Month: October 2022

Research question: Is PETA an extremist organization? What are the policies of PETA, and do they live up to what they say their values are?

Methodology: I will use Questia, among other sources, to find scholarly articles related to PETA’s behavior, as recent as I can find them. I will also make sure to mention noteworthy events in PETA’s history, regardless of whether they paint PETA in a positive or negative light.

Abstract: PETA, also known as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is the most well-known animal charity to date. PETA is an organization of the stance that animals should not be used for farming, entertainment, experimenting on, or killing for clothing items. Some sources say that less than 1% of PETA’s funding goes to animals. PETA has made a lot of bold campaign choices, which some people find highly distasteful and a waste of donated money. Additionally, although PETA’s aim is to help animals, they still euthanize a lot of animals, some going as far to say that they kill more animals than regular animal shelters. Some of their most offensive ad campaigns include: comparing pregnant women to fattened sows, a person dressed as a giant vanilla condom, comparing animal use to the death of millions of jews in the holocaust, urging Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to use human milk instead of cow milk, etc.

Potential conclusions: PETA, as an organization, makes radically offensive and inaccurate ad campaigns, and a majority of the money risen from PETA doesn’t even go to funding measures against animal cruelty. PETA is definitely an extremist organization, but not the best organization to donate to in an attempt to prevent animal cruelty.

Sources:
https://greatnonprofits.org/org/people-for-the-ethical-treatment-of-animals basic information on peta’s stances
https://speakingofresearch.com/2011/01/18/where-do-petas-donation-dollars-go/ bold campaign choices
https://www.activistfacts.com/organizations/peta-people-for-the-ethical-treatment-of-animals/ Less than 1% goes to animals
https://zoos.media/media-echo/peta-shelter-2021-death-rate-increases-significantly/?lang=en euthanization rates

When I first heard of this book, my first instinct was that calling it a “cookbook” would be, all in all, a misnomer. For being so controversial, surely the work contained more than recipes for baking/cooking foods. However, the misnomer wasn’t in the title; it was in its definition of being an anarchistic book. It’s more accurately nihilistic. The book references drugs like they’re a cure-all to the current set of laws. The author knows a suspiciously high amount of information about drugs. The author details 3 different kinds of pot, and 2 methods of growing it. They also manage to incorporate every part of a marijuana plant into a recipe of some sort. Before this, I had never heard of hash. It’s apparently just a block of marijuana plant extract. The author guides the reader through the process of making hash. The author mentions a man named Antonin Artaud, whose life was drastically changed for the worse after taking LSD, and romanticizes his experience as “[finding] his own truth.” There are rules about buying off the black market: never buy from a stranger or on the street, don’t front money, don’t hold large amounts of money with people you don’t trust around, etc. He also mentions LBJ, which is a mix of acid, belladonna, and heroin, describing the trip as “the freakiest, worst, most fucked-up trip you will ever go on.” He then quotes a patent on how to make acid. During the peyote segment, he goes off on a tangent, telling a story about the first time he tried it. After reading the peyote segment, I don’t understand why people would get high off of it. It smells bad, tastes bad, and makes one vomit. How is that desirable? The rest of the drugs listed follow a similar pattern of: where it comes from in nature, origin of usage, people who can use it to get high legally, preparation of drug to ingest, recipes for drug ingestion, and how to grow some in a lab setting or from home.