So Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is the first group to come forward with an offer [1] to acquire naming rights to a Virginia roadway. Their proposed name? “Spay Today Way.”
Bob Barker might like that one.
The group’s reasoning for both the name and the bid for naming rights goes like this:
“I think it’s something so basic that everyone who cares about animals can agree on,” she said. “It’s not sexy. It’s not provocative. It’s just about the health and safety of animals. We have 8 million animals entering shelters every year, and about half of them are euthanized.”
But then there’s this item from the Daily Caller [2] about PETA and euthanization:
Documents published online this month show that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization known for its uncompromising animal-rights positions, killed more than 95 percent of the pets in its care in 2011.
The documents, obtained from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, were published online by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a non-profit organization that runs online campaigns targeting groups that antagonize food producers.
Fifteen years’ worth of similar records show that since 1998 PETA has killed more than 27,000 animals at its headquarters in Norfolk, VA.
PETA responds that because it takes the hardest cases — animals that are “‘aggressive, on death’s door, or somehow unadoptable'” — such numbers aren’t cause for alarm.
However, it does put their road naming suggestion into a different light: spay (or neuter) your pets. Otherwise, PETA might have to kill them.