My pet hate: extreme views about interacting with animals
Re: “Better if pet keeping had never existed in the first place”, and “Get your pets from animal shelters - if you absolutely must”, Have Your Say, April 14.
One former and one current PETA operative do their best to defend the organisation’s policies but of course I am not misrepresenting anything, just quoting comments from PETA’s co-founder Ingrid Newkirk and drawing the obvious conclusions. There is a lot of obfuscation, dissembling and
doublespeak going on but PETA’s long-term objective is the ending of pet ownership, as their slogan “Total Animal Liberation”, makes perfectly clear.
However, aside from the question of pet keeping, there is a wider issue with PETA’s policies. If, God forbid, these policies were eventually to prevail, many lifestyles and livelihoods around the world would be devastated. To cite just a few examples: horse breeders and trainers in Ireland, yak herders in Tibet, (and yak butter tea is a staple of the Tibetan diet) sheep farmers in New Zealand and Australia, Inuit seal hunters in Arctic regions. Even the Kuy people here in eastern Thailand would be affected – traditionally elephant hunters, they now raise cattle but still take a prominent role in the annual Elephant Round Up spectacular in Surin.
In my opinion, PETA is an outfit with unacceptably extreme views on the relationship between man and the animal kingdom, led by a woman who once said that she would never have children because “having a pure bred human baby is like having a pure bred dog, it’s nothing but vanity, human vanity”. That is an extremely disturbing comment and only increases my misgivings about Ms Newkirk and the entire PETA movement.
Robin Grant
Bangkok
