PETA — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — is anti-human.
Animal-rights ideology–which is sharply distinct from, and inimical to “animal welfare” doctrines – believes that moral value comes from the capacity to feel pain or to suffer. Some call it “painience.”
For a true believer in animal rights — not someone who misuses the term animal rights when actually supporting animal welfare –humans and animals have equal moral value. As PETA’s alpha wolf, Ingrid Newkirk once put it, “A rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy.”
PETA has now called for the execution of the hunter who killed Cecil the Lion. Don’t doubt that they are serious. From its official statement:
Hunting is a coward’s pastime. If, as has been reported, this dentist and his guides lured Cecil out of the park with food so as to shoot him on private property, because shooting him in the park would have been illegal, he needs to be extradited, charged, and, preferably, hanged.
Don’t think they aren’t serious. This is the organization that believes Sea World’s orcas are, literally, “slaves.”
It also once campaigned on the noxious notion that eating meat was equivalent to Auschwitz and that owning a leather couch was the same as having a lampshades made from human skin on your bed stand in the Holocaust.
By the way: PETA once bitterly criticized the PLO for an act of terrorism because it killed a donkey, showing no concern for the human targets whatsoever.
I have strongly criticized the killing of Cecil and its circumstances from an animal-welfare and human-exceptionalist perspective. But it is not akin to murdering a human being.
By calling for capital punishment, PETA has asserted that destroying a lion is akin to murdering a human being, That is what they believe fervently. PETA’s anti-humanism is vividly clearly for all to see.