this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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It's worth taking a moment to remember that PETA, despite not being perfect, has been the victim of a smear campaign by the meat industry, so every mistake they make is amplified and every policy that isn't immediately obviously sensible is reframed to look as bad as possible. E.g. you'll often see that PETA-run dog shelters euthanise a lot more dogs than the average shelter, leaving out the context that plenty of no-kill shelters send all their sick dogs to a PETA shelter to be euthanised so they can claim not to have killed the dog, but that skews the statistics. You'll also see news reports about PETA abducting a pet dog and killing it, which leave out the fact that it's one past event being reported over and over as if it's news each time, and that it was a much more nuanced situation than most people think. A pet dog's collar fell off while it was unattended playing with a pack of strays, which animal control had been dispatched to round up, and then sent to PETA to be put down, then a series of clerical errors meant animal control told the owners they never had the dog and told PETA that the dog had already been held waiting to see if an owner claimed it, so it was already dead by the time the owners tracked down where it had really ended up.
Smear campaign or not, their marketing and social media presence is aggressive and obnoxious on purpose. It seems to be purely focused on getting as many eyes on them as possible without actually considering what those eyes will think of them after getting the desired attention.
When I think of PETA I don't think of an organization with strong moral and ethical principles, I think of an organization that made a bunch of tone-deaf video game parodies in the 2000s to try and get attention. Those are wounds that are entirely self-inflicted.
i played all those awful peta games as a kid, they would show all the gross shit in slaughterhouses and stuff
didnt change my eating habits one bit
Woah, we got a badass over here!
thanks 💪😎🤳
That… wasn’t a compliment.
it was and i thank you for it
Hating one side doesn't automatically make you like the opposing side.
You can hate both PETA and the industrial meat industry. You can also laugh at memes mocking both.
At the end of the day, PETA creates misinformation and isn't on the side of good. They milk their supporters for more money and once in a while, gets a really good talking point but then botch it because of how stupid they present themselves.
PETA is the Westboro Baptist Church of the animal rights movement: Purely focused on getting eyes at them at any cost, no matter how stupid it makes them and the people associated with them look. I'll never take an organization that wasted their time yelling about how catching bugs in a video game is evil seriously. At this point, they're either willfully stupid or they've been infiltrated by the meat industry and pushed to do things that discredit them.
PETA exists to kite misplaced public vitriol and industrial counter-propaganda away from the constellation of smaller animal advocacy groups who make the majority of forward progress on their shared mission. Some local vegan advocacy group with 30 members can do an outsized amount of good in their community but isn't going to survive a corporate laser targeting, however PETA can shrug off an attack like that without issue. PETA is basically the main tank of a raid group, smaller orgs are the DPS, and industrial animal agriculture (Or from my social ecology perspective, our tendency to dominate the natural world in general) is the raid boss. PETA very much wants the vitriol and isn't at all the out of touch misguided organization that they willing and strategically wear as a reputation.
Except tanks don't go around making adventurers look bad.
To the contrary! A bumbling oafishness that sometimes makes the team look bad to outsiders is a core tank trope and a common recipe for initiating encounters. And Taunt is a cornerstone of the tank kit.
Seriously though, PETA doesn't make other vegan activists look any worse than animal ag propaganda already does. A lot of money goes into making vegans look bad.
Yea a lot of money goes in to making activists look bad ... which is exactly why it's absolutely moronic of PETA to contribute actively to the problem.
Especially when they're adding credibility to the slander.
And yet, it's a strategy that has worked for decades.
No ad hominem please, I presume we're all adults here. I understand why PETAs strategies may seem counter-intuitive from the outside, but they're a large organization that has been finding success in their mission for decades.
I know plenty of people who didn't go vegetarian or vegan especially because peta made that choice look obnoxious and they didn't want to associate with it
Peta is doing more harm than good
How many people? Tell me all the details about each of them.
This has serious 4d chess vibes to it.
It's not really that complicated a strategy for a large, well-financed team of full time activists to produce, and really it's within a genre of "leveraging propagandized outrage" shock activism seen more frequently in the past decade from larger advocacy groups. Like those incidents of people vandalizing art with soup, or pouring products on the ground in grocery stores, or painting monuments. It generates outrage, that outrage garauntees wide news coverage, that wide news coverage reaches and activates 100x or 1000x the number of fresh new activists that traditional advocacy acts might, making the media-directed vitreol of millions who will forget and move on within a week fantastically worthwhile. It basically taps into the power of existing propaganda against a movement, using it to ultimately drive interest in the movement. I forget where I was reading an interview with a Greenpeace leader, about how they simply couldn't pass on these tactics because of how effective they are, and they arrived at that conclusion not by prediction but by experience.
Sure. Anyone who is aligned with the mission will perceive this as an expert move. Similarly, Trump or Musk supporters do the same. Hence, 4D chess.
From what I gathered reading the interview mentioned (I'll see if I can find it) it was the statistical results they couldn't argue with. There was just as much skepticism and resistance to these tactics internally, until the results couldn't be ignored. Activists are generally concerned about likability and are not analagous to nihilistic billionaire narcissists.
edit - This article by a disruptive politics researcher isn't the interview I'm looking for but it illustrates my ideas here better than I have.
Are you referring to The credibility of shock advocacy: Animal rights attack messages
That seems to align with your argument but not with the topic. The study was focused on corporate pig farm.
This is a terrible sample to base any conclusions on.
And this indicates it is not a generally useful approach.
The study doesn't measure how long the effect lasts; outrage is fleeting.
No, but I edited my previous comment to link to an article that's close to what I've been trying to explain.
PETA are their own smear campaign. Their own ignorance and skewing facts to push a narrative are all I needed to not trust what they or any of their supporters have to say about animals.
Isn't it great when a flawed messenger lets you ignore an inconvenient message and give no further thought to any hint of outside influence? Even better when you can label any wrong thinker as part of their group!