Most of you know that I love critters. I have an entire collection of them. I certainly oppose animal cruelty. All three of my cats are rescues. My dog is a mixed breed that I got for free that could have easily ended up in a shelter. Hell, even the goldfish that my daughter brought home from the fair lead a life of relative luxury compared to the food colored water in a plastic bag they came in. I figure that I have invested roughly 400% of their worth in their existence over the past year. So, I like critters.

(You can click on the title of this post to go to a site that documents very well the contrary facts regarding People for the “”Ethical”" Treatment of animals. The web site http://www.petakillsanimals.com/index.cfm does an excellent job exposing and documenting.)

I could rewrite the above web site, but I won’t. I’ll just pick one of the most glaring instances and rant a little about that. About 15 months ago I saw a headline on Yahoo! about PETA members being found dumping the bodies of dogs in a dumpster. I figured that there had to be some logical explanation for this, perhaps this was an isolated incident. Perhaps this was a “”rogue”" activist. I read the article and it was clear that this was not the case.

At that time, I actually went out of the net to find data to support the claims in the article and I actually found statistics showing that between 1998 and 2005, PETA put to death over 80% of the animals that they took in to “”help”".

I realize that animal cruelty is not the biggest social issue affecting our lives today. (I am certainly not making less of it either.) However, perhaps a bigger message can be taken from this which is: Not everything that is labeled as “help” is actually HELP.