Here's an important insight into their tactics I found:
"Any normal person looking at PeTA's presentation must be outraged and repelled by it. Like the Holocaust on your Plate campaign, which ran for approximately 2 years and for which Ingrid Newkirk cynically issued a non-apology apology, and PeTA's grotesque exploitation of staged brutality, it's principle effect will not be to sway public opinion in the direction of Animal Rights.
But, in my opinion, it's not intended to persuade the public. I believe it's part of a larger campaign to recruit people to "direct action."
First, and of lesser importance, this particular slide show, like so much of what PeTA does, is intended to attract recruits — not many, to be sure, but recruits of the right sort: people who experience a "click moment" from having viewed the slide show, who suddenly see the Truth, and who as a result become AR apostles.
Causing "click moments" is why PeTA so relentlessly targets kids: children, with their notoriously impressionable, unskeptical and inexperienced minds, are much more likely to experience a click moment and be recruited to the AR cause than adults. And once recruited, a fair number of them will become advocates of "direct action" (harassment, intimidation, vandalism, coercion) for the cause.
Targeting kids is not a new tactic — it's what religious leaders regularly try to do, and it's what tyrants and dictators have done from time immemorial. PeTA is just following suit, taking advantage of unformed minds to mold them to their AR ideology — and it works, which is why PeTA puts so much effort into this particular program.
The second, and I believe greater, effect of such propaganda is to incite some of the True Believers to action. Indeed, in it's campaign against "Wet Seal" executives and their families, PeTA calls upon their cadre of child and adolescent True Believers to harass the unfortunates who PeTA tags as targets.
And thus do kids become apostles and activists. They learn techniques, they establish patterns of thinking and living, and they aren't shy about acting at or slightly over the edges of the law. Once "here," they are unlikely ever to go back.
And thus are born the Useful Idiots who conduct direct actions. PeTA doesn't produce bombs or hand out paint stripper to be used in "direct actions." They produce True Believers inclined towards "direct action" . . .
