PETA and pet-food testing: Get a clue, Ingrid
By Gina Spadafori
July 19, 2008
In the middle of a long, prominent and generally favorable profile of HSUS top dog Wayne Pacelle in the Los Angeles Times, these two paragraphs made me snort coffee:
“He’s a very charming man, and that never hurts,” said Ingrid Newkirk, the co-founder of PETA, who has known Pacelle for 20 years. “I’m a rather abrasive sort.”
But Newkirk wishes he would do more. “I am keen that he really go after the pet food manufacturers who still test on animals,” she said. “Wayne has a slower approach.”
For an organization that kills 90 percent of the animal they take in to their shelter, PETA’s advocacy on the pet-food issue (which I happen know a little about, heh), is fascinating. Not only were the national animal advocacy groups — with the sole exception of the ASPCA and their Animal Poison Control Center’s Dr. Steve Hansen — caught completely flat-footed by the killing of thousands of pets by tainted pet foods, but PETA doesn’t seem to understand that the death of animals in the Menu Foods labs is what revealed there was a problem with the foods in the first place.
Those were the only animals confirmed dead by government and industry for the longest time, the infamous “16 dead” the FDA wouldn’t increase despite thousands and thousands of reports of pet deaths to the FDA and information from our PetConnection database and from the veterinarians of the Veterinary Information Network.
And despite PETA’s longstanding spittle-spewing hatred of Procter & Gamble’s Iams division, the recall was triggered, according to Congressional testimony, when Iams laid down the law to Menu Foods and told them that if they didn’t start the recalls, Iams would.
So, let’s recap:
- Ingredients that tested fine in laboratory analysis kill animals in a real-life feeding test.
- A company PETA loathes has the corporate cahones to force its reluctant contract manufacturer to trigger six weeks of product recalls that are unprecedented in U.S. history, and that foreshadow an ongoing and yet to be dealt with import crisis in the U.S. food supply.
- PETA wants pet food companies to abandon animal testing.
This, on top of their ongoing efforts to link community no-kill solutions with animal hoarding. This, on top of their attacks on the work of Dr. Jean Dodds to make rabies prevention safer for animals.
You look at it all, and you gotta ask:
Why is anyone still listening to PETA?
***
Interesting tidbit from the LAT Wayne Pacelle piece:
Pacelle said he knows he frequently veers away from what he calls the animal movement’s “orthodoxy.” He’s not against “responsible” dog and cat breeding. [emphasis mine] And he never refers to himself as an animal rights activist, always an animal protection “advocate.”
“The whole ‘rights’ thing is fraught with so much. I’m not sure I believe in any natural right,” he said. “It’s really about human behavior and less about the animals. Animals for the most part just need to be left alone.”
That sound you hear? Ingrid Newkirk’s head exploding.
And by the way, I can’t wait to vote Yes on California Proposition 2, which is why Pacelle is spending so much time in California. It’s a small step, but an important one away from industrialized agriculture, from the anything-goes-and-agribiz-knows practices that have led our food system down the wrong road for decades. As for the factory-farming of food animals, it’s more than animal cruelty: It’s an environmental disaster and a misuse of our precious oil reserves, and it produces food that has to be handled with extreme caution because it has become a bio-hazard.
I believe in the respectful humane handling of food animals. For their benefit, and for ours. And what we got now ain’t close.
Update: Was the L.A. Times reporter a little too charmed by Wayne Pacelle? Nathan Winograd suggests that she was.
While on the PETA subject, have you seen this? I saw it yesterday on CNN….play the ad and see how low one can go with their “message”.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/w.....ersial-all
Comment by Carol V — July 19, 2008 @ 8:40 am
“For an organization that kills 90 percent of the animal they take in to their shelter”
Maybe you should have ended that sentence after the word “in”. I don’t know what to call what PeTA has there in Virginia, but I sure wouldn’t call it a “shelter”!
Comment by The OTHER Pat — July 19, 2008 @ 9:55 am
I’m with you, Gina. I can’t wait to vote for Prop.2 either. California leads the way again!
Comment by Susan Fox — July 19, 2008 @ 10:28 am
So Humane Wayne is calling himself an ‘animal protection advocate’ these days? Interesting, I guess too many people were catching on.
‘Leaving animals alone’ is what AR is all about.
And I’m with you on Prop 2 - if I lived in CA I’d be voting for it too.
And you’re right, why anybody interviews Newkirk or mentions Peta anymore in the mass media is completely beyond me.
Comment by Caveat — July 19, 2008 @ 3:26 pm
The entire term “animal rights” is a misnomer, since the philosophical underpinning is entirely based on radical Utilitarianism. Radical Utilitarianism stands in stark opposition to any construct that depends on the idea of entities possessing rights. So Pacelle is correct.
Read Peter Singer (Animal Liberation), and for background, Jeremy Bentham. No “rights” for anybody, any time. Just a calculus of suffering, no boundaries around an individual where others Shall Not Pass no matter what their need or desire.
A Utilitarian philosopher who is a bit easier to live with is John Stuart Mill.
On an entire other note — I once had a bottle of pet shampoo whose label proudly proclaimed that it was “Not Tested on Animals”
Errrr….?
I wanted to take a picture of that label and send it to Consumer Reports for their “Selling It” back page, never got around to it.
Comment by H. Houlahan — July 19, 2008 @ 5:18 pm
I am not a supporter of PETA or of HSUS. But I can’t undersand why anyone would think it is ok to kill some dogs and cats to save other dogs and cats, even if the number killed is smaller than the number saved.
Comment by Tina Clark — July 20, 2008 @ 10:19 am
1) Much as we love them, they are still animals. And research using animals - conducted humanely and according to regulated guidelines - has long precedent in helping make discoveries that can save both human and (other) animals’ lives.
2) What do you propose as the alternative?
Finally, it could be argued that in this case, we are potentially killing dogs and cats every day through overvaccination. So which killing do you think is “better”?
Comment by The OTHER Pat — July 20, 2008 @ 10:32 am
Comment by Tina Clark — July 20, 2008 @ 10:19 am
Well *hopefully* no more feed trial cats will have to die in order for the pet food companies to clean up their act. I’m not of the mind that it was “ok” for Menu Foods to produce poisoned food and feed it to their feed trial cats, even if they didn’t know it was poisoned at the time. But if those cats hadn’t died, the FDA may have been even slower or possibly never gotten on the ball about the problems because they never did take pet owners’ reports into account. We would have then been left with whatever actions each company chose to take on its own, with no pressure from the FDA or Congress. If you want an example of that, take a look at Nutro’s “everything’s fine, move along” denials.
Feed trial cats and dogs are supposed to be there to test palatability and nutrition of the products. But potentially, they *could* serve as the canary in the coalmine if they died from toxic food and therefore alert the companies NOT to put the product on the market. Again, that *could* happen - although it didn’t happen in 2007. But if that ever DID happen, I’d be most grateful, even while I felt sad for the loss of life.
Comment by slt — July 20, 2008 @ 11:46 am
Ooops! My bad!
Got confused and thought I was posting on the Rabies Challenge Fund thread!
Comment by The OTHER Pat — July 20, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
H. Houlihan,
Thanks for the clarification and you’re right, of course.
AR is different from AL in many ways.
I wonder how those who follow Utilitarian school of thought reconcile sterilization with that philosophy? Obviously, the preference of an organism (and a species) is to pass its genetic material on to the next generation.
Comment by Caveat — July 21, 2008 @ 2:00 pm
Not a Utilitarian, don’t play one on teevee.
But a political philosopher, back in another lifetime.
Of course, Utilitarianism as a philosophy (and most of the other schools of political philosophy that are still framing our political debates and ideas) developed before the current understanding of an organism’s genetic interests — no “selfish gene” ideas were current, even in the age of Social Darwinism. It’s tricky for even a clear thinker to keep a handle on the slippery line between an individual’s self-identified interests, wants, desires and his or her genetic or biological interest in passing on his or her genes. So-called “AR’s” don’t seem to acknowledge the latter.
A radical Utilitarian will pose the issue purely in terms of the being’s cognitive capability as it relates to his capacity for suffering. (A really pure Utilitarian factors both suffering and pleasure into his calculus — “AR” Utilitarians seem to fixate only on pain/suffering, which is why Vicki Hearne titled one of her books Animal Happiness.
So a radical “AR” Utilitarian (in America) denies that a dog, say, or a turkey, has any interests in reproducing per se, since a dog can’t, according to the “AR” form an intention to become a parent and feel emotional pain on being denied that desire.
Further, since there are no individual rights, the “AR” will perform a calculus that “proves” that the life of a domestic animal is so painful and distressing that the best thing of all for a dog, cat, cow, chicken is to never be born. Second best — “euthanasia.” (Argument being that an animal that can’t form a conception of its own mortality cannot “suffer” by being killed, as long as the killing is “painless.”) A poor third, sterilization so that at least no other poor suffering debased creatures come into the world. The pain/distress of the sterilization is more than counterbalanced by the pain/distress spared the never-born descendants.
I won’t go into the kajillion ways to call bullshit on these arguments — just laying them out as best I can without caricaturing them, which is hard for me to do with my teeth gritted.
Hope that helps. I’m always sending people to Bentham for background, but the fact is, it is difficult reading, and especially hard to follow if you don’t have a background in Natural Rights theory, which is what Bentham was arguing against, or any background in the history of the period.
Of course, the AR’s, with the exception of Peter Singer, are mostly unconscious of the pedigree of their philosophy, and not well-educated or bright enough to grok it in context, which is why they so often are incoherent in both words and actions.
Comment by H. Houlahan — July 21, 2008 @ 5:50 pm