Pour les animaux et contre tout le reste

(IMAGE: Le type de BD que PETA donne aux jeunes enfants pour les "sensibiliser")


Les manifestations de Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) comme celle tenue récemment à Montréal, sont toujours spectaculaires. Ils expliquent aux journalistes leur amour des petits mammifères, se laissent gentiment poser et, si nécessaire donnent même des vidéos comme celui que TQS a diffusé pendant son bulletin de nouvelles.

Peta peut compter avec raison sur la paresse des journalistes qui ne voient pas plus loin que le bout de leur micro. Un journaliste du New Yorker a voulu en savoir plus. Il a appris, de la bouche même de la fondatrice de Peta, que l'organisation s'oppose aux cirques, aux zoos, à la pêche et, bien sûr, aux chiens-guides pour les aveugles . Voici quelques extraits du long article du New Yorker sur cette organisation et sa dirigeante. L'article s'intitule et c'est tout un programme, The Extremist.

« Peta owns a seemingly limitless supply of Web sites, and none of them are subtle. Scientists who experiment on animals have come under particular attack (marchofcrimes.com, stopanimaltests.com), and, throughout America, at least in part thanks to Peta, most investigators who work with animals in the laboratory--and there are thousands--are now reluctant even to discuss their work in public. "Peta and the other extremists in the animal-liberation movement believe they have to do spectacular things to gain attention,'' Donald Kennedy, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and a retired president of Stanford University, told me.

"I am sympathetic to that as a philosophy, and certainly we are all more sophisticated about our use of animals than we were twenty years ago. But they are simply wrong when they say you don't ever need to use an animal to develop a drug, design therapies, or study the course of disease. They have harassed legitimate scientists, frightened them, even driven people from the field. Does that really further their cause?" Peta objects not only to the use of animals in science, and to anything having to do with fur (furismurder.com, furshame.com), but also to zoos (wildlifepimps.com), fishing (fishinghurts.com, lobsterlib.com), and tobacco companies that still test their products on animals (smokinganimals.com).

These days, the Peta leadership devotes much of its energy to the issue that it sees as responsible for the most abuse of animals by far: the way American corporations turn billions of cows, pigs, and chickens into meat each year. (kentuckyfriedcruelty.com and murderking.com are just two of many examples; there are also wickedwendys.com and shameway.com.)

« She regards the use of Seeing Eye dogs as an abdication of human responsibility and, because they live as "servants" and are denied the companionship of other dogs, she is wholly opposed to their use. She has had at least one dog taken from its owner. »

THE EXTREMIST MICHAEL SPECTER. The New Yorker. New York: Apr 14, 2003.Vol.79, Iss. 8; pg. 052