PETA made the news in the videogaming world recently with the unveiling of Super Tofu Boy a parody of the newly released Super Meat Boy. Taking the latter's cast and reimagining the titular "Meat boy" as a rotting lump of animal flesh, PETA puts players in command of "Tofu boy", the Vegan friendly hero who steals away Meatboy's girlfriend before having to steal her back from the enraged (and implicitly impotent) former hero. The game and its about page spread the typical PETA spiel, with a focus on how Vegans "do it better".
Whilst some out there may be wondering what exactly PETA are hoping to achieve with a parody videogame that only makes sense to a extremely specific audience, an audience that stereotypically does not overthink its diet at that. It does not appear that unusual for the charity to make both unusualy specific and largely pointless protests. Whether it is protesting Obama's televised "Fly Slaughter", or organising virtual rallies against virtual baby seal culling (In an interesting twist, there are no actual virtual baby seals, indeed in game the player is required to partake in a scheme to help breed seals and is attacked if any animal is harmed), PETA is no stranger to spending large amounts of its members time and money on many other activities aside from rescueing and and ending cruelty to animals.
But do they even do that? When people think of PETA they tend to, rightly, think of protesters outside animal rescue homes, chanting slogans regarding the entrapment and treatment of the animals within. Surely then, one would think that with all the protesting PETA do outside such facilities that any animals they rescue or have handed to them at their headquarters are treated with dignity and respect, with every effort made to rehome the animal.
Apparently not.
Despite its $35,000,000 budget for 2009, PETA"impounded" 2366 animals in the same year, managing to only find homes for 8 animals. with 57 of those animals passed on to other animal rescue homes this means that 2301 animals were killed. a 97% kill rate. Since the year 2000, PETA has killed 21,537 "Unadoptable" animals. A designation for which there is no actual set criteria. That boils down to an average of over 2000 a year and five animals a day. If you look at their financial report for the year 2009 it turns out that PETA does not have a specific fund allocated to the care of "rescued" animals, nor does it have any program to encourage the adoption of its impounded animals. Instead the vast majority of its funds are spent on "Campaigns" and "Public outreach and education", in other words, parody video games, unairred advertisement campaigns, and trivialising the holocaust .
Alongside funding offensive and petty methods of protest (or education, depending on whether you're reading the news or PETA's financial announcements) PETA also fund organisations that are labelled as domestic terrorist threats. PETA's Lisa Lange admitted on FOX news that they had given $1500 to the ALF to support their activities. Alongside directly funding groups responsible for kidnapping journalists and arson attacks PETA also provides legal support to those charged in relation to these actions, having paid roughly $110,000 in legal aid to people connected to the group's actions, most notably Rodney Coronado after he was charged with connection to an arson attack that resulted in over $50,000,000 worth of damage.
For all its good intentions and public relations, it is an undeniable fact that over the years, PETA has not only been involved in missapropriation of donations but hypocrisy at its highest levels and has aided domestic terrorism. It has to be asked, if the majority of its supporters, especially those paying monthly donations, knew how little of their funds are going to actual living, breathing, animals and how much of it is going towards putting naked celebrities on billboards and denouncing animal testing, how long could PETA continue with its 97% kill rate?
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