The animal rights publication Animal People celebrated the end of 2005 with it’s annual analysis of key US animal rights/animal welfare groups’ funding. The biggest antivivisection group in the world by a good margin is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, with a budget of $25,063,060 in financial year 2004. This is over 50 times the budget of RDS and our US colleagues Americans for Medical Progress, to whom we are grateful for passing on this information. PeTA is also apparently the sole beneficiary a group called Foundation to Support Animal Protection/FSAP, whose budget was $3,294,816 in 2004.
So what does PeTA do with all this money, apart from killing animals (see Tigger’s blog entry last month PeTA - animal killers)? JunkScience.com has included one of PeTA’s campaigns as a top junk science claim of 2005. PeTa’s ‘educational arm’ TeachKind, it says, reaches kindergarten children with its extremist agenda: “PeTA’s ‘learning materials’ claim that such innocuous behavior as drinking milk is an example of ‘animal cruelty,’ which their Web site repeatedly claims is an unmistakable predictor of future adult psychopathy.”
Read the full JunkScience.com entry here:
Through its innocuous-sounding ‘educational’ programming arm known as TeachKind, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has found a way to reach school children starting as young as kindergarten with its extremist agenda. The opportunity for PETA to gets its message into the classroom has been paved, at least in part, by various laws on the books in at least 12 states mandating humane education in public schools — thus creating a demand for curricula centered on teaching children about the humane treatment of animals.
Naturally, PETA is only too happy to provide ready-made lesson plans, videos and handouts to already overworked teachers.
“Kids who hurt animals may be on a dangerous path that will only get worse if it is not corrected. Psychiatrists, FBI profilers and law enforcement officials have repeatedly documented that kids who abuse animals rarely stop there,” TeachKind warns.
Its fact sheet, entitled Animal Abuse and Human Abuse: Partners in Crime, points out that “violent acts toward animals have long been recognized as indicators of a dangerous psychopathy that does not confine itself to animals,” and goes on to detail how many notorious school shooters, including Columbine’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were known to mutilate animals prior to their attacks on humans.
JunkScience.com
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