Thank you for the thoughtful response. I really appreciate the time. However, I do fell I have to disagree on one point.

You’ve said that the animals that have been put down are those that do not have proper socialization. How, then, will you explain the work of Mr. Brandon Bond, a renowned tattoo artists and a man responsible for rehabilitating and placing in homes the fighting dogs taken off Michael Vick’s compound upon the man’s arrest. Talk about unsociable dogs, and yet, they seem to have thrived outside the reach of their former master.
That said, I would love to to talk to Ms. Ingrid — NewKirk, and I promise to faithfully report her side of the story. Would she like to get in touch with me?

I see what you’re saying regarding the CCF. But the statistic is nonetheless valid, based as it is on PETA’s own releases.

Moreover, I read through your suggested material and while I appreciate that the number of homeless animals does exceed available homes, I would think minimal effort ought to be expanded to place, at least, some of them.

Another thing to consider is, in fact, the ties to the more violent activists among PETA members. I have not found many instances of PETA upper management publicly condemning the attacks done in its name.

CCF is a front group for Philip Morris, Outback Steakhouse, KFC, cattle ranchers, and other animal exploiters who kill millions of animals every year, not out of compassion, but out of greed. CCF promotes meat-eating and defends corporations that send billions of cows, chickens, pigs, and other animals to terrifying, gruesome, and painful deaths in slaughterhouses.

PETA handled far more animals than 2,124 in 2008. In fact, we took in more than 10,000 dogs and cats, spaying and neutering all of them at low to no cost. We gave them shots, fixed their wounds and treated their illnesses, and returned them to the community. Most of the animals we took in and euthanized could hardly be called “pets,” as they had spent their lives on heavy chains, for instance. They were unsocialized, never having been inside a building of any kind or known a pat on the head. Others were indeed someone’s, but they were aged, sick, injured, dying, too aggressive to place, and the like, and PETA offered them a release from suffering, with no charge to their owners or custodians.

Those figures also do not include the hundreds upon hundreds of dogs and cats whose suffering PETA works to alleviate by providing them with free food when their owners are poor, clean water buckets, sturdy dog houses, straw for winter, and more, or the hundreds of adoptable dogs and cats we will not take in but refer to walk-in animal shelters and adoption centers. Since 2001, PETA’s low- to no-cost spay-and-neuter mobile clinics, SNIP and ABC, have sterilized more than 50,000 animals, preventing hundreds of thousands of animals from being born, neglected, abandoned, abused, or euthanized when no one wanted them. We also actively decrease the number of animals who end up in animal shelters only to be euthanized for lack of good homes by using star power to promote spaying and neutering in ads across the country.
On a national level, PETA is focusing on the root of the problem through our Animal Birth Control (ABC) campaign. The ABC campaign targets breeders, pet stores, and cat- and dog-breeding mills and in an active way through protests, PSAs, celebrity support, and investigations and puts the blame for the overpopulation crisis squarely where it belongs—with those who breed animals or allow their animals to breed. As long as animals are bred, homeless dogs and cats in animal shelters will die because there simply aren’t enough good homes for them all.

As long as animals are still be purposely bred and people aren’t spaying and neutering their companions, open-admission animal shelters and organizations like PETA must do society’s dirty work. Euthanasia is not a solution to overpopulation but rather a tragic necessity given the present crisis. PETA is proud to be a “shelter of last resort,” where animals who have no place to go or who are unwanted or suffering are welcomed with love and open arms.

You can read more about this in Ingrid Newkirk’s last blog: http://blog.peta.org/archives/2009/03/why_we_euthaniz.php