I have already given a glimpse of what side I am on for the topic of animal rights groups and how they illogically go about their doings to get people to stop eating and killing animals for that matter. The group that I am going to focus on for this blog is PETA or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and how they are blinded by their own biases and continue to push their beliefs on people.
I have recently inquired a question into PETA’s website on the questions and answers page to get a number on how many pounds of meat an average American consumes each year and here is the response to that question: “We don’t count animals by pounds, but we do count them each as individuals. In 2009 alone, 59 billion animals were killed for consumption by Americans… each person in the US consumes 198 animals per year.”[1] Now once I received this information I was set back a bit, I didn’t really know what to think except on how big the number actually was. 198 animals per year per person, I thought to myself. That is outrageous, I consume meat often in my house and in no way have I ever come close to that figure. That means I would have to consume a half an animal per day or 15 animals per month to accomplish this goal. Now I am not saying that it can’t be done. People who go out to KFC and get a bucket of chicken is like eating a whole animal in a sitting but what about the tri-tip that I just barbequed up last night, there is no way I would be able to eat the whole steer in 2 days let alone in a month. Another example is that I went caribou hunting in September of 2010 with my father in Quebec, Canada. It was a great time and both of us bagged a pretty big animal say a little bigger than the average size steer when it goes to market. So that is a count of two animals and my whole of four family and other friends we gave some meat to are still working our way through it. This tells me that the count for animals consumed each year are skewed somewhere along the lines. Even though I asked the question for how many pounds of meat are consumed they still responded with how many animals were consumed..
Now does that give a suggestion to the fact that they have a blind fold on or what? I mean they seem to not understand the simple fact that one person in the US cannot eat 198 steers or lambs or pigs in a year no matter how morbidly obese this country is getting. The aspect of credibility I may give for the answer they gave would be that one person could potentially eat 198 animals if they ate things like chickens, fish, and rabbits but they would have to stick with those meat groups in order to do so. Who wants to eat at least half a chicken every night for a whole year? I know I would get tired of it no matter how many different ways it was cooked. So I dare you to actually count how many WHOLE animals you consume in a year, let it be known that one steak does not equal a whole steer, and report back to PETA so there is some hard and honest evidence on the average Americans consumption of meat
PETA in logical sense stands for just ethical treatment of animals much like the Humane Society and how they don’t want to see abused and mistreated animals. They also have an underlying idea that everyone should be vegan and if not they are the enemy, hence the videos on their website and stories of celebrities that are so successful and don’t consume meat. They push their agenda by showing that you can be hot and sexy by not eating any animals. I also tried to get some of this information on maybe some statistic that showed any improvement towards PETA actually being successful in their quest to turn everyone vegan but the response was “We don’t have statistics for how our organization has influenced that number.”[2] Even though there must be some stat out there I mean they could even run it off of the number of people that comment on their website or on Facebook saying that they went vegan because of PETA’s cause. It’s not that I do not see and understand their cause it’s more the fact that they do not see how to go about persuading people to eat vegan and understand it. I actually side with them in some of my personal views but a very limited amount. I don’t want to sound like a psycho animal killer that thinks its fun to torture animals, because I side with the aspect of getting pets out of abusive situations that aren’t healthy for the animals. Another facet that I support with them are some views on commercial farming and how sometimes there are mistreatments that happen. I feel that home grown farm animals along with harvesting wild game animals, if it is possible for one to do so, is the way in which we should go about getting meat for the family. I think they go over the top in trying to show you the sickest of the animals or in the most horrible conditions that some of the animals have it. I noticed in one video clip about the chickens in being in such small cages that they little to no room to move they drag on about that but if they had more room to move the chickens would end up killing each other by fighting to the death in which more chickens would die. http://bit.ly/f7AQNf
To conclude I have tried to show that PETA has desired for years to drive a point across to turn everyone to veganism and turn away from meat with some success, now we don’t know how much success because there are no stats on it but needless they have supporters because of their campaign. However, PETA has a blindfold on when it comes to understanding the situation that animals are actually in. they continue to show us the most gruesome and horrible actions that occur in America for pushing their point. I think however they should but never will actually give the whole truth in that they should actually give information on what the reasons behind the farmers tactics are and how in a lot of the animal processes the animal does not go to waste, even though if it did it would just become fertilizer for some patch of earth somewhere, but instead they only show half the story. They cannot show the whole story, because that is not ethical at all, and let people decide what they feel is the moral in deciding between eating or not eating meat. This is the part that rattles my chains about PETA the most is the lack of view on the individual and their decision making and an emphasis on everyone should be the same and be like PETA.
