To be fair, that doesn’t say “kill because we cannot afford.”
See, I really don’t see how one can make that case if one is arguing from the position that PETA is worthy of hating because they murdered a number of animals. In an example relating to humans, Stalin and Mussolini both killed people with their regimes. Which one is more widely despised?
Euthanasia in animal shelters is also not considered wrong by most of the world. Again, if we go the “killing animals makes PETA worth hating” route, we’re either arguing they deserve more hatred than just about anyone else for being hypocrites (as earlier stated, this falls through very quickly when one tries to consider any non-hypocritical social group), or that, in killing animals, they have actually done harm to a living thing that it is immoral to harm. If the latter is the case you’re arguing that hypocrisy makes up for the torture and murder of hundreds upon thousands more living things by the other party. Basically, that intentional murdering for profit without believing it to be wrong is the morally superior action to killing something you don’t really want to kill because you are incompetent.
Similarly, there is a large difference between keeping an animal among sick animals until all are sick, then electrically shocking them into blood-filled slaughterhouses when they’re almost too weak to stand, sometimes over the bodies of ones who didn’t make it, before skinning them alive and hanging them by their legs until they bleed to death and giving an animal an injection to prevent it the misery of starving to death. If you’re going to toss out ridiculous strawmen, so am I.
I’m not actually defending PETA’s actions, however, it’s really unsurprising and sort of goes along with the actual argument I am making that you believe this. I am arguing that PETA is not nearly as bad when it comes to doing actual harm to living things as so many other organizations that do not get the same spiteful screen time. I don’t really like PETA all that much. That said, there are a large number of people I find far more worthy of my time and energy. Despite this having been my claim all along, people have only cared about the PETA half. Which is exactly what I’m talking about. PETA’s just a group it’s completely safe to hate because vegetarians are a minority who aren’t very frightening.
I addressed that. If he’s still hung up on hypocrisy, his argument doesn’t have any more validity now than it has since I pointed out that there is considerably more hatred directed at PETA than the most other political organizations, who are also hypocrites.
I pointed out PETA, while still hypocrites and kinda douchebags, were really not all that bad compared to organizations that do legitimate harm. To keep things within the realm of common morality, I only used examples of harm to human. GAP then brought up harm towards animals, which could either show that PETA are still hypocrites, which I never denied in the first place, or argue they caused legitimate harm. If it is the latter, now counting animals, the amount of harm they cause is far smaller than the not-nearly-so-execrated meat industry.
If he still believes PETA to be the worse, GAP’s scale for evil places causing harm and being hypocritical above than just causing harm, regardless of the amount of harm done. In this case, a boastful, open genocide is morally preferable to a parent who tells their child to drive safely killing someone by accident while speeding or running through a red light. This basically places the most derided and vilified figures in history on the moral high ground above people who try to do good things and don’t succeed.