PETA Can’t Go ‘Just One Day’ Without Promoting Killing
June 14, 2013
Condemns effort that saved as many as 10,000 shelters animals.
Adopted during a Just One Day event at a North Carolina shelter; PETA wanted her dead.
Just One Day is a nationwide campaign which occurs every year on June 11. The No Kill Advocacy Center and Animal Ark asked shelters nationwide to explore and experiment with alternatives to killing that have already proven so successful in those communities which have implemented them so that they, too, can end the killing of the healthy and treatable animals in their care by finding them loving, new homes instead. This year, roughly 1,200 organizations, including some of the largest animal control shelters in the nation, answered the call to participate. They put down their “euthanasia needles” and picked up cameras instead: to photograph and market animals. They reached out to rescue groups, hosted adoption events, stayed open for extended hours, and asked their communities to help them empty the shelter the good way. Last year, this effort resulted in roughly 9,000 adoptions nationwide on June 11, erasing one day’s worth of killing. This year, we hoped to save over 10,000 lives. And by all indications, we did.
In Escambia County, Florida, they had their best adoption day ever. In Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, 76 animals found a home. In San Antonio, Texas, 117 animals were placed. Similar stories occurred in shelters across the country, including shelters with historically high rates of killing and low numbers of adoptions. This is what the dog kennels looked like in Boone County, Kentucky, at the end of the day:
The number of groups participating and the number of animals finding homes was truly inspiring and showed what could be accomplished when groups come together, united by the common goal of saving lives, and laser-focus on that achievement. June 11, 2013, was a good day, a happy day, an important day, and an unqualified success: perhaps the safest day for animals in shelters in U.S. history. Thousands of animals were adopted, 1,200 shelters and rescue groups came together, adopters welcomed a new family member, the incinerators remained shuttered and the morgues stayed empty. We erased more than one day’s worth of killing in the U.S. So who could possibly oppose the effort that made it possible?
PETA.
Continuing its long and sordid tradition of undermining the movement to end shelter killing, PETA–an organization which itself kills over 90 percent of the animals they take in, which has killed puppies and kittens after they promised to find them homes, which defends even abusive shelters, which fights efforts to reform killing policies, and which has called for the wholesale round up and killing of animals, including healthy ones–posted an editorial against the Just One Day campaign calling it “smoke and mirrors” and telling those who supported the effort that saved an estimated 10,000 lives to “wake up” because they were being “duped.”
While Just One Day was designed to teach participating shelters how to use innovative programs to find loving, new homes for their animals in lieu of killing, PETA wrote that shelters should be “left alone” and that the animals should be killed rather than adopted; or as PETA euphemistically calls it, “a painless exit from an uncaring world.” And although the campaign is a joint effort by the No Kill Advocacy Center, a national animal protection organization, and Animal Ark, the oldest No Kill shelter in Minnesota, PETA disingenuously implied to their membership that the Just One Day campaign and the sponsoring organizations are a front for breeders and puppy millers–”Who is behind this initiative?,” PETA asks, “Is it breeders? People who receive money from breeders?”–though how breeders would benefit from increased shelter adoptions is a non-sequitur they don’t even attempt to explain. Indeed, every animal adopted from a shelter means fewer people buying commercially bred animals, not more.
They also nonsensically ask if it is ok to “put down the needle” for animals who are sick, inured, elderly, aggressive, feral or otherwise unsocialized. They ask if it is ok to dump animals along the highways, and they ask if it is ok to crowd dogs and cats together so they get sick. Of course, none of these issues has anything to do with an adoption campaign designed to save 10,000 lives and everything to do with trying to obscure a black and white issue with extraneous, disingenuous, unrelated implications and accusations. For the sake of argument, however, let’s answer their unrelated questions: As for overcrowding, 1,200 organizations started June 12 emptier and in many cases, entirely empty as a result of their adoption campaigns of the previous day, the opposite of overcrowding; while Just One Day was about adopting animals into homes, not dumping them along the side of an interstate.
Cat kennels at Roanoke, Virginia’s animal control shelter at the end of the Just One Day adoption drive.
Perhaps more importantly, though, the answer to their first question is actually, “Yes.” It is ok to put down the needle for animals who have special needs because in as little as one percent of cases are the animals who enter our nation’s shelters so irremediably suffering and near inevitable, pending death that their killing actually qualifies as true euthanasia. The other 99%, including the old, the infirm, the feral and the unsocialized, don’t “need” death, they need individualized care. Sick animals need medicine, not an overdose of “fatal-plus,” the poison used to kill animals in shelters. Elderly animals need TLC and a warm lap, not the gas chamber. Feral cats need neuter and release, not incineration. And others need rehabilitative care until they are well enough and well behaved enough for a loving, new home. That is what shelters in the true sense of the word should be. And that is what progressive shelters are already doing.
But what is good news for people who truly care about animals is bad news for PETA, an organization whose employees and volunteers are schooled in and instructed to act upon the perverse idea that animals want to die. For three out of four Americans who believe shelters should not be permitted to kill healthy and treatable animals, proof that adoption can replace killing is cause for rejoicing. For PETA, it is cause for alarm: one more blow to the traditional “catch and kill” sheltering dogma that they have historically used as a shield to avoid accountability. Without the safety afforded in numbers by a nation full of shelters likewise slaughtering healthy and treatable animals, the perversity of PETA’s own killing, including that of puppies and kittens, becomes even more abhorrent and less difficult to explain to an increasingly informed and savvy public that is growing less and less reconciled to the killing. And so they fight any effort to reform shelters, including condemning what to anyone who truly cares about animals can only regard as a good thing: an inspiring, heartwarming, successful campaign to save the lives of 10,000 animals and introduce thousands of Americans to the animals who will become cherished members of their family.
Instead of listening to PETA, true animal lovers should celebrate as thousands of animals walked out of the shelter and into the loving arms of adopters–for Just One Day and beyond; Like this little dog, adopted on June 11 in Louisiana at a participating shelter, who danced his way into a loving, new home and the brighter future that only PETA would deny him:
Learn more:
In Just One Day We Saved Thousands of Animals
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Have a comment? Join the discussion by clicking here.
Here is my story: www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=11902
And this is my vision: http://vimeo.com/48445902
In Just One Day…
June 13, 2013
… We Saved Thousands of Animals From Slaughter
Just One Day is a nationwide campaign which occurs every year on June 11. We asked shelters nationwide to explore and experiment with alternatives to killing that have already proven so successful in those communities which have implemented them so that they, too, can end the killing of the healthy and treatable animals in their care by finding them loving, new homes instead. This year, roughly 1,200 organizations, including some of the largest animal control shelters in the nation, answered the call to participate. They put down their “euthanasia needles” and picked up cameras instead: to photograph and market animals. They reached out to rescue groups, hosted adoption events, stayed open for extended hours, and asked their communities to help them empty the shelter the good way.
In Escambia County, Florida, they had their best adoption day ever. In Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, 76 animals found a home. In San Antonio, Texas, 117 animals were placed. Similar stories occurred in shelters across the country, including shelters with historically high rates of killing and low numbers of adoptions. The number of groups participating and the number of animals finding homes was truly inspiring and showed what could be accomplished when groups come together, united by the common goal of saving lives, and laser-focus on that achievement.
June 11, 2013, was a good day, a happy day, an important day, and an unqualified success: perhaps the safest day for animals in shelters in U.S. history. Thousands of animals were adopted, 1,200 shelters and rescue groups came together, adopters welcomed a new family member, the incinerators remained shuttered and the morgues stayed empty. We erased more than one day’s worth of killing in the U.S.
To read “In Just One Day We Saved Thousands of Shelter Animals,” my latest column in the Huffington Post (complete with lots of uplifting photographs and video), click here.
Photograph: This family drove three hours each way to a participating shelter in Louisiana to adopt this dog.
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Have a comment? Join the discussion by clicking here.
Here is my story: www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=11902
And this is my vision: http://vimeo.com/48445902
Environmental Bigotry
June 7, 2013
Stumps where majestic trees once stood. This is the vision of invasion biology and they hope to do the same to almost half a million trees in the San Francisco Bay Area alone, asking the Obama Administration to foot the bill to the tune of $5.9 million. And while they close libraries and other public services, they are pledging another $1.4 million of taxpayer dollars to the eradication effort.
My latest article in the Huffington Post is called “Biological Xenophobia: The Environmental Movement’s War on Nature.”
I wrote the piece in the hopes of reaching people who mindlessly embrace killing based on the philosophy of invasion biology. I had hoped to make people stop and think about what, exactly, it is they are embracing when they support it. Not surprisingly, my piece didn’t give some of the most ardent supporters pause for thought. It didn’t seem to touch them as it should have because invasion biology walls off the heart.
Indeed, if I could have told some of the commenters however many years ago it was before they were indoctrinated into the philosophy of invasion biology that they would read an article about the willful destruction and poisoning of hundreds of thousands of healthy trees and wildlife and support it, I bet they wouldn’t have believed it. It is not the loving, compassionate, logical or environmentally sound position. But, as Rogers and Hammerstein once wrote, you have to be carefully taught to hate. And it appears they have been.
Migration happens. And there is not a single time or place in the history of life on Earth where the invasion biologist could find the stasis they seek. That is not how life on Earth works. It never has, and it never will. And yet in seeking homeostasis, invasion biologists, those who falsely claim to speak for the Earth, paradoxically embrace horrific means of destruction that they should in fact exist to oppose.
Of course, this view is also selective, based on decidedly unscientific and narrow commercial or aesthetic prejudices. While they call for the slaughter of cats and Eucalyptus trees, while they call for the poisoning of lakes and wildlife corridors, they hypocritically ignore the tomato, the watermelon, the apple, and the person staring back at them in the mirror, all of them as “non-native” by their own arbitrary and selective philosophy as those plants and animals they seek to exterminate. In other words, it only includes those species they do not like. Why?
In their self-serving philosophy, they are given carte blanche to scapegoat, vilify and kill plants and animals for the environmental destruction caused by one species and one species alone: humans. Invasion biologists are environmental bigots, and they give voice to the darkest impulses of human nature – a disdain for the foreign and a reverence for the native. In fact, they elevate it to a core value.
Slaughter and death are not the tools we need to “preserve” life. In fact, by its very terms, it is not only ethically bankrupt, it is an irreconcilable contradiction. Please add your voice to the comments page of the Huffington Post by clicking here. Right now, it seems the inmates are running the asylum and they need to hear that rational people do not share their hate mongering.
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Have a comment? Join the discussion by clicking here.
Here is my story: www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=11902
And this is my vision: http://vimeo.com/48445902
Biological Xenophobia
June 6, 2013
Owl nesting in Eucalyptus. Both are being threatened, often with the support of “environmental protection” groups.
We’ve come to expect very little from large national animal protection groups like HSUS and the ASPCA. In fact, tragically, we expect them to work against animal protection. But what about environmental groups? What about the Sierra Club? The Nature Conservancy? The Audubon Society? The National Resources Defense Council? Are they any better? In many ways, they are not. All over the U.S., animals are being killed, trees are being cut down, poisons are being used with the support of these organizations. In fact, in some cases, they are the ones doing the killing.
How is it that over 50 years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the book that launched the modern environmental movement by alerting the public to the danger of using herbicides and pesticides in the effort to control and destroy nature, that very movement is now a proponent of the use of toxic chemicals?
Read “Biological Xenophobia: The Environmental Movement’s War on Nature,” my latest column in the Huffington Post by clicking here.
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Have a comment? Join the discussion by clicking here.
Here is my story: www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=11902
And this is my vision: http://vimeo.com/48445902
The Death of a Half Million Trees
June 3, 2013
A plan to turn Sutro Forest into stumps is being considered.
Those of us who live in the San Francisco Bay Area do so because of the natural beauty – to be surrounded by majestic, towering trees. To us and to most people, it does not matter what the species of those trees are. However, a small group of individuals who have an irrational hatred of certain species of trees are threatening to destroy the natural habitat where we live. And they do so by misportraying particular species of trees as “non-native,” an unscientific distinction that scapegoats some species for eradication based on wholly subjective criteria and narrow, personal prejudice. Now, they are asking the Federal Government to pay for clear cutting and poisons, felling trees and exposing the public and wildlife to thousands of gallons of toxic herbicide. And FEMA is listening. FEMA is considering a plan to cut down as many as half a million trees in the Bay Area.
We don’t want to live in an environmental war zone, to watch with sorrow and great heartbreak as decades old trees fall to the chainsaw, to see animals displaced, harmed and poisoned, to watch beautiful, lush forests be reduced to hillsides of barren stumps merely to satisfy the perverse preferences of a tiny but very vocal minority which cleverly cloaks their agenda of destruction in an faux “environmentalism” disguise.
Not only is it wrong to label any species an “alien” on its own planet and to target that species for extermination, but it is also breathtakingly myopic. On a tiny planet surrounded by the infinite emptiness of space, in a universe in which the anomaly of life renders every blade of grass, every insect that crawls and every animal on Earth an exquisite, wondrous rarity, it is quite simply inaccurate to label any living thing found anywhere on the planet which gave it life as “alien” or “non-native.” There is no such thing as an “invasive” species.
We must turn our attention away from the futile and pointless effort to return our environment to the past toward the meaningful goal of ensuring that every life that appears on this Earth is welcomed and respected as the glorious, cosmic miracle it actually is.
Help save the forests of San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland.
Learn more by clicking here.
Send comments in opposition to FEMA by June 17:
- Via the project website: http://ebheis.cdmims.com
- By email: EBH-EIS-FEMA-RIX@fema.dhs.gov
- By mail: P.O. Box 72379, Oakland, CA 94612-8579
- By fax: 510-627-7147
Please also send a copy of your comments in opposition to Senator Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein, and to the Mayors of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley.
You can also sign the petition by clicking here.
For further reading:
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Have a comment? Join the discussion by clicking here.
Here is my story: www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=11902
And this is my vision: http://vimeo.com/48445902
