Confessions.

[samtzu]

He's right. PETA genuinely opposes the keeping of pets. I guess we're supposed to turn them loose into the wild.

Why? I mean, they taste so damn gooooood.

When properly prepared... remember how bad that raw poodle was that night?

[Miss Kate]

FYI, that's bubkiss. The PETA headquarters and those involved with the organization have tons of rescued animals. The place is designed for animal/human compatible living. You should go and visit them, they're very, very good people.

[Lydia Love]

I should say that I'm delighted anytime I hear about someone rescuing an abused animal...

[Miss Kate]

Lydia, me too! I admit that PETA does have some harsh images, and agree that young eyes don't need to see them. However, without such organizations, animals would be far worse off than they are today. Lots of people have a very emotional reaction to PETA, but really, by the time they make it to the news, they've exhausted all communication with an inhumane company.

[stuart]

"Pet ownership is an abysmal situation brought about by human manipulation." --Ingrid Newkirk, President, PETA

"It is time we demand an end to the misguided and abusive concept of animal ownership. The first step on this long, but just, road would be ending the concept of pet ownership." --Elliot Katz

PETA pamphlet, Companion Animals: Pets or Prisoners?

"As John Bryant has written in his book Fettered Kingdoms, they [pets] are like slaves, even if well-kept slaves." --PETA's Statement on Companion Animals

"The bottom line is that people don't have the right to manipulate or to breed dogs and cats ... If people want toys they should buy inanimate objects. If they want companionship they should seek it with their own kind." --Ingrid Newkirk, President, PETA,




I have done animal rescue work. I grew up in a household that was very dedicated to it.

[Ranger Genius]

Wait, aren't slaves supposed to do some work, or something? None of my four pets (three cats and a dog, all rescued in one way or another) has ever done anything to pull their weight, which is becoming significant. I confess there's a slave/master relationship, but it's the inverse of what Newkirk implies.

You should see my cats' collars...made them from semi-precious stones (garnets, Opalite, amethyst, tiger's-eye, goldstone, snowflake obsidian, pearls.) Damn cats are spoiled rotten, but also fixed.

PETA's platform is a reductio ad absurdum of itself.

[Miss Kate]

Stuart, that pleases me. There are many, many animals that are dire need of aid. We are responsible for that which we domesticate, and so many times, people discard pets, mistreat animals in so many ways, as you know. You've found some specific quotes, and it is true that ownership was brought on by manipulation, but there isn't much we can do about that now. Like I said before, PETA is out there helping animals every single day, removing them from terrible situations, and working to change the way that the food, fur, cosmetic industries do business. And, they've done so much good. Everyone who works with rescue teams has an animal companion, and while maybe their aspirations would be for them all to be free, they still take in those who need homes. That's just the way it is.

I confess that this has made me so happy, I think many of you have found your way to the PETA website. I promise I won't tell if you sneak back and browse.

Bye~

My animal friends rule my house too...

[stuart]

Newkirk advocates the extermination of bull breeds

[Badger]

I confess to thinking that anyone who says PETA is yucky is uninformed and should check their compassion level,

Please Miss Kate, spare me the dismissive bullshit.

Uniformed you say? Have a look kiddoo...

“If we really believe that animals have the same right to be free from pain and suffering at our hands, then, of course we’re going to be, as a movement, blowing things up and smashing windows … I think it’s a great way to bring about animal liberation … I think it would be great if all of the fast-food outlets, slaughterhouses, these laboratories, and the banks that fund them exploded tomorrow. I think it's perfectly appropriate for people to take bricks and toss them through the windows ... Hallelujah to the people who are willing to do it. [click here to listen]”
— Bruce Friedrich, PETA’s vegan campaign coordinator, at the “Animal Rights 2001” conference


“Serving a burger to your family today, knowing what we know, constitutes child abuse. You might as well give them weed killer. ”
— Toni Vernelli, then-coordinator of PETA’s European operations


“Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.”
— PETA president and co-founder Ingrid Newkirk, in the September 1989 issue of Vogue


“Our campaigns are always geared towards children and they always will be”
— PETA vice president Dan Matthews, on the Fox News Network (December 19, 2003)

Oh wait hon, there's more....

Amidst the dozens of animal rights organizations, PETA occupies the niche of -- in Newkirk’s own words -- “complete press sluts.” Endlessly seeking media exposure, PETA sends out dozens of press releases every week.
In the past, PETA has handled the press for the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a violent, underground group of fanatics who plant firebombs in restaurants, destroy butcher shops, and torch research labs. The FBI considers ALF among America’s most active and prolific terrorist groups, but PETA compares it to the Underground Railroad and the French Resistance. More than 20 years after its inception, PETA continues to hire convicted ALF militants and funds their legal defense. In at least one case, court records show that Ingrid Newkirk herself was involved in an ALF arson.

PETA has even begun to adopt the tactics of an ALF offshoot known as SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty). This group is notorious for taking protests outside the boardroom and into the living room, attacking their targets at their homes.

In 2001, three masked SHAC members brutally bludgeoned a medical researcher outside his home in England. The lead attacker was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. A few months later, SHAC attacked another research industry employee on his doorstep with a chemical spray to his eyes, leaving him temporarily blinded and writhing in pain. The following year, Newkirk was asked her opinion of SHAC in the Boston Herald. Her response? “More power to SHAC if they can get someone’s attention.”

By 2003, PETA activists had adopted SHAC’s protest techniques, stalking and harassing fast-food restaurant executives. Not content to write letters and picket the chain restaurant’s offices, PETA’s leaders met with the CEO’s pastor, and visited his country club and the manager of one of his favorite restaurants. PETA activists, one dressed in a chicken suit, even protested at the church of two executives, annoying worshipers by driving a truck with giant screens of slaughterhouse video back and forth along the street.

In an effort to win more media exposure, PETA has adopted the counter-intuitive tactic of buying stock in restaurant and food companies that serve and sell meat. After buying just enough shares to qualify, PETA’s pattern is to introduce shareholder resolutions that would require animal-rights-oriented practices in the way animals are handled and slaughtered.

PETA’s goal as a shareholder, of course, is not to turn a profit. Its resolutions, if passed, would increase the cost of doing business and lower the value of everyone’s investment. The group has claimed that it’s “not trying to remove meat from the menu.” But with a stated long-term goal of “total animal liberation,” pushing for animal-welfare changes is just a first step. PETA’s short-term goals are to economically cripple these companies, force them to increase the retail price of meat, and nudge consumers toward eating less of it.

PETA collected more than $16 million in donations in 2002 alone, but few donors understand exactly where their money is going. During the past ten years, PETA has spent four times as much on criminals and their legal defense than it has on shelters, spay-neuter programs, and other efforts that actually help animals.

From both a moral and a legal standpoint, there are far too many objectionable things about PETA to list here in detail. But the following “top ten list” is a good start:

• PETA is not an animal welfare organization.
PETA spends less than one percent of its multi-million dollar budget actually helping animals. The group euthanized (killed) more than 1,300 cats and dogs in 1999 alone, preferring to spend its money on cheap publicity stunts and criminal defense, rather than finding the animals suitable homes.

• PETA assaults common decency.
PETA’s leadership has compared animal farmers to serial killer (and cannibal) Jeffrey Dahmer. They proclaimed in a 2003 exhibit that chickens are as valuable as Jewish Holocaust victims. They announced with a 2001 billboard that a shark attack on a little boy was “revenge” against humans who had it coming anyway. They have branded parents who feed their kids meat and milk “child abusers.” In 2002 PETA organized a campaign to sabotage a popular Thanksgiving hotline, which provides free advice about cooking turkeys. The group has even contemplated (literally) dancing on the grave of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders. And in 2003, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk wrote to Yasser Arafat, pleading with him to make certain no animals are harmed in Palestinian suicide-bombing attacks.

• PETA peddles its “animal liberation” food agenda through a medical front group that pretends to offer objective nutritional advice.

A group misleadingly named the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) has duped the press into believing that it is an association of conscientious doctors promoting good nutrition. In fact, it is a PETA front group. PCRM and PETA share money, offices, and staff. The American Medical Association calls PCRM a “pseudo-physicians group,” has demanded that PCRM stop its “inappropriate and unethical tactics used to manipulate public opinion,” and argues that PCRM has been “blatantly misleading Americans” and “concealing its true purpose as an animal ‘rights’ organization.”

Taking a page out of PETA’s press book, PCRM has labeled U.S. school lunches “weapons of mass destruction” because they include meat and milk. PCRM’s president, a psychiatrist named Neal Barnard, recently duped Newsweek into covering his “study” (of seven people) supposedly demonstrating that a vegan diet helped prevent type-2 diabetes. In 2002, PCRM was cited in major newspapers more than 550 times. It was identified as an animal-rights organization in only a handful of those cases.

• PETA exploits sick people.
PETA famously suggested that drinking milk causes cancer, in an advertisement mocking then-NYC Mayor Rudy Guliani with the words “Got Prostate Cancer?” PETA has also erected a billboard reading: “Got Sick Kids? Drinking milk contributes to colic, ear infections, allergies, diabetes, obesity, and many other illnesses.” In 2003 the group held a demonstration in front of a Toronto-area hospital that was under a SARS-related quarantine, spuriously alleging that animal husbandry has something to do with the epidemic’s spread. Upon hearing that Charlton Heston had fallen ill with Alzheimer’s Disease, Ingrid Newkirk suggested that PETA would “toy with the idea that both Alzheimer’s and CJD [Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease] are related to meat consumption.” According to a profile in The New Yorker, she considered “renting billboards that would display a large picture of a gaunt Charlton Heston foaming at the mouth.”

• PETA propagandizes children.

PETA’s website for kids puts a skull and crossbones next to the logo of Disney’s Animal Kingdom and tells the horror story of a fast food restaurant employee who “had taken a patty into the potty with her, then returned and said she had peed on it.” It hands out trading cards to kids that allege drinking milk will make them fat, pimply, flatulent, and phlegm-ridden. PETA also has a child-themed website, and a kiddie-oriented magazine, called GRRR! Kids Bite Back. The name is significant, as it is intended to prep children to identify with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which has long-used the phrase “bite back” in its promotional materials. In fact, as early as 1991, convicted ALF arsonist and PETA grantee Rodney Coronado was calling his own crime spree “Operation Bite Back.” PETA also sends “humane education lecturer” Gary Yourofsky into high schools -- and even middle schools -- to promote the “animal liberation” agenda. Yourofsky is a convicted ALF criminal who has said he would support burning down medical research labs even if humans were trapped in the flames.

• PETA opposes life-saving medical research.

PETA has repeatedly attacked groups like the March of Dimes, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and the American Cancer Society, for conducting animal testing to find cures for birth defects and life-threatening diseases. When asked if she would oppose an experiment on five thousand rats if it would result in a cure for AIDS, Newkirk responded: “Would you be opposed to experiments on your daughter if you knew it would save fifty million people?” In addition to opposing any and all medical research that uses animals, PETA also insults medical professionals by arguing, with a straight face, that animal testing is a counterproductive means of finding cures for human diseases. '

• PETA devalues human life.

PETA’s efforts to treasure every mosquito and cockroach invariably lead them to hate human beings for using bug spray and RAID. Ingrid Newkirk argues that as human beings, “we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.”

• PETA openly supports violence and terrorist activity.

PETA has long-standing ties to militant groups like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). The FBI calls these criminal groups a “serious domestic terrorist threat.”

According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, human beings are just another animal species, no more special or important than a snail darter or dairy cow. The group believes, as one commentator put it, that “animal trainers, hunters, fishermen, cattlemen, grocers, and indeed all non-vegetarians are the moral equivalent of cannibals, slave-owners, and death-camp guards.” Newkirk insists that the world would be a better place without people: “Humans have grown like a cancer. We’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.”

While valuing livestock over people may be an indefensible argument, it’s typical of PETA’s overall strategy: to stake out extreme, ridiculous, offensive, and often laughable positions, in order to constantly redefine the edge of what’s considered “acceptable” philosophy and protest activity. Ten years ago, throwing fake blood on a fur coat, agitating for vegan cafeteria food, or objecting to Biology-class dissection were unusual behaviors. Today, these are commonplace -- the radical line is now defined by firebombs, grand theft, stalking of scientists, and bloody physical assaults. For this, PETA deserves much of the blame; its habit of upping the ante of bad taste and shock value has redefined misanthropy and bad taste.

For instance, when PETA learned that the photographs of Holocaust victims displayed in its roving exhibit -- entitled “The Holocaust on Your Plate” -- included Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel as a young man at the Buchenwald concentration camp, it shrugged. “Six million people died in concentration camps,” laments Ingrid Newkirk, “but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.”

When terrorists struck on September 11, 2001, PETA issued a press release emphasizing the “animals left orphaned” and the dogs and cats in nearby buildings who would be “highly traumatized.” The press release berated Mayor Giuliani for his “poor record when it comes to animals” and urged him expend time, energy, and human resources “to set up a task force to locate and rescue animals” at Ground Zero.
When Newkirk heard that Palestinian militants had strapped explosives to a donkey in the hopes of exploding it in a crowded Jerusalem street, she faxed a letter to Yasser Arafat, pleading with him to “leave the animals out of it.”

When a grisly killing spree in Vancouver left 15 women dead, PETA tried to purchase full-page ads in local papers suggesting that this carnage was no worse than the killing of animals for food.

When Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh decided to refrain from eating meat during his last meal, PETA’s Bruce Friedrich told reporters: “Mr. McVeigh’s decision to go vegetarian groups him with some of the world’s greatest visionaries, including Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy and Albert Einstein.”

PETA also has given $2,000 to David Wilson, then a national ALF “spokesperson.” The group paid $27,000 for the legal defense of Roger Troen, who was arrested for taking part in an October 1986 burglary and arson at the University of Oregon. It gave $7,500 to Fran Stephanie Trutt, who tried to murder the president of a medical laboratory. It gave $5,000 to Josh Harper, who attacked Native Americans on a whale hunt by throwing smoke bombs, shooting flares, and spraying their faces with chemical fire extinguishers. All of these monies were paid out of tax-exempt funds, the same pot of money constantly enlarged by donations from an unsuspecting general public.

PETA president Ingrid Newkirk is also an acknowledged financial supporter of a publication called No Compromise. This periodical operates on behalf of the radicals of ALF, and often publishes underground “communiqués” and calls to arms from ALF leaders.

Most ominously, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk was involved in the multi-million-dollar arson at Michigan State University that resulted in a 57-month prison term for Animal Liberation Front bomber Rodney Coronado. At Coronado’s sentencing hearing, U.S. Attorney Michael Dettmer said that PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk arranged ahead of time to have Coronado send her a pair of FedEx packages from Michigan -- one on the day before he burned the lab down, and the other shortly afterward.
The first FedEx, according to the Sentencing Memorandum, was delivered to a woman named Maria Blanton, “a longtime PETA member who had agreed to accept the first Federal Express package from Coronado after being asked to do so by Ingrid Newkirk.” The FBI intercepted the second package, which had been sent to the same address. It contained documents that Coronado stole before lighting his firebombs, as well as “a videotape of the perpetrator of the MSU crime, disguised in a ski mask.” Since Coronado was convicted of the arson, we now know that he himself was that masked man. “Significantly,” wrote U.S. Attorney Dettmer, “Newkirk had arranged to have the package delivered to her days before the MSU arson occurred.”

A search warrant executed at Blanton’s home turned up evidence that PETA’s other co-founder, Alex Pacheco, had also been planning burglaries and break-ins along with Rodney Coronado. The feds seized “surveillance logs; code names for Coronado, Pacheco, and others; burglary tools; two-way radios; night vision goggles; [and] phony identification for Coronado and Pacheco.”

Shortly after Coronado’s arrest, PETA gave $45,200 to his “support committee” and “loaned” $25,000 to his father (the loan was never repaid and PETA hasn’t complained). Now free from jail, with an expired parole, and with the benefit of an expired Statute of Limitations on his many earlier arsons (to which he readily confesses in his standard stump speech), Coronado stood before a crowd of hundreds of young people at American University in January 2003 and demonstrated how to turn a milk jug into a bomb. A few days later, ALF criminals tried to burn down a McDonald’s restaurant in Chico, California, using a firebomb that matched Coronado’s recipe.

The following month, Ingrid Newkirk told ABC News that Rodney Coronado is “a fine young man.”
Newkirk wrote a book called Free the Animals! The Untold Story of the U.S. Animal Liberation Front and Its Founder, ‘Valerie.’ In it she writes: “The ALF has, over the years, trusted People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to receive copies of the evidence of wrongdoing … I have also become somewhat used to jumping on a plane with copies of freshly purloined documents and hurriedly calling news conferences to discuss the ALF’s findings.” Indeed, PETA has held such press conferences just hours after ALF arsons and other break-ins.

PETA has published a leaflet called “Animal Liberation Front: the Army of the Kind.” In another pamphlet, “Activism and the Law,” PETA openly offers advice on “burning a laboratory building.”
“I will be the last person to condemn ALF,” says Newkirk. And in another interview: “I find it small wonder that the laboratories aren’t all burning to the ground. If I had more guts, I’d light a match.” In ALF’s publication Bite Back (yes, this terrorist group has a newsletter), Newkirk has said: “You can’t have all politeness and patience, all potlucks and epistles … Some people will never budge unless [they are] pushed to budge.”
Perhaps Newkirk’s most telling comment, though, came in a 2002 U.S. News & World Report feature. “Our nonviolent tactics are not as effective,” she admitted. “We ask nicely for years and get nothing. Someone makes a threat, and it works.”

Cites and appropriate links available on request. Ah, hell just start here and work your way around....

http://www.consumerfreedom.com/pressrel ... release/82

[stuart]

I confess that I posted to the 3playa for the first time in, shit, more than a year?

[cowboyangel]

"Pet ownership is an abysmal situation brought about by human manipulation." --Ingrid Newkirk, President, PETA

"It is time we demand an end to the misguided and abusive concept of animal ownership. The first step on this long, but just, road would be ending the concept of pet ownership." --Elliot Katz

PETA pamphlet, Companion Animals: Pets or Prisoners?

"As John Bryant has written in his book Fettered Kingdoms, they [pets] are like slaves, even if well-kept slaves." --PETA's Statement on Companion Animals

"The bottom line is that people don't have the right to manipulate or to breed dogs and cats ... If people want toys they should buy inanimate objects. If they want companionship they should seek it with their own kind." --Ingrid Newkirk, President, PETA,


My poodle Jackie thinks I'm her pet....and this is true (she's a poodle after all)



I have done animal rescue work. I grew up in a household that was very dedicated to it.

[cowboyangel]

whoa how did that get screwed up? here it is again>>>>


My poodle Jackie thinks I'm her pet....and this is true (she's a poodle after all)

[bullD]

I confess that I have no fucking idea what 3playa is.

[Tancorix]

I confess that I have no fucking idea what 3playa is.

http://3playa.cultureshark.net

It's an alternative board / spinoff of the eplaya that was created by Trey Goesh over a year ago. In some ways it mirrors the overall ebb and flow of the eplaya with various topics and posters commenting on a range of subjects from Burning Man and beyond.

It's very fast paced....it reminds me of "The Bar" thread in how fast it moves. The discussions can run the gamut from personal stories to some really good political debates that get heated but stay civilized. Even with my personality clashes and drama the board was a very enlightening place. It's not for everyone but for those who like it they usually really like it! It's addicting as heck...if you're addicted to the eplaya the 3Playa can be like crack.

It's also a work in development and it's Trey's experiment in community. He tinkers with the code to add new things, after a year of heavy use it's still lighting fast...it's worth a few minutes to check out. There is a core goup of posters that may have you feeling like an outsider at first. But if you lurk a bit and learn how things work, you can wade in and be accepted pretty easily. (If you were reading my rants over on 39C, don't let my biases scare you away from it)

[cowboyangel]

thanks tanc...I don't need crack right now.......

[Badger]

(If you were reading my rants over on 39C, don't let my biases scare you away from it)

From what I hear, the bias is probably the least likely thing to scare folks.

[Tancorix]

Did I hear something? Nah, it must have been the doors to the bar from everyone going in and out.

[Rian Jackson]

i confess that most of my offering in the lunch hour conversation i had with CWL was 'mutha fuckas.'

i confess that it helped, a little.

[GuinivereElise]

I confess that I'm worried about people here, in a caring and wishing-I-could-make-it-better way.

I confess that when it rains, it pours, evidently.

On a completely different note, I confess that I went to the ragdolly website and ordered some cute little hair falls...

[bullD]

I confess that I love the ragdoll website, too.

I also confess that GE saying she is getting some falls made me shiver.

I further confess that if RJ gets ragdolled up as well, I might lose what little bit of sanity I have left. <being tormented by a ragdoll, oh my,,,>

[Rian Jackson]

i confess that while i was avoiding the dragons here yesterday, i also did something i shouldn't have on ragdolly.

i confess that it made me laugh when guin told me that she got some, too.

i confess that when guin and i naturally fall into synchronous rhythms, the world had better watch out.

[gigglesnort]

I confess I want to see the ragdolly things! I missed it yesterday. where, oh where?

[bullD]

I confess that I think both RJ and GE ragdolling together, " synchronous rhythms," is indeed a plot to drive me insane.

[bullD]

or mankind...

[bullD]

straight mankind...

[gigglesnort]

or womankind, I confess......but WHERE is hte site???

[bullD]

straight and a little bit freaky mankind...

[bullD]

www.ragdolly.net

[gigglesnort]

thanks.

[theCryptofishist]

I confess that I"m pretty damn pleased that BBP's sheep thread is holding it's own against the borg2 dramas.