated with them look. I’ll never take an organization that wasted their time yelling about how catching bugs in a video game is evil seriously. At this point, they’re either willfully stupid or they’ve been infiltrated by the meat industry and pushed to do things that discredit them.

    • VitoRobles@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      56
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      13 hours ago

      Hating one side doesn’t automatically make you like the opposing side.

      You can hate both PETA and the industrial meat industry. You can also laugh at memes mocking both.

      At the end of the day, PETA creates misinformation and isn’t on the side of good. They milk their supporters for more money and once in a while, gets a really good talking point but then botch it because of how stupid they present themselves.

    • ben@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      91
      arrow-down
      9
      ·
      14 hours ago

      Smear campaign or not, their marketing and social media presence is aggressive and obnoxious on purpose. It seems to be purely focused on getting as many eyes on them as possible without actually considering what those eyes will think of them after getting the desired attention.

      When I think of PETA I don’t think of an organization with strong moral and ethical principles, I think of an organization that made a bunch of tone-deaf video game parodies in the 2000s to try and get attention. Those are wounds that are entirely self-inflicted.

    • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      8 hours ago

      PETA exists to kite misplaced public vitriol and industrial counter-propaganda away from the constellation of smaller animal advocacy groups who make the majority of forward progress on their shared mission. Some local vegan advocacy group with 30 members can do an outsized amount of good in their community but isn’t going to survive a corporate laser targeting, however PETA can shrug off an attack like that without issue. PETA is basically the main tank of a raid group, smaller orgs are the DPS, and industrial animal agriculture (Or from my social ecology perspective, our tendency to dominate the natural world in general) is the raid boss. PETA very much wants the vitriol and isn’t at all the out of touch misguided organization that they willing and strategically wear as a reputation.

        • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          8 hours ago

          To the contrary! A bumbling oafishness that sometimes makes the team look bad to outsiders is a core tank trope and a common recipe for initiating encounters. And Taunt is a cornerstone of the tank kit.

          Seriously though, PETA doesn’t make other vegan activists look any worse than animal ag propaganda already does. A lot of money goes into making vegans look bad.

          • MotoAsh@piefed.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            edit-2
            8 hours ago

            Yea a lot of money goes in to making activists look bad … which is exactly why it’s absolutely moronic of PETA to contribute actively to the problem.

            Especially when they’re adding credibility to the slander.

              • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                3 hours ago

                I know plenty of people who didn’t go vegetarian or vegan especially because peta made that choice look obnoxious and they didn’t want to associate with it

                Peta is doing more harm than good

              • MotoAsh@piefed.social
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                5
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                8 hours ago

                TIL that showing PETA actively contributing to slander and demonstrating to normies that vegans can be massive moronic hypocrites is magically a good thing… Your brain is mush.

                • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  3 hours ago

                  No ad hominem please, I presume we’re all adults here. I understand why PETAs strategies may seem counter-intuitive from the outside, but they’re a large organization that has been finding success in their mission for decades.