WAVE 3 TV Louisville, KY | PETA's Ethics, Tactics Questionable

PETA's Ethics, Tactics Questionable

By Eric Flack

(LOUISVILLE, August 5th, 2004, 3 p.m.) -- PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is the world's largest animal rights organization, with more than 800,000 members. Its latest target: KFC, which it accuses of cruelty to chickens. But how ethical is PETA? WAVE 3 Investigator Eric Flack found out.

Its tactics can be outrageous, over the top and in your face. PETA's founder Ingrid Newkirk readily admits "we're not afraid of making idiots of ourselves."

Since 1980, PETA members have fought to keep animals out of the research labs, out of our and off our plates.

In July, PETA released a video it called smoking gun evidence of chicken abuse at a Kentucky Fried Chicken supplier. PETA spokesman Dan Shannon predicted "people will watch this tape, and I think they will be horrified. They will be horrified to know what is going on behind the scenes."

So exactly what is going on behind the scenes at PETA?

David Martosko with the Center for Consumer Freedom says, despite its name, PETA "is not a very ethical organization by any standard."

A Washington lobbying group called the Center for Consumer Freedom, one of PETA's biggest critics, says it's far from a love fest. "You have to understand that this is an organization that has a long history of supporting the most radical militant wing of the animal rights movement to achieve what it calls total animal liberation."

In the mid-1990s, a WAVE 3 investigation found PETA gave more than $45,000 to the "support committee" of Rodney Coronado with the Animal Liberation Front. Coronado has been convicted of arson for a 1992 fire at Michigan State University that destroyed decades worth of mink research.

Coronado makes no apologies for his actions. "I think that we need to destroy bulldozers that are destroying the desert, or machinery that is destroying the last old growth forests of our country, and these are actions that are every bit as similar by those taken by patriots at the Boston Tea Party."

In the government's sentencing brief, PETA members, including founder Ingrid Newkirk, were tied to the Coronado fire and other raids he planned but didn't get the chance to carry out, although no one from PETA was ever prosecuted.

In 2001, PETA made a $1,500 donation to a group called the "Earth Liberation Front," which has claimed responsibility for fires set to luxury apartments, homes and SUVs in southern California. The FBI calls the Earth Liberation Front, and the Animal Liberation Front, the group Coronado was working for, "domestic terrorist" organizations, responsible for more than 600 crimes, and $43 million in damage since 1996.

There have been no deaths so far.

PETA says it does not carry out violent attacks, but it does encourage them. Here's what PETA's campaign coordinator Bruce Friedrich had to say during a speech to an animal right's convention a couple of years ago:

"I think it would be a great thing if, you know, all of these fast-food outlets and these slaughterhouses and these laboratories and the banks that fund them exploded tomorrow. I think it's perfectly appropriate for people to take bricks and toss them through the windows, and you know everything else along the line. Hallelujah to the people who are willing to do it."

PETA's own campaigns may not be criminal, but they are far from harmless. Last year, they handed out leaflets with violent graphics and headlines like "Your Mommy Kills Animals" to children outside a holiday performance in Boston. And the group still maintains a website touting its "Holocaust On Your Plate" campaign, which compares the murder of Jews in Nazi Germany to the murder of livestock.

It's a comparison that rankles Holocaust survivor Ernie Marx. "The Holocaust is mine. The Holocaust belongs to the survivors."

Marx, who spent time in Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp where thousands of Jews were gased and creamated, calls the ad ignorant. "Chickens are killed for a reason; six million people were killed for no reason. To compare the Holocaust to chicken killing is ridiculous."

PETA, which runs to the media every time it has shocking video, ran from this story, refusing to be interviewed because it included criticism from the Center for Consumer Freedom. In an email, a spokeswoman writes: "CCF has an agenda we aren't interested in helping them publicize."

That's no surprise to Martosko. "PETA loves to raise a stink when it thinks it can control the press," he says, "but now, when the heat's on them, as soon as someone wants to come out and say PETA is not as ethical as it appears, the fact that they would run from the spotlight should tell you an awful lot about what they are about."

KFC, stung by all the recent bad publicity, also declined to comment on our investigation. But Yum! Brands CEO David Novak knows the subject well. He's had fake blood thrown on him by a PETA member, and PETA even protested Novak at his own church.

Because of their ties to the groups like the ELF and ALF PETA is in danger of losing its tax exempt status, which would be a huge blow. It receives more than $13 million a year in donations.

PETA has successfully forced McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy's to change their practices, and the groups says it won't stop protesting KFC until the fast-food giant changes the way it does things as well.

Online Reporter: Eric Flack

Online Producer: Michael Dever