Ingrid Newkirk

Ingrid Newkirk
Ingrid Newkirk holding a chihuahua during an interview for Wikinews in 2007.
Born	(1949-06-11) June 11, 1949
Occupation	President of PETA
Website	IngridNewkirk.com

Ingrid Newkirk (born June 11, 1949) is an English-born animal rights activist, author, and president and co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world's largest animal rights organization. She is the author of several books about animal liberation, including Free the Animals (2000), with a foreword from Chrissie Hynde, and Making Kind Choices (2005), which has a foreword by Sir Paul McCartney.

Newkirk is best known for the issue awareness campaigns she organizes on behalf of PETA, in order to promote animal rights and veganism. In her will, for example, she has directed that her skin be turned into wallets, her feet into umbrella stands, and her flesh into "Newkirk Nuggets," then grilled on a barbecue. "We are complete press sluts," she told The New Yorker. "It is our obligation."

Under Newkirk’s leadership in the 1970s as the District of Columbia's first female poundmaster, legislation was passed to create the first spay/neuter clinic in Washington, D.C., as well as an adoption program, and the public funding of veterinary services, leading her to be named "Washingtonian of the Year" in 1980. At PETA, she has led successful campaigns to stop the use of animals in crash tests, has convinced companies from Gillette to Revlon to stop testing cosmetics on animals, and has persuaded grocery store chains such as Safeway to insist on higher welfare standards from the meat industry.

Despite her approach to improving animal welfare, Newkirk remains committed to the idea that "[a]nimals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." She has been criticized in that regard for her support of actions carried out in the name of the Animal Liberation Front. Her position is that the animal rights movement is a revolutionary one, and that "[t]hinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out."

Early life

Template:Animal liberation movement Newkirk was born in England, living in Ware, Hertfordshire, until she was seven years old. Her father was a navigational engineer, and the family moved to New Delhi, India, where her father worked for the Indian government, while her mother volunteered for Mother Teresa in a leper colony and a home for unwed mothers. Newkirk attended a convent boarding school in the Himalayas for well-to-do Indian nationals and non-natives, although she was the only British child there.

Newkirk talking about herself and her legacy in an interview.

She credits her early experiences in India — packing pills and rolling bandages for those suffering from leprosy, stuffing toys for orphans, and feeding strays — as informing her view that anyone in need, including animals, was worthy of concern. She was also influenced by her mother's advice that "it doesn’t matter who suffers, but how." She tells the story of an early experience of trying to rescue an animal, when she heard laughter in the alleyway behind the family home in New Delhi. A group of people had bound a dog's arms and feet, muzzled him, then lowered him into a deep, muddy ditch, and were laughing as they watched him struggle to escape. Newkirk asked her family's staff to bring the dog to her, and tried to get him to drink some water, but someone had packed his throat with mud, and he died in her arms.

When she was eighteen, during the Vietnam War, her father worked for the United States Air Force and the family moved to Florida, where he worked on designing bombing systems. It was in Florida that Newkirk met her husband, Steve Newkirk, from whom she divorced in 1980. He introduced her to Formula One racing, which — along with sumo wrestling — remains one of her great passions, according to The New Yorker: "It's sex. The first time you hear them rev their engines, my God! That noise goes straight up my spine."

Introduction to animal protection

Until she was 22, Newkirk had given no thought to animals rights or even vegetarianism. She and her husband had moved to Poolesville, Maryland in 1970, where she was studying to become a stockbroker, when a neighbour abandoned some kittens, and Newkirk decided to take them to an animal shelter. She told Michael Specter of The New Yorker:

When I arrived at the shelter, the woman said, 'Come in the back and we will just put them down there.' ... I thought, How nice — you will set them up with a place to live. So I waited out front for a while, and then I asked if I could go back and see them, and the woman just looked at me and said, 'What are you talking about? They are all dead.' I just snapped when I heard those kittens were dead. The woman was so rude. The place was a junk heap in the middle of nowhere. It couldn't have been more horrible. For some reason, and even now I don't know what it was, I decided I needed to do something about it. So I thought, I'm going to work here.

Newkirk took a job in the kennels, witnessing the mistreatment of the animals, including physical abuse. Kathy Snow Guillermo writes that Newkirk disinfected kennels by day, and by night studied animal care, animal behavior, and animal-cruelty investigations.

I went to the front office all the time, and I would say, "John is kicking the dogs and putting them into freezers." Or I would say, "They are stepping on the animals, crushing them like grapes, and they don't care." In the end, I would go to work early, before anyone got there, and I would just kill the animals myself. Because I couldn't stand to let them go through that. I must have killed a thousand of them, sometimes dozens every day. Some of those people would take pleasure in making them suffer. Driving home every night, I would cry just thinking about it. And I just felt, to my bones, this cannot be right.

She blew the whistle on the shelter and became an animal-protection officer, first for Montgomery County, then for the District of Columbia. She became D.C.'s first female poundmaster, persuading the city to fund veterinary services and to set up an adoption program, an investigations department, and a pet sterilization program. By 1976, she was head of the animal-disease-control division of the District of Columbia Commission on Public Health. Over the next few years, she became well known for her work with animals and in 1980 was among those named "Washingtonian of the Year."

Newkirk's work with PETA

Founding of PETA

Main article: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Further information: Animal_rights § Modern_movement

In 1980, Newkirk met Alex Pacheco in a D.C. shelter where he was working as a volunteer. She had by then become a vegetarian, despite her great love of eating meat. She told Michael Specter: "I loved meat, liver above all ... My God, I would eat it tomorrow. Now. I would eat roadkill if I could."

I'd eat burgers, steak, anything. I love car racing and meat. I am a boy at heart, I am my father's son ... On my way down into the District, I would stop in Potomac and pick up triple-ground prime meat ... I would break a raw egg and take onions and capers and I would mix it all, and I would go about checking on the animals while eating this raw food right out of my hand. I am just a raw-oyster, raw-meat-eating person who happened to find out what happened in the meat industry, and I just can't support it.

It was Pacheco who introduced Newkirk to the concept of animal rights. Pacheco presented her with a copy of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation. She has said that Singer had put into words what she had felt intuitively for a long time. She called Pacheco "Alex the Abdul," a name given to messengers in Muslim stories.

The concept of animal rights was at that time almost unheard of in the United States. The modern animal rights movement had started in England eight years earlier, in 1972, when a group of Oxford University scholars, particularly philosophers, had formed the "Oxford group" to promote the idea that discrimination against individuals on the basis of their species is as irrational as discrimination on the basis of race or sex. During the same year, Ronnie Lee and Cliff Goodman set up the Band of Mercy, a militant subgroup of the Hunt Saboteurs Association, and a precursor of the Animal Liberation Front.

In March 1980, Newkirk and Pacheco decided to form a group to educate the American public about these ideas. They called it People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and it consisted of what Newkirk later called "five people in a basement." The couple also fell in love and began living together, though they were very different. Newkirk was older, practical, very organized, whereas Pacheco was absent-minded and barely looked after himself, spending his time in white painter's overalls and eating vegetarian hot dogs straight from the can.

Silver Spring monkeys

One of the Silver Spring monkeys in a restraint chair.

The case of the Silver Spring monkeys, an animal-research controversy that lasted ten years, transformed PETA from just Newkirk, Pacheco, and a small group of friends into an international movement.

In the summer of 1981, Pacheco decided to take a job as a volunteer inside the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, so that he and Newkirk would have some firsthand knowledge on which to base their campaigns. Edward Taub, a psychologist, was working there on seventeen monkeys. He had cut sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to their arms and legs, then used physical restraint, electric shock, and withholding of food to force them to use the limbs. The idea was to see whether monkeys could be induced to use limbs they could not feel.

Pacheco repeatedly went into the lab at night to take photographs, and to escort other scientists through it to secure their testimony, with Newkirk crouching on the back seat of a car outside, hidden under a large cardboard box with holes for her eyes, holding a walkie-talkie from a toy store to alert Pacheco if anyone else entered the building. The monkeys' living conditions documented by Pacheco were graphically disturbing. Having collected the evidence, Newkirk and Pacheco alerted the police, who raided the lab, removed the monkeys, and charged Taub with 113 counts of animal cruelty and 6 counts of failing to provide adequate veterinary care. At the initial bench trial the animal cruely charges were dismissed, but Taub was convicted on the veterinary care charges. A later jury trial saw five of these counts dismissed, and the sixth was overturned on appeal. The National Institutes of Health, which had funded Taub's research, was among the scientists and other professionals who criticized the conditions in which Taub had kept them (though the NIH later reversed its decision when the charges against Taub were overturned.)

Newkirk and Pacheco found themselves thrust overnight into the public eye. The images of the restrained animals became iconic after the Washington Post published one of them on its front page. Taub maintained that he had been set up by Newkirk and Pacheco while he was on vacation, and his version continues to receive support from within the scientific community. In 1991 neuroscientist David Hubel wrote "...there is strong suspicion the Silver Spring monkey photograph was staged by animal-rights caretakers."

It was the first police raid on an animal-research facility in the United States and the first conviction (although subsequently overturned) of an animal researcher. The controversy led to an amendment to the 1985 Animal Welfare Act, became the first animal-rights case to be heard before the United States Supreme Court, and established PETA as an internationally known animal-rights group, with Newkirk as its outspoken president.

Relationship with the ALF

Main article: Animal Liberation Front

File:ALFbeagles.jpg

Newkirk has said of the Animal Liberation Front: "Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out.

Newkirk has been criticized for publicizing actions carried out in the name of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), something that she freely admits to. She has said that she supports the goals of the ALF, arguing that "Not until black demonstrators resorted to violence did the national government work seriously for civil rights legislation ... In 1850 white abolitionists, having given up on peaceful means, began to encourage and engage in actions that disrupted plantation operations and liberated slaves. Was that all wrong?" She has said that she understands, but shrinks from, actions that involve arson.

I do support getting animals out in the same way I would have supported getting human slaves out, child labor, sex slaves, the whole lot. But I don’t support burning. I don’t support arson. I would rather that these buildings weren’t standing, so on some level I understand. I just don’t like the idea of that. Maybe that is wishy-washy of me, because I don’t want those buildings standing if they are going to hurt anyone. And the ALF has never hurt mice nor mare.

She has been accused of having had advance knowledge of one ALF action. During the 1995 trial of Rod Coronado, in connection with an arson attack at Michigan State University (MSU), U.S. Attorney Michael Dettmer alleged that Newkirk had arranged, in advance of the attack, to have Coronado send her stolen documents from the university and a videotape of the action.

Public image

Newkirk and Matthew Galkin, who directed I Am an Animal, the story of Newkirk's life.

Newkirk and her cause both provoke strong feelings. Michael Specter writes that she "has the popular image of a monster," becoming more disliked with every PETA stunt, unable even to walk through an airport without accosting every woman wearing fur. She told him that she has had to stop vacationing in tropical or poor countries like Mexico, because she spends the entire time rescuing animals from what she calls their "horrid owners."

She was heavily criticized in 2003, for example, when she wrote to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to protest the use of a donkey as a suicide bomber, triggering the criticism that she was prioritizing animal over human life. "We are named People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals," she told Specter. "There are plenty of other groups that worry about the humans."

In this business I am very easy to cubby hole. As someone said to me the other day — they had seen the HBO special — and they said, "Are you really a sad obsessed person?" And I thought, No, I’m not really a sad person, except when I lie awake at night in winter thinking about all the animals out without shelter, and then I’m sad! Who wouldn’t be? Wouldn’t anybody be sad if they have a heart? It’s just that I’ve seen so much.

Newkirk has been accused of employing a double standard for her organization's practice of euthanizing animals for which it has neither the space nor resources to shelter. Debra Saunders, a newspaper columnist and critic of Newkirk, argues that "PETA assails other parties for killing animals for food or research. Then it kills animals — but for really important reasons, such as running out of room." PETA, however, believes that euthanasia is the most humane method of dealing with "surplus" animals, and has published detailed refutations of this criticism.

She was also criticized for saying that she would oppose animal research even if it led to a cure for AIDS. Michael Specter asked whether she would be opposed to experiments on five thousand rats, or even chimpanzees, if it was needed to cure AIDS. She replied: "Would you be opposed to experiments on your daughter if you knew it would save fifty million people?"

The Peace Abbey, in Sherborn, MA, awarded her with the Courage of Conscience award on March 20, 1995.

Works

• One Can Make a Difference: Original stories by the Dali Lama, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, Dennis Kucinch, Russel Simmons, Bridgitte Bardot…. co-author Jane Ratcliffe, Adams Media (September 17, 2008)ISBN 1-598-696297
• Let's Have a Dog Party!: 20 Tail-wagging Celebrations to Share With Your Best Friend. Adams Media Corporation, October 2007. ISBN 1-598-69149-X
• 50 Awesome Ways Kids Can Help Animals. Warner Books, November 1, 2006. ISBN 0-446-69828-8
• Nonviolence Includes Animals. CD, PETA, December 29, 2005.
• Making Kind Choices. CD, PETA, 2005
• Making Kind Choices : Everyday Ways to Enhance Your Life Through Earth- and Animal-Friendly Living. St. Martin's Griffin, January 1, 2005. ISBN 0-312-32993-8
• Peta 2005 Shopping Guide For Caring Consumers: A Guide To Products That Are Not Tested On Animals. Book Publishing Company (TN), October 30, 2004. ISBN 1-57067-166-4
• Speaking Up For the Animals. DVD, PETA, June 1, 2004.
• Animal Rights Weekend Warrior. Lantern Books, March 1, 2003. ISBN 1-590-56048-5
• Free the Animals: The Story of the Animal Liberation Front. Lantern Books, 2000, ISBN 1-930051-22-0
• You Can Save the Animals : 251 Simple Ways to Stop Thoughtless Cruelty. Prima Lifestyles (January 27, 1999) ISBN 0-7615-1673-5
• 250 Things You Can Do to Make Your Cat Adore You. Fireside, May 15, 1998. ISBN 0-684-83648-3
• Compassionate Cook : Please don't Eat the Animals. Warner Books, July 1, 1993. ISBN 0-446-39492-0
• Kids Can Save the Animals : 101 Easy Things to Do. Warner Books, August 1, 1991. ISBN 0-446-39271-5
• On the Run. Audiobook, PETA
• Love That Cat! CD, PETA
• "Speaking Up for Animals 2" CD, PETA

See also

• List of vegans
• Silver Spring monkeys

Further reading

• Ingrid Newkirk's website
• PETA website
• Trione, Debra. A Perfect World: Words and Paintings from Over 50 of America's Most Powerful People, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2002. ISBN 0-740-72726-5
• Galkin, Matthew (director) "I Am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA", a television production for HBO, November 2007.
• Fowler, Hayden. "Interview with Ingrid Newkirk about the HBO documentary, YouTube, retrieved February 24, 2008.

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