Hi
PETA people make a pretty common mistake: The confuse both ETHICAL and HUMANE with
AESTHETIC.
They think that a PRETTY death is the same as a HUMANE death, and have this image of vegetarian wolves, bobcats and cougars living peacefully alongside the deer, rabbits and squirrels in blissfull harmony.
A few years ago, the State on Indiana proposed opening the Brown County State Forest to a limited hunt because of a severe overpopulation of deer. Fish and Wildlife specialists said that there wasn't enough food available in the forest for a population HALF the current size, and saw a hunt as a good way to solve the overpopulation.
MAN, was there an uproar around here! Bloomington, Indiana, is a college campus town (Indiana University), and a lot of the popluation could be considered, "liberal."
There's also a very strong PETA group telling them how things should be.
I asked several of these guys, if there's only enough food available for LESS THAN HALF of the population, were they willing to let ALL the deer starve to death, because food doesn't work like a bank loan - you have to have it constantly, and if ALL the deer ate ALL the food in first half of the winter, ALL the deer would starve in the second half of the winter.
"Well," they responded, "someone can buy bales of hay, and put it out for the deer!" (NOTE: VERY FEW of these guys pay the taxes that, "someone," would have to PAY for the hay, either...)
"That'll be nice," I responded, "then at least they'll starve to death with full stomachs."
Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY gave me astonished looks.
"Deer, if I remember correctly," I went on, "are BROWSERS, not GRAZERS. They live on TREES, not GRASS. During the winter, they strip young trees of branch tips, twigs and bark. When they run out of that, they attack larger trees and knock off bark to get to sub-bark, and they dig through the snow to get to the tender shoots and roots of plants. They can't DIGEST hay."
After a momen, one of them said, kind of embarrased, "I did not know that."
"So," I said, "either we CUT BACK on the number of deer, or we lose ALL the deer, and the deer pretty much WRECK the State Forest in trying to survive the winter. Letting hunters take SOME of the deer in a controlled hunt leaves us with a healthy, maintainable deer population. What's YOUR solution?"
No one had any other ideas. Neither did I.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong, here, by the way. That was the best of my knowledge at the time.)
ANYHOW: I think that it's not a TREATMENT thing. It's a CONTROLL thing. PETA is more interested in CONTROLLING how OTHER PEOPLE treat animals, and have very little interest in the animals themselves.
I'd like to mention, here, that
the PETA administration destroys EVERY domestic animal that comes into its hands. Public records show that they have (as of my last reading) referred NONE of the animals that folks send to them to adoption agencies, pounds, or no-kill shelters. Pets check in and they don't check out.
There was even one fairly large fuss over the fact that one branch was dumping dead animals in dumpsters owned or rented by other companies around the town. Theft of services is apparently
ethical.
It's Ok, though, as long as nobody actually SEES it, it's ETHICAL.
If they cared about the ANIMALS, you'd think they'd FIND OUT stuff about them, and the FIRST thing they should learn is that animals exist in a balance, and when people interfere with that balance by putting up high fences and killing off predators, then those same people are RESPONSIBLE for MAINTAINING the balance.
...even if it's NOT very pretty.