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Ingrid E. Newkirk, in her 50's is cofounder and president of PETA-People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the largest animal rights organization
in the world.
Ingrid Newkirk's campaigns to save animals
have been featured in The Washington Post and other national newspapers.
She has appeared on The Today Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Nightline, and
20/20 among others, and has spoken internationally on animal protection,
from the steps of the Canadian Parliament to the streets of New Delhi,
India.
She is the author of 'Kids Can Save the
Animals!'; 'The Compassionate Cook'; '250 Things You Can Do to Make Your
Cat Adore You'; and 'Save the Animals: 251 Simple Ways to Stop Thoughtless
Cruelty', and numerous articles on the social implications of our
treatment of animals.
Ms. Newkirk served as a deputy sheriff; as a
state law enforcement officer for 25 years; director of cruelty
investigations for the second oldest humane society in the U.S.; and Chief
of Animal Disease Control for the Washington's Commission on Public
Health.
She coordinated the first arrest in U.S.
history of a scientist on animal cruelty charges and helped achieve the
first anti-cruelty law in Taiwan. She spearheaded the closure of
Department of Defense underground "wound laboratories," and has initiated
many other campaigns against animal abuse, including ending General
Motors' crash tests on animals.
She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where PETA
is headquartered and believes "Animals are not ours to eat, wear,
experiment on or use for entertainment.'
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/entertainment/11776626.htm
Philadelphia Daily News. 31 May
2005.
Peta's Ingrid Newkirk asks for kindness
Stu
Bykofsky
SHE MAY BE the most feared woman in America, this
grandmotherly 55-year-old with the light accent who was born in England,
raised in India and had herself sterilized at 22 because she believes it
more ethical to adopt an existing child than create a new one. As
co-founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,
Ingrid Newkirk never had time for the adoption option. For the past 25
years, her life has been dedicated to leading the 800,000-strong,
push-the- envelope, cross-the-line animal rights group. She's a Lioness
who's lionized by many animal lovers, but she's also been called radical,
crazed, ruthless, evil, fanatic, intimidating, combative and dangerous.
One of her - and PETA's - chief detractors is the Center for Consumer
Freedom, an advocacy group largely funded by the restaurant and food
industry to "protect consumer choices." Choices PETA would deny you, says
CCF director of research David Martosko.
PETA wants to bring you, he
says, "a world where you cannot take your children to the zoo or the
aquarium, a world where you don't have the choice whether you want to eat
a cheeseburger versus a veggie burger, a world where you can't wear a silk
necktie or a wool sweater, a world where if you have cancer or AIDS, there
simply isn't any meaningful research going on to help
you."
That's probably true, but PETA can't do any
of that without consent of the people and the people who get really,
really
angry, Newkirk responds, are those "who have businesses that
test [cosmetics and medical procedures] on animals, that kill animals for
food, depend on caging animals for the fur trade. Those people are very
anxious to demonize me so that will s care people away from listening to
the message," which is that you do have a choice between kindness and
cruelty."
That's the theme of her chatty, emotional new book, "Making
Kind Choices." There's more sorrow than anger in its 472 pages, which show
how the world around us - of food, fashion, cosmetics - is filled with
unbearable pain for animals that cannot speak, except through their
torment and misery. The book brims with ideas about how to make consumer
choices that are friendly to animals and the environment. One choice PETA
makes is to occasionally play the fool with over-the-top positions, such
as Newkirk's ill-advised letter to Yasser Arafat after Palestinian
murderers loaded a donkey with explosives in Jerusalem and blew it up near
some Israelis. Newkirk complained about using the animal but didn't
address the human deaths. Others do that, she loftily said at the time.
PETA also is criticized for using nudity (at least partial) in ads and for
harassing leggy, hollow-cheeked models when activists crash the runways at
fashion shows. Why all this zany stuff, Ingrid? People have a short
attention span and they want "controversial things or titillating things.
So we have to turn heads. Having the facts is not enough," the Lioness
says crisply. "Very few people want to see heart-breaking pictures or
videos [of animal cruelty]. So we have to make the issue
attention-getting."
PETA is a genius at getting attention. Through
publicity, andcorporate intimidation, PETA has done more to lessen animal
suffering than nearly any other organization. PETA's 10-year war against
Gillette got the company to declare a moratorium on testing products on
animals; its "McCruelty" campaign pushed McDonald's into ordering
suppliers to increase humane treatment of animals - a tremendous
breakthrough because McDonald's is huge, and once it fell into line,
competitors were pressured to follow suit.
Since Newkirk can affect the
bottom line of those who run
slaughterhouses and fast-food companies
and fur salons and
medical labs and chicken farms, they call the
Lioness arrogant and argumentative and ferocious. No surprise, then, that
Newkirk's had death threats, dead animals left at her door, gunshots fired
into PETA headquarters
in Norfolk, Va. "Generally I take it with a
grain of salt,
figuring I've touched a nerve somewhere."
She is a
vegan, meaning she neither eats nor wears nor uses any animal products.
Truthfully, she does want you to be a vegan, too. But, "head in the
clouds, feet on the ground," she says. She knows that won't happen in her
lifetime, maybe never. Meantime, she asks you to "veganize" just one meal
a week - skip meat, poultry, fish and eat pasta, salad, beans, rice,
carrots, bananas, apples, peaches, berries, corn, potatoes. Is that too
hard a choice to ask? It doesn't sound so radical, combative and dangerous
to me.
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