At Harvard, the recent news about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has focused on its “naked” fur protest in the Square and the related arrests of six activists, including a Harvard junior. This is the sort of PETA activity that titillates the media and leads some to think that the controversial organization begins and ends with its “shock tactics,” but headline-grabbing stunts only scratch the surface of PETA’s work on behalf of animals

Last year alone, PETA responded to more than 13,500 calls about cruelty to animals, and in its local area, it built and delivered 567 free doghouses for dogs chained outdoors without shelter and provided low or no-cost spay/neuter services for 6,046 cats and dogs. PETA also launched international campaigns against animal abuse at KFC, Iams and PETCO, worked with the state of Virginia and many municipalities to develop humane wildlife-management strategies and lobbied Congress to enforce the federal Humane Slaughter Act and to honor its commitment to encourage alternatives to animal experiments. These substantive actions illustrate PETA’s dedication to furthering the causes that its publicity campaigns propound.

PETA uses many different methods to reach its varied audience. Last week, it promoted Pamela Anderson’s new cruelty-free clothing and fragrance line, urged cruelty charges in response to a whistleblower’s allegations of animal abuse in Columbia University’s laboratories and aired an ad starring Charlize Theron promoting adoption from animal shelters and denouncing puppy mills. The message has a growing audience: In 2003, more than 30 million users visited PETA websites, 2.3 million teachers and students received PETA’s humane-education materials and the organization answered more than 170,000 phone calls, letters and e-mail messages.

PETA’s work is supported by its more than 800,000 members, and it makes efficient use of their donations, allocating 86 cents of every contributed dollar directly to its programs fighting animal exploitation. Furthermore, its more than 150 dedicated employees work for very little money (from PETA’s president, whose annual salary is about $30,000, to the 57 percent of PETA employees who make less than $26,500), and it is assisted by countless unpaid interns and volunteers.

All these people have joined together to fight for the principle that no animal is ours to eat, wear, experiment on or use for entertainment. It’s no secret that PETA’s agenda calls for radical changes to our current treatment of animals. But PETA is also pragmatic, and it chips away at animal exploitation wherever it can. For example, as worthwhile as it is to promote vegetarianism, given that every person who stops eating meat spares the lives of more than 100 animals every year, PETA is equally committed to urging reforms in the meat industry that would not require shutting it down. PETA’s hard-fought campaigns forced fast-food chains McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s and grocery giants Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons to demand significant animal-welfare improvements from their suppliers, and PETA will continue its campaign against KFC until the chain adopts reforms.

Similarly, as a result of PETA’s campaign against circuses’ routine cruelty to animals—elephants and tigers simply will not perform ridiculous tricks without being “broken”—school boards are banning circus promotions in schools, officials are investigating and charging circuses for cruelty to animals and some municipalities have banned animal acts altogether. PETA has convinced more than 550 companies to stop testing their products on animals, and the organization also polices experimenters’ cruel and unnecessary mutilation of animals by investigating laboratories and scrutinizing proposed protocols. As a grizzled vivisector grudgingly admitted to me last fall when I was tabling at a university, “You people have really forced us to clean up our act over the past 20 years.”

PETA’s mission is largely inspired by Princeton bioethicist Peter A. D. Singer’s Animal Liberation. Upon that book’s publication in 1975, many philosophers clamored to refute Singer’s compelling arguments for extending moral consideration to animals, but today, few would seriously argue that animals are completely without moral status. There simply aren’t any plausible ethical arguments for treating sentient animals like garbage, but many people still disregard animal suffering whenever avoiding it would inconvenience them in any way. According to the unreflective PETA-bashing that appears in the media, just about anything that PETA does is “over the top,” and it’s apparently so obviously absurd to compare the plight of animals with the experiences of women, Holocaust victims and slaves that it isn’t worth offering a single argument against such comparisons.

Animal rights isn’t the first cause to encounter knee-jerk resistance. For example, while it is clearly wrong to oppress women—and always has been wrong—this has only recently become the consensus. In response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s groundbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Taylor published the dismissive satire A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, sneering that the arguments for women’s rights were also applicable to animals and that this amounted to a reductio ad absurdum of Wollstonecraft’s position. Taylor’s conclusion was wrong, of course, but he was right in asserting that we have the same reasons to respect the interests of all sentient animals—male or female, human or nonhuman.

PETA and other animal rights advocates represent an analogous challenge to the twenty-first century’s status quo. Most of eighteenth-century society joined Taylor in smirking at Wollstonecraft’s folly, but some people dared to question the prevailing view that women did not deserve rights. Today, the animal liberation movement follows in the path of Wollstonecraft and other reformers, and PETA will tirelessly endeavor to persuade more and more people to put aside prejudice and dare to question the oppression of animals.

Stephen C. Young is an editor at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.