PETA is without question a terrorist organization. They act as a front for recruitment for terrorist groups such as ALF, they give money to such groups, they support their activities, they send out large amounts of propaganda, they have significant overlap in membership with said terrorist groups and put terrorists in leadership roles... the list goes on. They DO, in fact, go around burning stuff down, commit arson, and I know on at least one of those occaisions left their dog locked up in their truck on a hot day while they were out "liberating' rabbits (who mostly ended up hiding under their hutches anyway). They have destroyed scientific research in pursuit of their insane ideology.
They oppose the use of genetic engineering to improve food crops, indeed destroying specimens of GMed plants in their terrorist activities, and try to terrorize people into believing GMed plants and animals are more dangerous than anything else we eat. They promulgate scams like organic foods, and thus are considerably worse for the environment and society - there's a reason why GMed foods are cheaper, after all.
PETA is a terrorist front organization, and obviously so to those who are familiar with them, their history, and the people involved with them. They are without question evil, and I oppose them quite strongly. And you should too, if you actually believe in a better future. PETA doesn't.
Factory farms aren't a bad thing anyway. Animals aren't people. I eat them. They are delicious. If they are produced more efficiently via factory farming methods (and they are; if they weren't, then factory farms wouldn't exist), then whatever. Killing them is much worse than everything else that happens to them, and in the end, I don't really care. They aren't randomly being "tortured". They're being kept in stark conditions in order to be produced more efficiently.
I'm not really for someone going out and just randomly hurting animals for no reason, but I'm okay with things that cause harm to animals which actually have legitimate purposes. Factory farming has a legitimate purpose.
PETA is without question a terrorist organization.
It is possible (and preferable) to give reasons why you don't approve of PETA and why you like eating animals without inflationary use of the term 'terrorist'.
I notice that a large fraction of Effective Altruism people are vegetarian. This makes sense: in general Effective Altruists take moral issues seriously, even when that means changing your lifestyle. I'm not sure it's a good balance, though.
One way to think about this is to convert it into money. How much would I need to be paid to give up eating meat? All animal products? How much money would I need to spend on myself to be about as happy as I would be with less money but continuing to eat animals? I'd probably be willing to go vegetarian for about $500/year, vegan for maybe $2000/year.
It turns out you can probably pay to convince other people to be vegetarian much more cheaply than that. I estimate the cost of a vegetarian-year at $4.29 to $536 while Brian Tomasik estimates $11 with better methodology (which I looked at). This is by placing ads on facebook for a site where people can watch an animial cruelty video and ideally become vegetarian or vegan.
If you would get more than $11/year worth of enjoyment out of continuing to eat meat, why not give $11/year to convince someone else to not eat meat for you? Or give $50/year and be on the safe side?
(While you're giving money, you should probably give it to the organization that you think will do the most good with it, which I think is probably one of GiveWell's top charities. The nice thing about money as opposed to actions is that it's easy to redirect.)
I also posted this on my blog.