PETA Attacks!

Good news, everyone! PETA has decided to bring their (animal) righteous hammer down own my own alma mater and hometown drunktank, Purdue University!

Apparently, some busybodied and prickish PETA-sympathizing vet student at Purdue's prestigious College of Veterinary Medicine sent them an alarmist e-mail about Purdue's training dogs, dogs that are used to teach vet students how to draw blood, set catheters, give vaccine injections, etc.

PETA has this to say:

After receiving a frantic e-mail that was being circulated by a Purdue student who was desperate to find a home for one of the dogs used in her class, we dug up some extremely disturbing information about Purdue University’s Veterinary Technology Program. As part of this program, catheters are inserted into perfectly healthy dogs, who are killed following the experiment if students are unable to find homes for them.

(Note: "catheter" in this context is a plastic IV tube inserted into a vein so that IV needles can be inserted and removed as necessary without re-poking the animal)

PETA's lies aside, the truth is that the dogs are used for a number of minor procedures over a long period of time, and the whole time they are treated extraordinarily well, like valued pets, by their assigned vet students. They are walked twice a day, played with, fed healthy diets, and generally treated like kings. They do not live in tiny little squalorous cages, they are not bruised, beaten, and battered, they do not have cosmetics tested on them, they are not infected with diseases. I know this, see, because my girlfriend works at the Purdue animal housing facility. Each vet student is assigned a dog to practice on for one year of his education and is personally responsible for the care of the dog after which it is hoped that the dog is adopted by a loving home. Neglecting the animal is seriously frowned upon by the college.

Dogs are euthanized sometimes if homes cannot be found, but that's nothing compared to the hundreds of shelters who have to euthanize thousands of unwanted animals from puppies and kittens to geriatrics year in and year out because sometimes a home just cannot be found. What are the alternatives? Should the university stockpile dogs until they are forced to house them in tiny, squalorous cages? What if the dog turns out to be aggressive or temperamental?

Moreover, if this dumb bastard PETA sympathizing student really was "frantic" and "desperate" to find a home for the dog, it was only his/her own fault; he/she had the entire year he/she was working with the dog to find a home for it.

And beside that, what the fuck good is e-mailing PETA going to be? They won't help get the dog adopted. They'll just bitch and moan, picket loudly, and funnel money to an animal rights terrorist group who will firebomb the facility in which the animals live. Either that or firebomb someone's house, flood someone's house, leave threatening notes, etc. PETA will not get out there with their hands dirty making calls and posting local newspaper ads trying to find the dog a home. They're too high and fucking mighty for that. Wouldn't want to help the dog into slavery.

And the tone of that PETA blog entry is hypocritical as hell. Par for the course, PETA. Oh, gosh, how dare anyone humanely kill animals unless it's PETA themselves doing it on the down low.

Especially telling is this page of tallies. in 2006, PETA took in 3,061 animals. Of that number, they adopted only twelve. Forty-six of the remainder were transferred elsewhere, and 2,981 of them were killed. that's a 97.4% kill rate. Go PETA! I suppose when you don't believe in pets (slavery!), it's better to just kill the creatures rather than adopt them out to a loving home.

Pet ownership is an absolutely abysmal situation brought about by human manipulation.
— Giant Evil Cunt Ingrid Newkirk, Harper's, Aug 1988

So, in comparison, one homeless dog among twenty doesn't sound so bad, now, does it? PETA's goal, despite their moralizing and demonizing, is a 100% homelessness rate for domesticated animals.

What a wonderful situation for animal and human alike.

And now all this insanity is pointed in my general direction. Word has it that unmarked white vans have been circulating the veterinary area of campus with people taking pictures. My girlfriend saw a nervous person switching the license plates of an unfamiliar car from Wisconsin to Indiana.

The big question is this: what's the best plan of action for us Action Skeptics when these ignorant, self-obsessed assholes descend upon us with signs and screaming and (perhaps) Molotov cocktails?

Purdue's own little chapter of PETA, composed of dumbass joiners with too much time on their hands and a desperation for some righteous-sounding cause to support, apparently used to (when it was warm) stage weekly protests of the local KFC. Pissing them off is easy: wear my leather jacket, my leather boots, and my People Eating Tasty Animals shirt, drive to KFC, buy a bucket, and eat it outside, enjoying a cool breeze. When I am full, blatantly waste the remainder of the chicken by throwing it on the ground to ensure that those birds died completely in vain.

An alternative annoyance is to tailgate them, except I don't have a truck with which to haul my grill. Also, I'm out of propane.

But this, if/when it happens, will be so much more than three or four dipshit college students yelling at the Colonel. Obviously it will involve my People Eating Tasty Animals shirt and my assorted dead animal flesh garb, but what else can be done? How else can they be annoyed, irritated, and otherwise pissed off? How else can these people be driven to, perhaps, attack me and thus get arrested?

How, most importantly, can a contingent of these morons picketing and protesting one of the most prestigious vet schools in the country be most effectively countermanded?

I leave this as an open thread for PETA-bothering ideas. Think!

Ideas, people, ideas! I needz them!