PETA is Another Name for Misanthropy

By Rich Kozlovich

I originally published this on Friday, April 21, 2006 and again on September 3, 2009, and for some reason it's been hit a lot recently, along with some other old articles dealing with animal rights issues, such as, Endangered Species Act, and Jim Beer's excellent article, How Bureaucrats, Anarchists and Communists Use Wolves To Establish Tyranny, which I've also republished.  

So, here it is again, and updated.  

A misanthrope is somebody who hates people.  Somebody who hates humanity, or who dislikes and distrusts other people and tends to avoid them.  The next time you see a Hollywood star proudly telling everyone how much they support animal rights and they are proud members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), remember the quotes listed below from an April 15, 2006 article by Fred Geilow.  (Editor's Note: After all these years the link no longer works so I've removed it.  RK) 

Remember, this is who these people really are.

• "Mankind is the biggest blight on the face of the earth." PETA statement
• "I don't believe human beings have the "right to life." That's a supremacist perversion. A rat is a pig, is a dog, is a boy." Ingrid Newkirk, PETA co-founder and national director
• "It would be great if all the fast food outlets' slaughterhouses, laboratories, and the banks that fund them exploded tomorrow. "Bruce Fredrich, PETA spokesman
• "I would rather have medical experiments done on our children, than on animals." PETA statement
• "If we could shut down all sport hunting in a moment, we would... Only 7 percent of Americans are hunters. That means there are more of us than there are of them. It is simply a matter of democracy. The majority rules in a democracy. We are going to use the ballot box, and the democratic process to stop all hunting in the United States... We will take it species by species, until all hunting is stopped in California. Then, we will take it state by state." Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the Humane Society of the U.S.
• "Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition." Peter Singer, known as the "Father of Animal Rights"
• "To those people who say, "My father is alive because of animal experimentation," I say, "Yeah, well, good for you. This dog died so your father could live." Sorry, but I am just not behind that kind of tradeoff." Bill Maher
• "Even if animal tests produced a cure [for AIDS], we'd be against it." Ingrid Newkirk, PETA co-founder and national director
• "Chickens are interesting individuals, who have as much right not to be cooked and eaten as a dog, or a cat, or even a human being." Bruce Fredrich, PETA spokesman
• "Ants are sentient beings, like we are, and have a right to life like we do, and they shouldn't be shown the level of disrespect the producers of ant farms show them." Stephanie Boyles, PETA
• "The life of an ant and the life of my child should be granted equal consideration." Michael W. Fox, vice president, Humane Society of the United States
• "We feel that animals have the same rights as retarded children." Alex Pacheco, former director of PETA, and subsequently the head of an animal-rights fundraising company
• "I think it is speciesist [someone who accepts human domination over animals] to think that the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center was a greater tragedy than what millions of chickens endured that day, and what they endure every day, because they cannot defend themselves against the concerted human appetites arrayed against them." Karen Davis, president of the animal rights group, United Poultry Concerns
• "If a human four-year-old has what it takes for legal personhood, then a chimpanzee should be able to be a legal person, in terms of legal rights." Steven Wise, Harvard University lecturer, and author of Rattling the Cage
• "Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans." Peter Singer
• "[A]rson, property destruction, burglary, and theft are "acceptable crimes" when used for the animal cause." Alex Pacheco, former director of PETA (This has been used in many areas of the world already, especially labs where animal experimentation has gone on. They have even intimidated individual employees at their homes as well as attacking the facilities. There has even been talk about assassinating researchers.)
• "If someone is killing, on a regular basis, thousands of animals, and if that person can only be stopped in one way by the use of violence, then it is certainly a morally justified solution." Jerry Vlasak, spokesman for PCRM [Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine], a front group for PETA.

After I published this in 2009 I had one comment from a reader then saying:

Unknown September 29, 2009 at 6:55 AM:  I think that a spectrum of rhetoric is sometimes useful to shake people up. Recall a time when children and wives were the property of parents and husbands, without individual rights. It took a lot of fighting and angry rhetoric to shed those long-held ideas.  I think that many of the quotes you cite are hyperbolic rhetorical and unfortunate flourishes, not literal beliefs.

Ignoring the red herring fallacy regarding children and wives, I have some questions.

1. Why would anyone say such things if they didn't really believe them?
2. Since the actions of these individuals reflect their statements, why would we consider them mere hyperbolic rhetoric with unfortunate flourishes?  
   
3. If they don't believe what they're saying here, why should we believe anything they say anywhere about anything?
   
4. When reading this sort of thing do we say to ourselves; are the views expressed here my views?
5. Are the views expressed here shared by most people?
6. Are these views the views of rational people?
7. What do you think their ultimate goals are?
8. Do you think these are the views of misanthropes?
9. Do you think leftism in all of it's manifestations, including environmentalism, is misanthropic?

Let's understand all these groups are scions of socialism, with environmentalism, via their insane global warming initiatives, as the spear point of an effort to impose a socialist system of worldwide governance under the auspices of the most corrupt, incompetent, and socially destructive organization the world has ever known.  The United Nations.  It really is that simple.