Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by it IRL
The UK has a high rate of veganism, and part of that is attributed to the fact that the major vegetarian and vegan organisations in the UK generally recommend persuading people by offering them delicious food that is also vegetarian/vegan and saying it’s more ethical. On the other hand, the equivalent organisations in the US tend to lean more towards recommending telling people that eating animal products is unethical, and it’s difficult to accuse someone of unethical behaviour without being insulting. It also doesn’t help that multibillion-dollar organisations have run successful smear campaigns against groups like PETA - everyone’s heard of the time they took someone’s pet dog and killed it, but most aren’t aware that it happened once and gets reported on as if it’s news every few months, or that it was an accident as the dog’s collar had come off and it was with a group of strays, and got muddled with another dog, so was put down weeks earlier than it was supposed to be, bypassing the waiting period they had specifically to avoid this kind of mistake.
PETA has a lot more fucked up behavior under its belt than the one time they “accidentally” euthanized a dog they stole from someone, and much of their bad behavior has been very much maliciously intentional. Here just a small sample.
ETA: A few more, because why the hell not? Fuck PETA.
- https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/petas-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-history-of-killing-animals/254130/
- https://www.boredpanda.com/anti-peta-hate-rant-dear-tumb1r/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
- https://speakingofresearch.com/2013/02/08/a-lesson-in-hypocrisy-as-peta-cries-foul-over-one-cats-death-while-secretly-killing-hundreds-more/
- https://www.foxnews.com/us/peta-shelter-was-a-slaughterhouse-group-claims
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/peta-taking-pets/
- https://petakillsanimals.com/
It doesn’t strengthen your point to link Fox News and the literal website for the smear campaign I mentioned: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PETA_Kills_Animals
As for PETA putting down lots of animals, that’s no secret. It’s really easy to get people to donate to a no-kill animal shelter, so there are lots of them. However, when you’re a no-kill animal shelter, and you’re full of animals you can’t kill, or are asked to take an animal that can’t be ethically be treated with anything other than euthanasia, you have to turn the animal down, and it ends up wherever will take it. Usually, that ends up being a PETA-run shelter. When a PETA-run shelter is being given all the rejects from everywhere else, it’s obviously going to end up putting lots of animals down. It’d be better for PR if they didn’t, but less ethical, and they prioritise the ethics above the PR.
If you look at one of your more reliable sources, the Snopes article, it backs up what I’m saying, and not what you’re saying. It corroborates the story from my original post, lists another incident where PETA staff were accused but not convicted, and then discusses that they put down a lot of animals in their shelters, and how it includes healthy animals. The only controversy there is the definition of adoptable - a healthy stray kitten is theoretically adoptable, but if you get ten times as many kittens in a week as you do people wanting to adopt a kitten, 90% of them won’t get adopted, and your shelter will get quickly overcrowded if you insist on ignoring that fact.
I’m no fan of Fox News in general myself, but just because we don’t like them doesn’t make everything they publish false. And yeah, the PETA kills site clearly has an agenda, but their agenda is to try and save animals from PETA’s “love.” There’s sensationalism on that site, but there are also numbers, many of which come from PETA themselves.
I linked the Snopes article knowing that it supported points from both sides. The point in linking that article is that it’s despicable that any of those reports of PETA’s disgusting behavior are true at all.
You know what no-kill shelters try to do when they don’t have space? Coordinate with local foster programs, coordinate with other shelters to see if they have space. There are other alternatives besides taking in a perfectly healthy animal and dropping it in the euthanasia queue.
I’m quite sure there are quite a few things PETA has been accused but not convicted of. When you’re a group of assholes as big as that, you get pretty good at skirting the fine lines of what’s legal and what’s not. They’re hardly the first example of groups like that.
