Progress in any social movement is slow, incremental, and bumpy. But PETA has provided a blueprint. It started with a strong and nonnegotiable ethical and political goal and realized it could have the most impact over the long term through professionalization and developing a wide supporter network. It was unafraid of controversy and confrontation, making sure people knew the name PETA. Wherever the animal rights movement goes from here, and whatever strategies it chooses, it will need large, well-funded organizations to fight the big fights, in courtrooms and in the court of public opinion. And it will need leaders, like Ingrid Newkirk, whose commitment to the cause is absolute.
JAN DUTKIEWICZ: PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) — you’ve heard of it, and chances are, you have an opinion about it. Nearly 45 years after its founding, the organization has a complicated but undeniable legacy. Known for its ostentatious protests, the group is almost single-handedly responsible for making animal rights part of the national conversation.
The scale of animal exploitation in the United States is staggering. Over 10 billion land animals are slaughtered for food every year, and it’s estimated that over 100 million are killed in experiments. Abuse of animals is rampant in the fashion industry, in pet breeding and ownership, and in zoos.
Most of this happens out of sight and out of mind, often without public knowledge or consent. PETA has fought for over four decades to put a spotlight on these atrocities and trained generations of animal activists now active throughout the country.
Peter Singer, who is widely credited for galvanizing the modern animal rights movement, states: “I can’t think of any other organization that can compare with PETA in terms of the overall influence that it has had and still is having on the animal rights movement.”
Its controversial tactics are not above critique. But the key to PETA’s success has been its very refusal to be well-behaved, forcing us to look at what we might rather ignore: humanity’s mass exploitation of the animal world…
PETA’s mission statement is Animal Liberation breathed into life: “PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.” The group’s rapid rise from obscurity to household name was propelled by its first two major investigations into animal abuse. Its first target, in 1981, was the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland.
At the now-defunct lab, neuroscientist Edward Taub was severing the nerves of macaques, permanently leaving them with limbs they could see but could not feel. He aimed to test whether the maimed monkeys could nevertheless be trained to use these limbs, theorizing that the research could help people regain control of their bodies after suffering a stroke or spinal cord injury…
PETA protestors dressed as caged monkeys picketed the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had funded the research. The press ate it up. Taub was convicted and his lab shut down — the first time this had happened to an animal experimenter in the US…
For its next act, in 1985, PETA released footage taken by the Animal Liberation Front, a radical group more willing to break the law, of severe abuse of baboons at the University of Pennsylvania. There, under the auspices of studying the effects of whiplash and head injuries in car accidents, baboons were fitted with helmets and strapped to tables, where a sort of hydraulic hammer smashed their heads. The footage showed lab staff mocking concussed and brain-damaged animals. The video, titled “Unnecessary Fuss,” is still available online. A slate of protests at Penn and the NIH followed, as did lawsuits against the university. The experiments were discontinued.
Almost overnight, PETA became the most visible animal rights organization in the country. By bringing the public face to face with violence carried out against lab animals, PETA challenged the orthodoxy that scientists used animals ethically, appropriately, or rationally.
Newkirk savvily parlayed the opportunity into fundraising, becoming an early adopter of direct-mailing campaigns to court donors. The idea was to professionalize animal activism, giving the movement a well-funded, organizational home…
To spread its message, PETA didn’t just rely on the mass media but embraced any medium available, often with strategies that were ahead of its time. This included making short documentaries, often with celebrity narration, released as DVDs or online. Alec Baldwin lent his voice to “Meet Your Meat,” a short film about factory farms; Paul McCartney did the voiceover for one of its undercover videos, telling viewers that “if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” The rise of the internet and social media were a godsend for PETA, allowing the group to reach the public directly with undercover videos, calls to organize, and pro-vegan messages (it has amassed a million followers on X, formerly Twitter, and over 700,000 on TikTok)…
The media has proven hungry for PETA’s provocations, fueling an often mutually beneficial relationship: PETA gets press, and the press can farm outrage, be it at cruelty against animals or at PETA itself, for readers and clicks. This focus on bombast and outrage has not only made PETA many enemies, but it has often undermined, or at least undersold, the seriousness of the group’s goals and the extent of its successes…
In making sense of PETA, start not with the group, but with the crisis it is trying to address. Humans mete out violence against animals on an almost unimaginable scale. It is a violence that is ubiquitous and normalized, carried out by individuals, organizations, companies, and governments, often entirely legally. Not only have few people attempted to tackle this violence seriously, most don’t even recognize it as violence. How do you challenge this status quo, when most people would rather tune out your arguments?
PETA, an imperfect but necessary messenger, offered one answer, as best as it could. Today, more animals are bred and killed in horrendous conditions than at any other point in human existence. Over more than 40 years, PETA has not achieved its goal of ending speciesism.
But it has, nonetheless and against the odds, forever altered the debate around animal use. In the US, animals are, for the most part, out of circuses. Fur is considered taboo by many. Animal testing is divisive, with half of Americans opposed to the practice. Meat-eating has become the subject of spirited public debate. Perhaps more importantly, there are now many more groups committed to animal welfare. There is more donor money. More politicians are speaking out about factory farming.
Progress in any social movement is slow, incremental, and bumpy. But PETA has provided a blueprint. It started with a strong and nonnegotiable ethical and political goal and realized it could have the most impact over the long term through professionalization and developing a wide supporter network. It was unafraid of controversy and confrontation, making sure people knew the name PETA.
It also made missteps that harmed its reputation and that of the movement. But wherever the animal rights movement goes from here, and whatever strategies it chooses, it will need large, well-funded organizations to fight the big fights, in courtrooms and in the court of public opinion. And it will need leaders, like Newkirk, whose commitment to the cause is absolute. SOURCE…
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