You’re wrong about PETA

Jeremy Beckham remembers the announcement coming over his middle school’s PA system in the winter of 1999: Everyone was to stay in their classrooms because there was an intrusion on campus.

A day after the brief lockdown was lifted at Eisenhower Junior High School just outside Salt Lake City, the rumors were swirling. Supposedly, someone from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had, like a pirate claiming a captured ship, climbed the school flagpole and cut down the McDonald’s flag that had been flying there just under Old Glory.

The animal rights group was indeed protesting across the street from the public school over its acceptance of a sponsorship from a fast food giant perhaps more responsible than any other for getting generations of Americans hooked on cheap, factory-farmed meat. According to court documents, two people had unsuccessfully tried to take down the flag, though it’s unclear whether they were affiliated with PETA. The police later intervened to stop PETA’s protest, which led to a yearslong legal battle over the activists’ First Amendment rights.

“I thought they were psychos with machetes who came to my school ... and didn’t want people to eat meat,” Beckham told me with a laugh.

But it planted a seed. In high school, when he became curious about animal mistreatment, he checked PETA’s website. He learned about factory farming, ordered a copy of Animal Liberation, the animal rights classic by philosopher Peter Singer, and went vegan. Later, he got a job at PETA and helped organize the Salt Lake City VegFest, a popular vegan food and education festival.

Now a law student, Beckham has his critiques of the group, as do many across the animal rights movement. But he credits it with inspiring his work to make the world less hellish for animals.

It’s a quintessential PETA story: the protest, the controversy, the infamy and theatrics, and, ultimately, the conversion.

PETA — you’ve heard of it, and chances are, you have an opinion about it. Nearly 45 years after its founding, the organization has a complicated but undeniable legacy. Known for its ostentatious protests, the group is almost single-handedly responsible for making animal rights part of the national conversation.

The scale of animal exploitation in the United States is staggering. Over 10 billion land animals are slaughtered for food every year, and it’s estimated that over 100 million are killed in experiments. Abuse of animals is rampant in the fashion industry, in pet breeding and ownership, and in zoos.

Most of this happens out of sight and out of mind, often without public knowledge or consent. PETA has fought for over four decades to put a spotlight on these atrocities and trained generations of animal activists now active throughout the country.

Peter Singer, who is widely credited for galvanizing the modern animal rights movement, told me: “I can’t think of any other organization that can compare with PETA in terms of the overall influence that it has had and still is having on the animal rights movement.”

Its controversial tactics are not above critique. But the key to PETA’s success has been its very refusal to be well-behaved, forcing us to look at what we might rather ignore: humanity’s mass exploitation of the animal world.

In the spring of 1976, the American Museum of Natural History was picketed by activists bearing signs that read, “Castrate the Scientists.” The protest, organized by the activist Henry Spira and his group Animal Rights International, sought to stop government-funded experiments at the museum that involved mutilating cats’ bodies to test the effects on their sexual instincts.

After public outcry, the museum agreed to discontinue the research. These protests marked the birth of modern animal rights activism, pioneering a model that PETA would embrace — confrontational protests, media campaigns, direct pressure on corporations and institutions.

Animal welfare groups had been around for decades, including the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), founded in 1866; the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), founded in 1951; and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), founded in 1954. These groups had taken a reformist and institutionalist approach to animal treatment, pushing for legislation like the 1958 Humane Slaughter Act, which required farm animals to be rendered completely unconscious before slaughter, and the 1966 Animal Welfare Act, which called for more humane treatment of laboratory animals. (Both acts are considered landmark animal welfare laws, yet they exempt from protection the vast majority of food animals — chickens — and the vast majority of lab animals — mice and rats.)

But they were either unwilling or unprepared to take a fundamental, confrontational stance in opposition to animal experimentation and, especially, to the use of animals for food, even as these industries grew precipitously. By 1980, the year PETA was founded, the US was already slaughtering over 4.6 billion animals a year and killing between 17 and 22 million in experiments.

The rapid post-war industrialization of animal exploitation gave rise to a new generation of activists. Many came from the environmental movement, where Greenpeace had been protesting commercial seal hunts and radical direct-action groups like the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society had been sinking whaling vessels. Others, like Spira, were inspired by the “animal liberation” philosophy advanced by Peter Singer and articulated in his 1975 book Animal Liberation. But the movement was small, fringe, scattered, and underfunded.

British-born Ingrid Newkirk had been managing animal shelters in Washington, DC, when she met Alex Pacheco, a George Washington University political science major who had been active with Sea Shepherd and was a committed adherent of Animal Liberation. It was around this book’s ideas that the two decided to start a grassroots animal rights group: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Animal Liberation argues that humans and animals share a number of basic interests, most notably the interest in living free from harm, which should be respected. The failure to recognize this interest by most people, Singer argues, stems from a bias in favor of one’s own species that he calls speciesism, akin to racists ignoring the interests of members of other races.

Singer does not claim that animals and humans have the same interests but rather that animals’ interests are denied to them for no legitimate reason but our assumed right to use them as we please.

The obvious difference between anti-speciesism and abolitionism or women’s liberation, of course, is that the oppressed are not the same species as their oppressors and lack the capacity to rationally voice arguments or organize on their own behalf. They require human surrogates to urge their fellow humans to reconsider their place in the hierarchy of species.

PETA’s mission statement is Animal Liberation breathed into life: “PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.”

The group’s rapid rise from obscurity to household name was propelled by its first two major investigations into animal abuse. Its first target, in 1981, was the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland.

At the now-defunct lab, neuroscientist Edward Taub was severing the nerves of macaques, permanently leaving them with limbs they could see but could not feel. He aimed to test whether the maimed monkeys could nevertheless be trained to use these limbs, theorizing that the research could help people regain control of their bodies after suffering a stroke or spinal cord injury.

Pacheco got an unpaid position assisting with experiments, using the time to document the conditions there. The experiments themselves, however grotesque, were legal, but the level of care for the monkeys and the sanitary conditions at the lab appeared to fall short of Maryland’s animal welfare laws. Having gathered enough evidence, PETA presented it to the state’s attorney, who pressed animal abuse charges against Taub and his assistant. Simultaneously, PETA released shocking photos Pacheco had taken of the confined monkeys to the press.

PETA protestors dressed as caged monkeys picketed the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had funded the research. The press ate it up. Taub was convicted and his lab shut down — the first time this had happened to an animal experimenter in the US.

He was later cleared of the charges by the Maryland Court of Appeals on the grounds that the state’s animal welfare statutes didn’t apply to the lab because it was federally funded and thus under federal jurisdiction. The American scientific establishment rushed to his defense, rattled by the public and legal opposition to what they viewed as a normal and necessary practice.

For its next act, in 1985, PETA released footage taken by the Animal Liberation Front, a radical group more willing to break the law, of severe abuse of baboons at the University of Pennsylvania. There, under the auspices of studying the effects of whiplash and head injuries in car accidents, baboons were fitted with helmets and strapped to tables, where a sort of hydraulic hammer smashed their heads. The footage showed lab staff mocking concussed and brain-damaged animals. The video, titled “Unnecessary Fuss,” is still available online. A slate of protests at Penn and the NIH followed, as did lawsuits against the university. The experiments were discontinued.

Almost overnight, PETA became the most visible animal rights organization in the country. By bringing the public face to face with violence carried out against lab animals, PETA challenged the orthodoxy that scientists used animals ethically, appropriately, or rationally.

Newkirk savvily parlayed the opportunity into fundraising, becoming an early adopter of direct-mailing campaigns to court donors. The idea was to professionalize animal activism, giving the movement a well-funded, organizational home.

The group quickly broadened its efforts to address animal suffering caused by the food, fashion, and entertainment industries (including circuses and aquariums), in which everyday Americans were most complicit. The plight of farmed animals, in particular, was an issue the American animal rights movement, such as it was, had previously been loath to confront. PETA charged it, conducting undercover investigations at factory farms, documenting widespread animal abuse at farms across the country, and bringing attention to common industry practices like the confinement of pregnant pigs to tiny cages.

“‘We will do the homework for you’: that was our mantra,” Newkirk told me about the group’s strategy. “We will show you what goes on in these places where they make the things you’re buying.”

PETA began targeting highly visible national fast food brands, and by the early 1990s, it was running campaigns against “Murder King” and “Wicked Wendy’s” that eventually led to winning commitments from those mega-brands to cut ties with farms where abuses were found. “By combining highly visible demonstrations with carefully crafted public relations campaigns, PETA has become adept at arm-twisting major companies into bending to its wishes,” USA Today reported in 2001.

To spread its message, PETA didn’t just rely on the mass media but embraced any medium available, often with strategies that were ahead of its time. This included making short documentaries, often with celebrity narration, released as DVDs or online. Alec Baldwin lent his voice to “Meet Your Meat,” a short film about factory farms; Paul McCartney did the voiceover for one of its undercover videos, telling viewers that “if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” The rise of the internet and social media were a godsend for PETA, allowing the group to reach the public directly with undercover videos, calls to organize, and pro-vegan messages (it has amassed a million followers on X, formerly Twitter, and over 700,000 on TikTok).

At a time when even vegetarianism was still viewed askance, PETA was the first large NGO to vocally champion veganism, creating widely shared pamphlets full of recipes and plant-based nutritional information. It gave out free veggie dogs at the National Mall; the musician Morrissey, who had titled a Smiths album Meat Is Murder had PETA booths at his concerts; hardcore punk bands like Earth Crisis passed out pro-vegan PETA flyers at their shows.

The animal experimentation and animal agriculture industries are deep-pocketed and deeply entrenched — in taking them on, PETA picked uphill, long-term fights. But bringing the same tactics against weaker opponents has brought quicker results, shifting norms on once-ubiquitous uses of animals, from fur to animal testing in cosmetics, with mega-corporations like Unilever touting PETA’s approval of their animal-friendly credentials.

The group has helped end animal use at circuses (including at Ringling Brothers, which relaunched in 2022 with only human performers) and says it has shut down most wild big cat cub petting zoos in the US. Its many-faceted approach has drawn attention to the sheer breadth of ways that humans harm animals for profit outside the public eye, like in its campaigns against the use of animals in gruesome car crash tests.

As it started doing with the Silver Spring monkeys in 1981, PETA is adept at using its investigations and protests to force authorities to enforce animal welfare laws that are otherwise often flouted. Perhaps its biggest recent victory was against Envigo, a Virginia-based breeder of beagles used in toxicology experiments. A PETA investigator found a litany of violations of the Animal Welfare Act and brought them to the Department of Agriculture, which in turn brought them to the Department of Justice. Envigo pleaded guilty to extensive violations of the law, resulting in a $35 million fine — the largest ever in an animal welfare case — and a ban on the company’s ability to breed dogs. The investigation spurred lawmakers in Virginia to pass stricter animal welfare legislation for animal breeding.

PETA has also become, out of necessity, a force for defending the democratic right to protest. When the industries intimidated by PETA and other animal rights groups doing undercover investigations pushed so-called “ag-gag” laws to prevent whistleblowing on factory farms, the group joined a coalition including the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge them in court, winning several state-level First Amendment victories for animal rights activists and corporate whistleblowers.

Over 40 years, PETA has grown into a major institution, with a 2023 operating budget of $75 million and 500 full-time staff, including scientists, lawyers, and policy experts. It is now the de facto face of the American animal rights movement, with public opinion on the group split.

Chris Green, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund (with whom I used to work at Harvard’s Animal Law and Policy Program), told me: “Like Hoover for vacuums, PETA has become a proper noun, a proxy for animal protection and animal rights.”

The media has proven hungry for PETA’s provocations, fueling an often mutually beneficial relationship: PETA gets press, and the press can farm outrage, be it at cruelty against animals or at PETA itself, for readers and clicks. This focus on bombast and outrage has not only made PETA many enemies, but it has often undermined, or at least undersold, the seriousness of the group’s goals and the extent of its successes.

Long-form coverage of the group tends to focus not on the group’s achievements or even on the actual logic of its messaging but on Newkirk herself, and specifically on the seeming disconnect between her well-mannered persona and her ideas, which drive PETA’s often ill-mannered protests. In a 2003 New Yorker profile, Michael Specter declared that Newkirk “is well read, and she can be witty. When she is not proselytizing, denouncing, or attacking the ninety-nine per cent of humanity that sees the world differently from the way she does, she is good company.” He hyperbolically dismissed PETA’s PR strategy as “eighty per cent outrage, ten per cent each of celebrity and truth.”

Specter is ventriloquizing an assumed reader who is hostile to Newkirk’s ideas. But calling critique of an orthodox position fanatical or extreme is the first line of defense against actually engaging with the substance of the critique. And so PETA has consistently faced the same pushback as virtually every civil rights and social justice movement before it: too much, too soon, too far, too extreme, too fanatical.

But PETA has made its critics’ work easier by too often stepping over the line between provocation and aggravation. To list some of the worst offenders, the group has made dubious claims linking milk consumption to autism, likened meatpackers to Jeffrey Dahmer’s cannibalism, attributed Rudy Giuliani’s bout of prostate cancer to milk consumption (in a rare show of contrition, it later apologized), and compared factory farming to the Holocaust, drawing extensive backlash. (Never mind that the latter comparison was also made by the Polish-Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had escaped Europe during the rise of Nazism in Germany and in 1968 wrote that “in relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.”)

Sexualized bodies and nudity, almost always female, are a regular fixture of PETA’s protests and ads; Newkirk herself has been hung up naked amid hog carcasses at London’s Smithfield meat market to show the similarity between human and porcine bodies. Celebrity supporters like Pamela Anderson appeared in the longstanding “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign, and naked body-painted activists have protested everything from wool to wild animal captivity. These tactics have drawn accusations of misogyny and even sexual exploitation from feminists and supporters of animal rights concerned with a more intersectional approach to human and animal liberation.

One former PETA staffer, who asked to speak anonymously, told me that even people within the organization have found some of these messaging choices “problematic.” The press-at-all-costs approach reportedly contributed to co-founder Alex Pacheco’s departure from the organization, and it has drawn criticism from stalwarts of the American animal rights movement, like legal scholar Gary Francione, a one-time Newkirk ally. And while it’s simplistic to conflate all of PETA with Newkirk, many people I spoke with were clear that most decisions, including the most controversial ones, run through her.

For her part, having faced such criticism for over four decades, Newkirk remains blissfully impenitent. “We’re not here to make friends; we’re here to influence people,” she tells me. She seems grimly aware of being among a tiny minority of people who grasp the overwhelming scale of global animal suffering. Her call for reducing the harm humans cause other species is, if anything, eminently reasonable, especially coming from someone who for almost 50 years has been a witness to the worst of those harms. When she speaks about campaigns, she speaks about individual mistreated animals from PETA’s investigations. She can recall the minute details of protests from decades ago and the particular forms of animal abuse that prompted them. She wants to build a movement, but she also wants to do right by animals.

Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in her decision to run an animal cruelty outreach program and animal shelter in Norfolk, Virginia, that regularly euthanizes animals. One of the longest-running critiques of the organization is that PETA is hypocritical: It is an animal rights activism group that also kills dogs. It’s ideal grist for the Center for Consumer Freedom, an astroturf group long associated with animal agriculture and tobacco interests, which runs a “PETA kills animals” campaign. Google PETA, and chances are this issue comes up.

But the reality of animal sheltering is that due to constrained capacity, most shelters kill stray cats and dogs that they take in and can’t rehome — a crisis created by the poorly regulated breeding of animals in the pet industry that PETA itself fights against. PETA’s shelter takes in animals regardless of their state of health, no questions asked, and, as a result, ends up euthanizing more animals on average than other shelters in Virginia, according to public records. The program has also blundered brutally, once prematurely euthanizing a pet chihuahua they assumed to be a stray.

So why do it? Why would an organization so concerned with PR provide detractors with such an obvious target?

Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA’s vice president for animal cruelty investigations, told me that focusing on the shelter misses the extensive work PETA does to help animals in the community, and that the shelter is taking in animals that would suffer more if they were left to die without anyone to take them: “Trying to improve the lives of animals is animal rights,” she said. Nonetheless, a long-time movement insider told me that “PETA euthanizing animals is absolutely a detriment to PETA’s image and bottom line. From a reputation, donor, and income vantage it is the worst thing that PETA is doing … Everyone would prefer they don’t do this. But Ingrid just won’t turn her back on the dogs.”

Ultimately, questions about messaging and strategic choices are questions about effectiveness. And that is the big question mark around PETA: Is it effective? Or at least as effective as it can be? Measuring the influence of social movements and protests is notoriously difficult. An entire academic literature exists and is, ultimately, inconclusive on what works and what doesn’t to achieve different activist goals, or how one should define those goals in the first place.

Take the sexualized images. “Sex sells, always has done,” says Newkirk. A raft of vocal criticism and some academic research suggests otherwise. It may get attention but ultimately could be counterproductive to winning adherents.

But it’s hard to isolate the effect. Currently, PETA says it has attracted over 9 million members and supporters around the globe. It is one of the best-funded animal rights organizations in the world.

Would it have more or less money and membership if it had chosen different strategies? It’s impossible to say. It’s entirely plausible that the very visibility obtained via its controversial tactics makes PETA attractive to deep-pocketed allies and reaches people who might otherwise have never considered animal rights.

The same uncertainty applies to PETA’s promotion of veganism. While there are certainly more vegan options at supermarkets and restaurants than there were in 1980, vegans still only make up about 1 percent of the American population.

Despite almost 45 years of work, PETA has not convinced even a meaningful minority of Americans to eschew meat. Since it was founded, meat production in the country has doubled.

But to see this as a failure misses the scale of the challenge and the forces arrayed against it. Meat-eating is a deeply culturally-entrenched habit, facilitated by the ubiquity of cheap meat made possible by factory farming, the hydra-like political influence of agricultural lobbies, and the omnipresence of advertising for meat. PETA spends $75 million per year on all of its staff and campaigns, with some percentage of that aimed at opposing meat-eating. The American fast food industry alone spent about $5 billion in 2019 promoting the opposite message.

Shifting the behavior of the public on something as personal as diet is a problem no one in the animal rights movement (or the environmental or public health movements, for that matter) has solved. Peter Singer, when I speak to him, concedes that to the extent he envisioned a political project in Animal Liberation, it was one of consciousness-raising resulting in a consumer movement like an organized boycott. “The idea was that once people know, they won’t participate,” he told me. “And that hasn’t quite happened.”

Nor has PETA’s work resulted in truly transformative federal legislation, like taxes on meat, stronger animal welfare laws, or a moratorium on federal funding for animal experiments. What’s needed to achieve this in the US is brute lobbying power. And when it comes to lobbying power, PETA, and the animal rights movement as a whole, is lacking.

Justin Goodman, senior vice president at White Coat Waste Project, a group that opposes government funding for animal testing, told me that by being seen as alienating and perhaps unserious, PETA is “yelling from the outside” while the industries it opposes have armies of lobbyists.

“You can count on one hand the number of animal rights people on the Hill,” he says, “so no one’s scared. PETA should want to be like the NRA — where they have a negative view of you, but they’re afraid of you.”

By contrast, Wayne Hsiung, a lawyer, founder of the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, now-and-again Newkirk critic, and author of the excellent essay “Why activism, not veganism, is the moral baseline,” questions whether the number of people converted to veganism or even societal rates of meat consumption are the right metrics by which to measure PETA’s success. The animal rights movement, he told me, “has a very neoliberal conception of success that looks at economic indicators, but economics [like how many animals are produced and eaten] will be a lagging indicator.”

“The better metric is how many activists are getting active, how many people are engaged in non-violent sustained action on behalf of your cause,” he said. “Today, unlike 40 years ago, you have hundreds of people storming factory farms, hundreds of thousands of people voting on state-wide ballot initiatives … PETA more than any other organization is responsible for that.”

When it comes to pollinating ideas, PETA has sown countless seeds of animal rights activism. Virtually everyone I spoke to for this piece, including many critics, credited some aspect of PETA’s operations with motivating them to get involved in the movement, be it through flyers at a punk show, undercover videos disseminated on DVD or online, or Newkirk’s own writing and public speaking.

Jeremy Beckham might not have helped start the Salt Lake City VegFest, or even become vegan, if not for the PETA protest at his middle school. Bruce Friedrich, who founded the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit promoting alternative protein, was PETA’s campaign coordinator for that protest. Today, former PETA staffers teach at universities, run plant-based meat companies, and have senior positions at other nonprofits.

PETA has also shaped the work of other groups. A number of animal rights movement insiders I spoke to argued that large animal welfare groups like the Humane Society of the United States would not have committed serious resources to anti-factory farming work if not for PETA cutting a path for them. Legacy animal welfare organizations now do the grunt work — filing litigation, posting public comments on proposed regulations, getting ballot initiatives in front of voters — necessary to make incremental change. They deserve their own share of the credit for the successes of recent decades. But they have also benefited from PETA acting not only as an inspiration to them but as an animal rights bogeyman to others.

A senior staffer at a major animal welfare advocacy group told me: “Having PETA out there doing all these bombastic, questionable things, it makes other animal protection organizations look like more reasonable partners when advocating for legislation, regulations, or other institutional change.”

Newkirk, meanwhile, remains an iconoclast. She is loath to criticize other organizations directly — something for which many people I spoke to, including fierce critics, praised her — but she is adamant about staking out clear and potentially unpopular positions for PETA.

After spending decades urging the movement to take farmed animals seriously, with PETA even praising fast food chains for making commitments to more humane treatment of animals, Newkirk has at times been critical of a turn in animal advocacy toward improving conditions for animals on factory farms rather than abolishing factory farms altogether. PETA opposed Proposition 12, a landmark animal welfare law passed by California voters in 2018, over those objections (a few years later, however, Newkirk herself was protesting in favor of upholding Prop 12 at the Supreme Court when it heard a legal challenge from factory farming interests).

In making sense of PETA, start not with the group, but with the crisis it is trying to address. Humans mete out violence against animals on an almost unimaginable scale. It is a violence that is ubiquitous and normalized, carried out by individuals, organizations, companies, and governments, often entirely legally. Not only have few people attempted to tackle this violence seriously, most don’t even recognize it as violence. How do you challenge this status quo, when most people would rather tune out your arguments?

PETA, an imperfect but necessary messenger, offered one answer, as best as it could.

Today, more animals are bred and killed in horrendous conditions than at any other point in human existence. Over more than 40 years, PETA has not achieved its goal of ending speciesism.

But it has, nonetheless and against the odds, forever altered the debate around animal use. In the US, animals are, for the most part, out of circuses. Fur is considered taboo by many. Animal testing is divisive, with half of Americans opposed to the practice. Meat-eating has become the subject of spirited public debate. Perhaps more importantly, there are now many more groups committed to animal welfare. There is more donor money. More politicians are speaking out about factory farming.

Progress in any social movement is slow, incremental, and bumpy. But PETA has provided a blueprint. It started with a strong and nonnegotiable ethical and political goal and realized it could have the most impact over the long term through professionalization and developing a wide supporter network. It was unafraid of controversy and confrontation, making sure people knew the name PETA.

It also made missteps that harmed its reputation and that of the movement.

But wherever the animal rights movement goes from here, and whatever strategies it chooses, it will need large, well-funded organizations to fight the big fights, in courtrooms and in the court of public opinion. And it will need leaders, like Newkirk, whose commitment to the cause is absolute.