By Theresa Lucas McMahan, PTH Executive Director
In March 2023, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced a redesign of their website. This effort appears to be an attempt to enhance their targeting of children with animal extremist vegan indoctrination messaging. We have previously written about peta2, the youth propaganda branch of PETA. Since they recently updated their materials aimed at children, let’s take another look.
PETA’s announcement expresses that peta2 exists to “reach young people by focusing on empowering, positive content about animal rights and following a vegan lifestyle, which affords students a break from the anxiety-inducing news they are often inundated with during daily life.” Yet, this messaging is inconsistent with PETA’s actions, which bombards readers with repetitive negative messaging about animals in its attempts to convince children that animals aren’t “test tubes, dinner, clothing, entertainment, or anything else for us to use.” To us, those messages do not seem to relieve stress in children. Instead, PETA’s misleading messages serve to create anxiety, doubt, fear and confusion.
The Devil is in the Details
The peta2 website overhaul displays friendly vegetable and animal graphics alongside a “free stickers” button that is repeated on each page. They made it a point to omit their typical extremist graphic content and radical ideology promoted by their parent organization (PETA). Clearly, their idea is to brainwash children using a website with a playful rainbows and unicorns look as part of a diabolical marketing plan that masks PETA’s true agenda. The motive behind the website redesign is to spoon-feed kids their ideology and to block them from using logic, common sense and the truth. They want kids to absorb PETA propaganda and ignore scientific facts.
Lack of Information Important to Animal Lovers
While browsing their new cutesy website, I found it odd the number of animals PETA euthanized at their shelter in 2022 is conspicuously absent. Why would an animal rights organization feverishly work to indoctrinate children and then refuse to tell them that PETA killed 74% of the animals they took into their shelter in 2022? I was also unable to find any PETA euthanasia stats from past years, which peaked at an astonishing 97.3%! In a March 2012 The Atlantic article, a PETA spokesperson said “euthanasia is a product of love for animals that have no one to love them.” PETA’s lack of transparency underscores the hypocrisy of their so-called “animal rights” agenda.
Parents Should Be Alarmed That Their Children Are Online Targets
The mask PETA has placed on itself in the form of peta2 should alarm all parents. The information pushed out by this group is directly targeting your children through social media and “humane education” taught in public and private schools across the country. While you may not be browsing the web looking for information on becoming a vegan or activist, many children are lured into checking out these subjects due to PETA’s tactics.
PETA’s TeachKind Targets Classrooms
PETA’s “TeachKind” program is its “humane education” outreach effort to infiltrate classrooms. The program offers K-12 curriculum at no cost to teachers and includes coloring books, stickers, “going vegan” booklets, and anti-animal agriculture propaganda. You may be telling yourself there is no way your child’s teacher would ever allow this into their classroom, but you would be disappointed to learn the answer. Teachers in schools small and large, private and public, are using this program to indoctrinate your child without you even being aware.
Sleazy, Unethical, Misleading Tactics Ignore Science
The peta2 website has many articles and pages that children would find interesting, including a “Horoscope for Helping Animals” and “Why Vegan Athletes Are the Healthiest.” They don’t include studies revealing how a vegan diet can be detrimental to a child or teenager’s health as they are growing and developing.
In a 2020 abstract by Pascal Müller, regarding vegan diets for young children, he noted height and weight are adversely impacted by a vegan diet, as well as neurocognitive and psychomotor development. Müller mentions that in certain adult populations, there can be some benefits to a vegan diet yet, in children the diet has risks of inadequate amounts of quality protein, long-chain fatty acids, iron, zinc, vitamin D, iodine, calcium, and vitamin B12. The abstract further states, “Deficiencies in these nutrients can lead to severe and sometimes irreversible developmental disorders.” PETA ignores these scientific facts.
Recovering Vegans Use Social Media to Tell Their Horror Stories
Many who were formerly indoctrinated into a vegan lifestyle are now involved in vegan-recovery groups easily found on social media platforms. These groups have been formed due to the physical and mental health issues many are plagued with as a result of their former vegan lifestyle. Their stories are eye-opening and underscore the potential risks associated with blindly following the cult-like urgings of groups such as PETA that promote a vegan lifestyle in the name of “animal rights.”
Serious Health Consequences For Youth
The radical fantasy world that PETA’s leaders live in might work for them, but it doesn’t work for children whose minds and bodies are growing, and developing, under malnourished conditions caused by veganism. PETA’s marketing materials never mention the vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition that often afflict those who follow a vegan lifestyle, especially children and teens who do not fully understand, or pay attention to, their own nutritional requirements.
PETA Doesn’t Care About People (or Animals)
Where are PETA and peta2 when our young people are dealing with the negative after-effects of their indoctrination? Nowhere to be found, missing in action, that is where. Their interest in our youth is only to brainwash as many of them as they possibly can, then cast out those who question PETA and want facts. PETA’s scheme of targeting those who are easily impressed, and have not yet developed a sense of rational thinking, will one day catch up to them.
Parents, The Ball’s in Your Court
If you do not want PETA or other extremist organizations in your child’s life and mind, it is up to you to remain vigilant about what they are being exposed to on social media and in their classrooms. Together, we can keep America Free and Fed, and that starts with our children being educated with the facts.
Learn more about PETA killing animals here.
Read studies about vegan diets here and here.
Watch out for materials such as the ones here.
