PETA’s Controversies and Its Ways of Protesting

By Yehezkiel Widjaja
June 5, 2024

We’ve all heard of PETA, right? It’s an animal rights organization, founded in 1980 that is supposed to fight for animals. According to its website, PETA “opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and focuses its attention... in laboratories, in the food industry, in the clothing trade, and in the entertainment business” (About page, PETA). The website also says that “PETA works through public education, investigative newsgathering and reporting, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns” (About page, PETA).

 PETA managed to expose and shut down experiments involving animals in the past. In fact, PETA became popular after its founders, Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco, helped shut down an experiment involving monkeys in 1981. Their actions led to America’s first ever arrest of an animal experimenter. He was charged with animal cruelty. There were other PETA-led actions that led to justice for animals. The calling for ending the usage of animals in car crash testings and shutting down circuses having wild animals were all PETA’s doings. Sure, these are examples of known good acts that PETA has done. Now, let’s ask what are some other ways the organization has protested against animal cruelty? Not only that but what were some controversies that PETA had to address?

PETA is known to stage protests against the fashion and fast food industry for using animals as part of their ingredients and for their products. Some well known ways PETA managed to get the media’s attention is by having protesters cosplay as animals getting “slaughtered” by costumed butchers. 

Last year on September 15 in London, UK, PETA was protesting in front of Urban Outfitters. It’s a clothing company that uses cashmere goat skin in its products. Many protestors wore animal masks, which is a tradition in PETA protests, and one protestor dressed as a sheep. Her body was nearly naked. She was being pinned down by a “farm worker” with her hairs being torn. Another way PETA gets its message across is by crashing fashion weeks, it’s a habit the organization can’t quite lay off of.

On September 7, just last year during the New York Fashion Week, Coach New York, a global fashion company, was having a runway, showing off its clothing. Suddenly, two protestors managed to infiltrate and crash the event. One of them held a sign that read “Coach: Leather Kills” while the other protester had her body painted, it also said the same thing. There’s actually a third protestor in the event but they weren’t on stage and were recording their fellow partners instead. 

In short, these examples of PETA’s protestings are some ways they’ve tried to deliver their message. Other creative ways like dressing up naked and looking like bulls to protest Spanish bullfightings are another way that PETA does to protest animal cruelty. However in this case, while the way they protested against the festival is insane, this act is completely valid and isn’t too outlandish or ridiculous. Bullfighting should’ve been outlawed long ago.

Now, let’s move on to talking about the controversies surrounding PETA. Its acronym stands for the “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”. Ironically, sometimes PETA’s methods of saving creatures are anything but ethical. Some examples include euthanizing pets and claiming that cow’s milk causes autism. While PETA thinks it’s an animal rights organization, it doesn’t always act like one. 

For euthanizing pets, there’s an incident in Virginia in 2014 which involved the euthanization of the Zarate family’s chihuahua. Two PETA employees, Victoria Carrey and Jennifer Wood, were contacted by a mobile home park owner who requested they help capture feral dogs and cats. While aiding the owner, the women had apparently stolen an unsupervised chihuahua called Maya from a porch. After they had successfully taken Maya, they put her down later that day. Maya was the Christmas gift of a nine year old girl who became her pet in 2009. PETA was sued in 2015 for trespassing and causing the Zarate family emotional distress after the abhorrent incident. 

PETA finally paid them $49,000 in 2017 to settle the lawsuit. It stated that it’s sorry for what they had done to Maya. However, PETA should also apologize to the many animals they euthanized before her. In 2011, the organization was called out for putting down 713 dogs, 1,198 cats, and 54 other animals in their shelter. What’s worse is that these euthanized creatures were ready to be adopted. Not to mention that a year before the Zarates’ lawsuit was settled, PETA was accused again of euthanizing more than 1,400 out of the 2,000 animals from its shelter.

The other controversy is PETA’s preposterous and insensitive claim that cow’s milk causes autism. In 2014, there was an earlier PETA billboard ad that was resurfacing online. Its advertisement said “Got autism? Studies have shown a link between cow’s milk and autism”. That statement is referring to two outdated studies conducted in 1995 and 2002. 

The 1995 study uses 36 autistic subjects to find the correlation between milk and autism. The study concluded that antibodies have been found in milk protein in children’s blood. This conclusion is useless and completely irrelevant for the researchers’ quest in finding a milk to autism connection. 

The 2002 study involved only 20 autistic children and they were put on a non-gluten, gliadin, and casein diet. In other words, they were to not consume any product which includes protein found in wheat or milk. The result showed some possible improvements in autism symptoms but the conclusion is pretty vague. Researchers who conducted this experiment, broadly blamed the result on processes with opioid effects. These processes refer to foods and drinks that have the opioid effect. For affected food, they can make the consumer feel nauseous and may trigger vomiting. For drinks, they can certainly make you have slowed breathing, have an overdose, or may even kill you. That is if you are to mix opioid with alcohol. The study and research is, what Time Magazine calls, single-blind. That means researchers knew which subjects were getting the diet and which ones weren’t. This study is, again, useless but also pretty biased.

When faced with public backlash about the provoking ad, PETA defended itself to the bones. It stated that the billboard serves to alert the public about the alleged connection between milk and autism. Keyword: “alleged”. The animal organization then said that there needs to be more research being done to promote the theorized correlation between milk and autism. However, PETA prefers to die on that hill. It restated by saying that studies show children who’s on a non-dairy diet reduces autism drastically. While PETA claimed that the ad serves as an alert, a pediatrician interviewed by ABC News suggested that the ad is more of a scare tactic than a PSA.

In conclusion, PETA has sometimes apologized for some controversies but stands by its acts in others. There are times when PETA has saved animals. However, sometimes their way of saving them could either be controversial or is less deserving of saying that PETA is saving animals (i.e. euthanizing pets without consent). Its statements, like linking milk with autism, causes harm for certain groups of people. Overall, PETA is a notorious organization that’s hated by animal lovers and the rest of the public as well. PETA violated laws in different states all in the name of protecting animals because their actions have caused more harm than good to them.

Sources:

https://www.peta.org/about-peta/ 

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/peta-is-founded 

https://www.greenmatters.com/climate-action/peta-cashmere-protests-london 

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/coach-protest-nyfw-peta-intl-scli/index.html 

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2023/sep/20/we-managed-to-draw-quite-a-crowd-a-brief-history-of-protest-at-fashion-weeks 

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/petas-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-history-of-killing-animals/254130/ 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/17/peta-sorry-for-taking-girls-dog-putting-it-down 

https://time.com/2798480/peta-autism-got-milk/ 

https://globalnews.ca/news/1365084/peta-links-milk-to-autism-in-controversial-new-ad/ 

https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation/silver-spring-monkeys/