Every year at the end of January — as surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west — the following events occur: PETA will start putting out the same videos and blogs they always do — spay/neuter, how many dog houses they gave out (to people who would not surrender the animals to them for killing), the few dogs they placed for adoption (so rare an event they put out a press release), winter pet care tips, why killing is preferable to not killing, and why cats belong indoors.
They do so to divert attention away from the second predictable thing that occurs. The Virginia Department of Agriculture releases PETA’s statistics for the prior year and — while communities across Virginia and the country will have reported placement rates as high as 99% — PETA will once again have needlessly killed the overwhelming majority of animals.
At the end of January, those articles started appearing. And sure enough, so did the data for 2022 and the numbers are every bit as lethal as years past. The Virginia Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, which oversees animal “shelters” in the state, released PETA statistics for 2022. While communities across Virginia and the country are reporting placement rates as high as 99% in municipal shelters, PETA continues to kill most animals.
In 2022, PETA put to death 1,374 out of 1,737 cats. Another 347 went to pounds that also kill animals. Historically, many of the kittens and cats PETA has taken to those pounds have been killed, often within minutes, despite being young (as young as six weeks old) and healthy. Not only do those records prove the lie that all of the animals PETA rounds up to kill are “suffering,” but if those cats and kittens were killed or displaced others who were killed, that puts the overall cat death rate as high as 99%. They only adopted out 15 cats, an adoption rate of ½ of 1% despite millions of “animal loving” supporters, a staff of hundreds, and revenues in excess of $72 million.
While dogs fared a little better, 718 out of 1,041 were killed. Roughly 4% were adopted out. And PETA staff also killed almost 80% of other animal companions: 30 out of 38.
To date, PETA has killed 46,364 dogs and cats and sent thousands more to be killed at local pounds, that we know of. The number may be many times higher. According to a former employee whose job it was to acquire animals to kill:
I was told regularly to not enter animals into the log, or to euthanize off-site in order to prevent animals from even entering the building. I was told regularly to greatly overestimate the weight of animals whose euthanasia we recorded, in order to account for what would have otherwise been missing ‘blue juice’ (the chemical used to euthanize); because that allowed us to euthanize animals off the books.
A second PETA field worker also admitted that healthy animals were routinely rounded up and killed, including lying to people in order to acquire their animals. For example, she writes that she,
[R]esponded to a call from a concerned woman who’d found an abandoned days-old kitten under her porch. When I came to pick up the kitten, I had her sign a generic give-up form that spelled out that euthanasia was a possibility. But I was instructed to repeatedly convey that we would do our absolute best, and so that’s what I said, even as the woman described her careful search for an organization she knew would work around the clock to help this tiny being pull through. It was my job to make sure I did not leave without that cat — that I said whatever necessary for the woman not to change her mind.
The entire way back to PETA’s Norfolk, Virginia, headquarters, I sobbed, petting the infant cat in my lap, telling her things would all be OK, even though in my gut I knew it wouldn’t, that she never really had a chance. I even began plotting out how I might take a detour and deliver her to a rehabber instead. But how could I explain a missing kitten to the woman waiting with the needle? I couldn’t, so I complied without a word.
PETA is letting loose upon the world individuals who not only believe that killing is a good thing and that the living want to die, but who are legally armed with lethal drugs which they have already proven — 46,364 times in the last 23 years — that they are not averse to using.