PETA go out of their way to antagonise people or say absurd things. They consider all publicity to be good publicity. I don't care for them, but I think veganism makes a lot of sense, even though I can't manage it (have tried in the past, fell off the wagon...its very hard in a society where its not the norm and I'm weak about such things).
But there are some curious things about it, e.g. how it seems to slide from being a pragmatic moral practice to being a quasi-religion and lifestyle, complete with 'contamination anxiety' that doesn't really make much sense from a pragmatic point-of-view.
There's also the problem that all sorts of other things people do can harm animals, probably more so than meat-eating, e.g. habitat destruction or pollution, and yet many Vegans happily participate in those activities (many of them drive or take flights, for example - I gather the boss of PETA is a big fan of Formula One car racing). I don't really understand how they can be so absolutist about animals-for-food while cutting themselves slack over all those other issues.
And finally I think there's a qualitative difference between the issue of how we treat non-human animals and how we treat groups of humans. Namely, animals themselves are not, and never will be, participants in the construction of morality. Morality is a human invention. It's not like the liberation of slaves, where the former-enslaved-classes are capable of noisily and forcefully pointing out how barbaric the practice was. Animals are never going to reproach us for what we did or organise an armed resistance, stage acts of terrorism or a Haitian-style bloody revolt, so it's always going to depend on humans _choosing_ to be 'moral' (or some humans claiming to speak 'for' animals, in a way that will always be second-hand).
To me that seems to make it an unstable situation and a dilemma that will never fully be resolved - even if people became vegans en-masse at some point, backsliding could always happen.