PETA Pressures Neumann Alumni

PETA, the radical animal rights group, has convinced the Neumann University Alumni Association to stop offering discounted tickets to a Barnum & Bailey’s Circus event, reported CNS News yesterday.

“The Alumni Association was offering discounted tickets to the Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey’s Circus FUNundrum show, which was headed to Philadelphia’s Wachovia Center on Feb. 27,” states CNS News. “The Alumni Association summarily ended its sponsorship of the event, which Neumann University spokesman Steve Bell said was already in the works.”

Neumann U has a Franciscan and Catholic heritage, and their patron saint is St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals.

“There was already an ongoing conversation among our alumni association about the appropriateness of this event,’ Bell told CNSNews.com, ‘and then our director got the letter [from PETA], and that sort of brought it to the front burner.’”

This is just one more altercation in the conflict between Ringling Bros and the animal rights group. “PETA, however, has launched a Web site called ‘RinglingBeatsAnimals.com,’ where they make a number of abuse allegations, including that baby elephants are separated from their mothers and prodded with bull-hooks, that one died when forced to perform while ill, and that another drowned because it had not been taught by its mother to swim,” writes CNS News writer Christopher Neefus.

Neefus points out something very interesting about PETA’s own brand of animal kindness:

According to the consumer group [the Center for Consumer Freedom], PETA is guilty of “hypocrisy,” because it has euthanized the vast majority of stray cats and dogs it takes in and had found homes for fewer than one percent in 2008.

Records PETA filed with the state of Virginia last year show they euthanized more than 95 percent of the pets in its care, excluding animals brought in to be spayed or neutered and then returned to their owners. “Out of the 2,216 animals PETA took during 2008, it managed to find homes for a mere seven animals – despite an annual budget of $32 million.”

“What’s the reason for PETA’s hypocrisy? Money,” the CCF said. “It’s easier and cheaper to run media campaigns berating circuses than to actually roll up a sleeve or two and save cats and dogs. The last thing PETA wants to do is actually take care of animals. That’s expensive” (emphasis added).

CCF’s documents on PETA euthanasia can be seen at petakillsanimals.com.

Ironically, the PETA blog features Valentine’s day cards featuring those fun and furry cats and dogs with statements like “Rescue me. Be my valentine?” and “I only have eye [sic] for you.”

Earlier this month, PETA exposed elementary school students to an elephant with “a bloody bandage wrapped around a head wound,” according to Neefus. “PETA also announced on Feb. 3 that it dispatched ‘Ellie,’ a dress-up elephant with a bloody bandage wrapped around a head wound, to greet students as they exited August Circle Elementary School that afternoon,” he writes.

“The elephant wore a button reading ‘Circuses Are No Fun for Animals’ with a large PETA logo, and handed out activity books explaining the group’s claims of animal abuse.”

The PETA blog didn’t seem to have pictures up for the aforementioned February visit, but the January section it shows “Ellie’s” visit to Nashville, Tennessee.

“When one student asked Ellie why she was wearing a bandage, Ellie pointed to her ‘Circuses Are No Fun for Animals’ sign, and the boy said, ‘I’m sorry that they did that to you,’” states the PETA blog, added by Logan Sherer with the following photo.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.