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Its Spring 1998 newsletter says that Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is "an independent ... non-profit organization comprised of psychologists working in cooperation with other professional and animal rights organizations to change the way individuals and society as a whole treat non-human animals." After reading the newsletter, though, I’d say they’re a classic case of the inmates loose in the asylum.
Consider the leadoff article in the newsletter by Theodora Capaldo and Lorin Lindner, "PSYETA: Radicals or Realists?" The article starts by describing child abuse and domestic violence and tries to link those phenomenon with abuse of animals. Certainly children who take out their anger by abusing animals need help, but PSYETA goes much further maintaining that "membership in a nonhuman species is no further justification for the deprivation of natural rights than race, age, sexual preference, gender or any other categorization." Unfortunately, they don’t even attempt to develop or highlight any specific "natural rights" theory.
Of course PSYETA believes this puts "psychology in the forefront of moving society up the evolutionary ladder of consciousness and moral development, PSYETA invites it to consider another frontier, ‘speciesism.’"
Evolutionary ladder of consciousness and moral development? Are people with PhDs really allowed to get their degrees without even rudimentary training in evolutionary biology? The idea of an "evolutionary ladder of consciousness" is a religious belief, not a claim grounded in the reality of evolutionary biology. This is the sort of nonsense I’d expect to read in a magazine such as New Age or Whole Earth Review.
Capaldo and Lindner don’t do much better in an extraordinarily lame effort to link violence against animals with violence toward human beings when they claim "violence toward animals is correlated with violence toward humans." Certainly. But you can pick any two variables you like and correlate them. This is akin to me saying that protests by animal rights groups are correlated with violence against human beings or that the amount of ice cream consumed by Californians is correlated with volcanic activity in Asia. It is a claim that is trivially true; any variable can be correlated with any other variable.
Not so trivial is their view of violence against animals. Lindner and Capaldo claim, "one necessary step in doing this [understanding and preventing violence] is taking abuse toward animals as seriously as other forms of violence." Remember, now, that Lindner and Capaldo earlier argued that there is no basis for discriminating between humans and nonhumans when it comes to rights. So should the slaughter of a cow to make hamburger be treated as seriously as the rape and murder of a woman? Should a farmer raising chickens be considered on par with a serial killer? These would seem to logically follow from Lindner and Capaldo’s claims.
Ultimately Lindner and Capaldo return to their semi-religious musings about the role of psychologists:
We are convinced that the way humans treat nonhuman species causes unnecessary suffering and violence to millions of sentient beings and has a profound impact on our moral, ethical, psychological and spiritual development. Psychologists, who should have a great capacity for empathy and compassion, need to be in the forefront of efforts to eliminate pain and suffering wherever it occurs. In this post-Cartesian-era, psychologists / scientists can no longer hide behind the erroneous belief that animals do not feel or that if they do, their feelings do not matter. We cannot continue to believe that what can be learned or gotten from animals can be done so at their expense.
Throughout their piece the duo celebrate their compassion, empathy and emotion, apparently unaware that they are poor substitutes for sound reasoning and logic, both of which are noticeably absent from their rambling.