It is no secret among most folks who know me that I hate PETA.
Yup, that group. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or as I like to call it: The People Who Don’t Give a Damn About Animals But Love Antagonizing People, Particularly Blacks and All Women. Seriously, why the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t list them among other eco-terrorist groups is beyond me.
And I mean this sincerely. When someone tells me that they are a member of PETA, I instantly think hipster-bigot. PETA is habitually offensive. But as of late (or possibly always), the organization has been extremely sexist and racist too. They love to evoke imagery related to Black people and our history – as well as other oppressed people’s history – and use it as comparison for their alleged animal liberation: like the time when some PETA members dressed as Klan members to protest the Westminster Kennel Club show and then followed up that bad idea with an equally offensive Klan commercial; or the time when they compared slaughtering cows for food to lynching Black people; or the time when the entire country of Germany had to ban a PETA campaign that compared the Jewish Holocaust to slaughtering animals for food; or the time the organization evoked the names of Trayvon Martin and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the same campaign to remind PETA followers to “speak up for anyone, regardless of how hard it is for us to relate to them or how alien their behavior, culture, or looks seem to us, including the individuals gunned down for a millionaire’s casual amusement, the chimpanzees poisoned in experiments, the elephants beaten to make them perform in circuses, and the foxes caught in steel-jaw traps for their fur.”
Some people I have encountered believe that such comparisons, while harsh, are a necessary truth. They argue that fighting against how we treat animals and how we have industrialized our food, particularly our meat, is also a fight against White supremacy. I can certainly understand this. However, using the holidays, memorials and general history of the oppressed to make this point just seems unnecessarily antagonistic to me; and at the very least, hollow.
After all, if PETA was actually genuinely concerned about ending the oppression of all species as they claim, then how come the organization was silent about the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report? In particular, the part in the report that brought to light the Ferguson Police Department’s “unreasonable” use of canines on “low-level, unarmed offenders.”
According to the report:
FPD engages in a pattern of deploying canines to bite individuals when the articulated facts do not justify this significant use of force. The department’s own records demonstrate that, as with other types of force, canines officers use dogs out of proportion to the threat posed by the people they encounter, leaving serious puncture wounds to nonviolent offenders, some of them children. Furthermore, in every canine bite incident for which racial information is available, the subject was African American.
As we are all aware, the use of canines against Black people has a long history in this country. Most memorably, the Birmingham Campaign of 1963. But according to this article in the New Yorker entitled, “Police Dog Bites Black Man,” the use of police dogs has gone up since September 11 in just about all aspects of policing, including bomb detonation. And according to Citylab, a 2013 report by the Police Assessment Resource Center reveals that in the first six months of that year, all of the people bitten by L.A. County Sheriff’s Department canine unit were Black or Hispanic.
In spite of the clear exploitation of dogs here, particularly by training them to see and react violently to people based on their race, PETA has been pretty silent about all of it. To the contrary, the animals rights organization, founded on the principles of animal liberation, could be seen as pro-K-9 unit. It even gave a special shout-out on its blog to Kirk the K-9 dog, who was on the presidential security detail during Ronald Reagan’s administration when his partner, Officer Thomas K. Delahanty, was shot in the neck during an assassination attempt.
In fact, the only time PETA takes issue with the use of canines as weapons and tools for law enforcement is when they are not protected enough from heatstroke; not when they are being unnecessarily deployed on mostly Black and brown people.
This may seem like a petty observation, but it’s a total head-scratcher. How can PETA can be okay with canine police dogs being used in this manner while also supporting positions that say the use of service dogs, including guide dogs, is ethically wrong (yes, the organization believes that)? Besides, if they are going to continuously evoke the image of truly oppressed people in the hopes of liberating animals, then they better make for damn sure that their allyship is genuine. Or else, it all comes off as a bit racist.
