Why join PETA when there's human abuse?

Question

Cruelty to animals is just a gruesome aspect of life.

Yet, there's still so much abuse between humans.

Child abuse, spousal abuse.

PETA has a large following. I mean, if they can rally so many people for animals, why don't they rally for human life?

Answer 1

There are many organisations dealing with the problems of human abuse - in fact every state is dealing with the issue by law, human abuse is illegal, whereas animal abuse often is not illegal or it is not punished or prevented. It is not a matter of choosing one or the other. Both must be respected. As a matter of fact, of the people I know who care about animals, most are also helping people. And vice versa. The people who judge those who care about animals saying "why don't they help people instead", usually don't do anything in that direction themselves.

Answer 2

Almost to a fault, every single serial killer began their "career" by injuring and torturing and animal in their youth. It's practice and it built up their tolerance and technique so they could go on to midlessly do the same to humans.

There are individuals who have NO respect or regard for animals, would never have a pet and so no interest in them whatsoever. This is so deeply ingrained in their heads that, although they may be intelligent people, I have to wonder if there is not a damaged portion of their brains where compassion for life stems from. These same people don;t get upset when other humans are mistreated either and they are the last people you would ever see at a rally to stop abuse.

Compassion must begin somewhere. The awakening of our stewardship for the planet and everything on it begins with a tiny step. Even in rehabilitating criminals, mental health professionals have found that if you can get these people to connect to one other living thing and start to care for it, then there is hope that they can recover their humanity. They do this by pairing up a prisioner and a puppy or another animal. The day to day care and feeding and training can lead to a person who could one day care for other humans.

Very large paradigm shifts in consciousness always begin with little things we can understand and identify with. Getting the public to, as one, stop poking bunnies in eyes with brushes for "laboratory testing" so Giselle Bunchen can sell us her mascara, just might be the small step that leads to the larger ones; maybe stopping the mass slaughter of cows, chickens, pigs and other animals for human consumption.

And MAYBE if we stop using our bodies as graveyards for dead animals, there is the hope that we could also imagine embracing other humans from different cultures and we can stop being so afraid of our differences that the only thing we can think of doing is killing them. MAYBE.

Answer 3

When PETA is concerned about the treatment of animals that are going to be slaughtered for food anyway, most people look the other way, because they figure the animals are going to die anyway, so what's the big deal?

The big deal about that might be that if the animals are treated poorly and are in bad health, then we consume these unhealthy animals, it is bad for us as well.  We need to take better care of our food chain so that we have healthy food to eat.

Animals are pumped-up with massive ammounts of growth hormones so we can get more of them faster, then our children's bodies reach puberty earlier and earlier, before their minds are ready, and we have rampant teen pregnancies.

We don't give our animals enough room to exercise and they are raised in cramped, filthy conditions.  The meat we get from them is poorer quality, high in fat and often disease ridden.

We feed sick animals to halthy ones, then eat them, and can't figure out why we get sick too.

It's something to think about at least.

Just my two cents!  :-)