There was a war between Nathan Winograd and PETA. Winograd won a major battle within that war in a court case PETA v. Winograd. You can see the video on that story at the base of the page.
On this page I’ve published another Winograd video (actually an audio file) which records an interview with a former PETA field worker, Heather Harper-Troje, who provides first-hand evidence of how PETA kills rescue animals in a non-descript “exam room” as it is euphemistically called by PETA. I wrote about the exam room in the earlier post about four years ago.
RELATED: The Exam Room at PETA’s Headquarters
Sidebar Note: For me, what is interesting about this audio video (below) which I’ve not listened to at the time of writing this, is that it was uploaded to YouTube in February 2019, more than two years ago, and it has been seen less than 3,000 times. I would consider that to be a failure in terms of impact. Clearly, then, the public is not particularly interested in Mr Winograd’s story about PETA’s attitude towards killing rescue animals rather than finding homes for them. I think that issue needs to be analysed. I think Mr Winograd should figure out what’s going on because he’s a very intelligent person with a very cogent argument but I wonder whether his message is getting across.
I have my personal theory about this. Although I admire, ironically, both Nathan Winograd and PETA, I believe that Winograd is not the greatest of communicators. He is almost too good to the point where his message is what I would call ‘dense’ meaning there is often too much detail so you can’t see the wood for the trees. That’s the first problem and the second problem is that people don’t care. That sounds awful but clearly not enough people do care otherwise over the years tens of millions of animals wouldn’t have been killed at shelters in America which is exactly what has happened. Thirdly this video is a listening experience. Nowadays people like instant, high impact visuals. The world is being dumbed down.
Yesterday I viewed a pretty mediocre video of a Maine coon cat talking to his human caregiver but it had been seen more than 3 million times over the same sort of timeframe as Winograd’s video. That’s the kind of thing people are interested in. They want the killing out of sight and out of mind. It’s too difficult to deal with perhaps because it goes to the heart of American society and it hurts.
THERE ARE MORE ARTICLES ABOUT PETA AT THE BASE OF THE PAGE.
I subscribe to Nathan Winograd’s emails and in his latest email he sent a podcast which is an interview with Heather Harper-Troje a former PETA employee. He tells me that under instructions from the PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk, it was Heather Harper-Troje’s job to acquire as many animals as possible from the public by promising people that she would find homes for the animals while knowing that the majority of them would be killed.
Further, he says that the killing of animals was not an ancillary part of her job but a core aspect of PETA’s mission. It appears that she lost her moral bearings until she met a dog named “Black Boy” who put her on the straight and narrow in terms of animal rights.
To the best of my knowledge, PETA’s kill room is at their headquarters in Virginia. Winograd says that in this room staff routinely inject thousands of animals a year with fatal doses of barbiturates. The animals include puppies and kittens who are healthy but who were not made available for adoption.
He believes that a lot of people who donate to PETA are unaware of this. This non-descript but sinister killing room has been in operation for well over two decades according to Winograd. The killing there is part of PETA’s Community Animal Project.
And according to Heather Harper-Troje its operation goes to the core of their mission. She said “The objective of the programme was to get as many animals as possible and the vast majority of those animals were killed.”
And disconcertingly to say the least, the means to meet that objective included lying to the public by telling them that the animals would be adopted: “I was told to pretty much say anything I needed to say to gain custody of an animal…I was told to lie by my direct supervisors directly and then by [PETA founder] Ingrid [Newkirk]…”
Winograd said that another PETA employee, Laura Lee Cascada, has since come forward describing this culture of killing as terrifying. He claims that this is overwhelming evidence of a perverted culture (my interpretation) which prioritises killing over attempts to rehome rescued and unwanted animals.
On the basis that this is true, anybody with any sensitivity towards animals has to be depressed by the information. In animal rescue there has to be a culture of saving animals and improving lives. That must be the raison d’être of animal rescue. The core mission in that vast field of activity in which hundreds of thousands of volunteers provide their services, must be to improve animal welfare, in general terms, which includes, specifically, finding good homes for abandoned and unwanted animals. PETA’s core mission is exactly the opposite to that on what I read as provided by Nathan Winograd’s email to me and in the video on this page.
