Ingrid Newkirk Was a Deputy Sheriff Before She Founded PETA

the Ethical Treatment of Animals or PETER. It may be America's best known animal rights organization thanks to its formidable combination of legal sophistication, scientific seriousness, and off the wall publicity stunts like this one showcasing a young volunteer in downtown Toronto. Folks, right now, I'm looking at an almost naked woman covered in rague spaghetti sauce. Yes, it must

be another PETER protest. Yeah, this is our volunteers, nearly naked on a point to represent that just like us, animals have personalities, they're intelligent, they farm families and friendships. If given the chance to understand what drives Ingrid new Kirk, you have to understand something counterintuitive. Peter's focus is on the well being of individual creatures, not species. Species have come and gone throughout history, new Kirk argues, and that's okay.

She would rather see some threatened or domesticated animals go extinct to see members of those species suffering at the hands of hunters or farmers. For some animals, they're better off not being managed and not being conserved, because what happens is you reintroduce the species and then you say, okay, now it's reached this level where we can hunt them as if they don't have relationships, and as if they as individuals aren't important. It's not about a species. It's

about to me reducing suffering. And that's the pragmatic part is does it reduce suffering or not. We had a documentary at the Hampton's Film Festival. The film was called Trophy. It was the documentary but the South African rhino richards name was John Hume, who has the farm in Africa, who's trying to save the species, and the way that he saves the species he calls horns. Yeah, and that's a really thorny one, you know, it's thorny in a

number of ways. I mean, I remember when Prince Philip decided long ago that we should farm spotted leopards so that women like Jackie Kennedy was wearing a leopard coat, that they would be farmed rather than we'd go out into the wild and shoot them. But that doesn't take into account the individual animals suffering. If you're taking the horn off and it's harmless, I'm not sure that that's a problem at all. But we act as if the

world is sort of a Disney park. We want some of these, some of those, and some of the others so that they're always there for us to look at and for us to do whatever with. I'm not so keen on saving the species as saving the individuals. Well, to go back to the origins here of not only myself and my relationship with you and your organization, but your own career. You know, how did this start for you?

How well? I've always cared about animals, but where I grew up in two places in England, mostly a little bit in Europe and mostly in England, and then when I was seven we went to India. But you know, as much as Indians are supposed to care about animals. It's sort of like Christians not cheating on their wives. It's the same all over the world, and that's good and as bad. But it didn't dawn on me. Even though I loved animals that I was eating them, I

was wearing them. I had my first fur coat when I was nineteen. I thought I looked like the cat's whiskers. What your dad do? My father was a navigational engineer, so he did war projects, who designed bombing systems. So we would go to India to work on the Indo China War. When I came to America and he ate his way through the animal kingdom and took me with him. I was like his son, you know. We tried everything, but um much later, I had been a law enforcement officer.

I had seen cruelty to animals on factual farms Maryland. In Montgomery County, Maryland, I was a sheriff, and so I went That happened because first I started with a humane society, and I thought, I want to know exactly how to prosecute a cruelty case. So I went to the Sheriff's office and they were just hiring their first women and so I got through the door, much to the resentment of the guys there, who thought, these women are never going to be able to do this, and

that opened my eyes to cruelty. I went inspected laboratories, went on factory farms, saw one thing after another. Found a squirrel and a fox caught in steel traps some kids had set behind a seven eleven. One was alive, one was dead. And so I thought, why haven't I

connected these dots? And so I stopped eating animals, and I stopped wearing animals, and I realized that in experimentation, it's not just a few animals used for these wonderful purposes to save children's lives or something who had treated with respect. It was lousy. And I found things in those labs that changed me forever in my perspective. And I thought, if I didn't know this and I care about animals, then there are a lot of people who

are just like me. I need to spread this word and then do the homework, find out what people can do instead of this. There were scant choices back then, and then helped them make transitions, and that's how it began. And had Peter been started by someone else and you joined a group of or you phone. I founded it and then I wrote Alex check O in and friends. I met him when I was running the d C what was called then the dog Pound. It's now all

Lardie Darts the Animal Shelter. But I was the pound master, an old old school pounder. I was the first lay pound master. It had always been a veterinarian. And he came in one day. He had just got off the Sea Shepherd. They had been out looking for the whaling ships and they had actually sunk one. And he said to me, yes, we found out that we both similar in that way. So he said, a youth vegetarian. I said yes, because I had read Peter Singer's book Animal

Liberation that had changed me. And he said, but why are you putting milk in your tea? I've always put milk in my tea. I'm English English. I said, they don't kill the cow, and he said, well, actually they do. He said, where is this giant retirement home for cows that you think exist? And then of course he told me about veal farming being created so we could take

the mill. That was that, And then I told him about animals and laboratories because I had inspected them, and it went from there were sort of like Jack Spratt and his wife. We both knew a bit about something. I didn't know anything about Wales, and so we thought, let's put this group together, and he was one of the founding members. And silver Spring Monkeys take us through that. Well.

That was interesting because back then no one thought they could do anything about animals in laboratories, even if in their hearts they knew that there was something that was probably horrible going on. So I looked at a list put out by the U. S Department of Agriculture and chose the nearest one to my apartment where there was a lab that they inspected, supposedly, and um Alex was a law student at g W. I had a full

time job at the Pounds. I said to him, why don't you wander over there and see if you can get a job. So he wandered over and they said, no jobs, but we'll take you as a volunteer. And so once he got in, I knew from my law enforcement training how to put a case together. And what he saw was worse than what we had imagined, because there were seventeen monkeys in small metal cages with broken wires. Many of the monkeys had lost their fingers because the experimenter,

who didn't have one minute of medical training. He was a psychologist, had cut open their backs, interfered with their nerves, and had rendered most of their arms useless. He would put them in an electric shock chamber and shock them so that they had to use that what they called de affronted arm. These were blood splattered converted refrigerators he had made into basically tortured chamber us. So we documented it all. We bought committed. How well I would hide

in the parking lot in a big cardboard box. We had radio shack walkie talkies. He had one. I had one. Sometimes they worked and if someone pulled into the parking lot at night, which is when he would go in and take the photographs, I would try to alert him. And after that we bought in. Actually he was hidden inside. He got his job as a volunteer, so he could want what did they tell people they were doing me? Were they contracted that somebody was hiring who was hiring them?

They got lots of grants, and one of their grants was from the National Institutes of Health, but there was no oversight. So the purpose of this de affrontation experiment with these poor monkeys who had all been captured in the wild, was to see if a lecture shock would cure stroke victims who had lost the use of their arm. And of course, are you going to electro shock somebody with a stroke whose luck lost the use of their arm. Also, they didn't lose it that way by having nerves cut

in their backs. A stroke is completely different. But people were applying for grants for all sorts of full purposes, and nobody ever tapped them on the shoulder and said that doesn't sound feasible. They just accepted it, and we did eventually have his grant suspended and then cut off all the monkeys taken away. They them, yes, many of them survived. They first went to the National Institutes of Health. Well actually they first went to one of our members basements.

And then when we realized the National Institutes of Health was applying pressure to the police and that they were going to be given back to this experimenter, all the monkeys disappeared. They went on a little trip and we negotiated with the Underground Railroad of Monkeys. Correct We negotiated with the police, and in return for prosecuting Edward Taube, the monkeys came back. They ended up in another spacious laboratory, in a clean place, not a happy place, and eventually

some were retired to the San Diego Zoo. And the person that was prosecuted in the name was Edward Taub And what happened. He was found guilty by a jury. He appealed, He went before a judge and the judge ruled that in the state of Maryland, a federally funded experimenter was exempt from state law. Is he still alive today? He is. He hasn't touched an animal since he's at

the University of Alabama and he teaches classes. What kinds of companies are among the rogues gallery here, the youthin Growl among the worst in terms of what they've done to animals. The pharmaceutical industry certainly take surprise there. We have just actually managed to change a few of the

really big ones. You you'd recognize them. But what were they doing, for example, well, testing depression drugs, pie, feeding them to animals, dropping the animals into vats of water with sheer sides, and then just recording how long it took for the animals to stop struggling. The animals obviously think they're going to drown. They're totally panicked. You see them dive to the bottom and look for an escape, and of course they can't there isn't one. They claw

at the sides of these containers they can't get. Usually hamsters, rats, my small animals because they're convenient, they're cheap, and eventually they'll decapitate them or they'll they'll freeze them. Um. We have a woman now who is capturing wild songbirds. Birds are very popular in the lab. You never think of that. Why, Um, they're easy to handle and they're small, and again that's not a scientific reason to use them. They have almost

nothing to do with the human animals physiology. She captures wild songbirds. We actually found her illegally capturing some, even though she's on a federal grant. She puts electrodes in their heads, she puts them in a cage, and she does various things to them and just for forty years has been recording what they do, whether they can tell of the sunlight, whether their song is affected. We have

owls being used at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. In Colorado, we have crows being used and you think, you know, find something useful that you can do with your lives. Stop torturing animals. We have lungs on a chip, we have organs on a chip. We have whole human DNA on the internet. You know you can take slivers of human brain now and throw it in a Petrie dish. What are you doing tormenting, traumatizing and eventually killing these

animals that you've heard so much? Advances that equal the advances in crash tests where they would crash tests live animals, dogs and pigs. Now, of course it's dummies and computer modeling and so forth to achieve this, and are virtually all at least domestic manufacturers. No more animals live tests internationally alex so exciting. Yes, we stopped them all. There is no car company that chooses anything but crash test

dummies these days. No pigs, no badans, nobody, It's all finished Ingrad new Kirk, one of the founders of Peter. If you're a fan of the organization or just want to know more about the tactics that gained it notoriety, you'll want to listen to my conversation with Dan Matthews. He's Peter's senior vice president for campaigns, the brain behind I'd rather go naked than were for and lots more. One of his biggest successes involved Calvin Klein. It started

with a plan to occupy the designer's office. We asked to meet, We asked to show him the evidence, and we never got a call back. So I went to his office UH and case the place. I were all black, so it looked like I might be part of the fashion pact that was there. Made friends with the security guard UH, and came back the next day with a dozen other interns and we went up and took over his office, and we put literature on all the desks.

We were screaming, Calvin Klein kills animals. Uh. Somebody spray painted kills animals beneath the Calvin Klein logo. So I picked up my phone four days later and it's Calvin Klein's vice president asking if I would come in for a meeting. Flash forward many years now, he and Calvin are good friends. You can get a link to my full interview with Dan Matthews by texting more Peter to seven zero zero one. That's m O r E p E t A to seven zero zero one. Now back

with Peter founder Ingrid new Kirk. We all know people who say they love to go vegetarian but for one thing, taste new Kirk. Here's that too, which he says, it's an old excuse. Times have changed, Thank god. I think you can get probably anything as a taste alike these days. I mean, some of the old veggie burgers used to taste like dog food, terrible. But now I mean, you've got the Beyond burger. They taste tested. With people who love a regular burger, they prefer the Beyond sometimes. And

you can dress anyway you want. Now everything has changed. You've got pineapple leather and apple leather, and I mean all these wonderful things. And people are talking about the environmental destructiveness of animal skins. But people would come to me and say, it's one thing if you want to protect animals and performance. It's one thing if you want to protect animals in terms of clothing, medical experimentation, the

whole body. But don't tell me what to eat. Well, look, our taste bud's usually for most of us, we've grown up eating meat. As I said, you know, my father and I basically ate our way through the animal kingdom. The only two things that I wouldn't eat. One was tongue because i'd seen a cow stick it out and I don't know that. And the other was intestines. My father loved intestines and my mother would cook them in

the house. Would stink too high heaven. But I do think that people cling to reasons to continue to have the taste they've grown up with and they've come to like I did, because you know, I didn't want to give up meat. Now as time has passed, you look back at it and it's no different than roadkill, except itselfered more. But we've got faux grow instead of foi gras. We have a camera there instead of a camem bear. We have all these things. There's even a cavey art

that's like Caviare this beef burger substitute. I'm so ecstatic about that idea because fast food companies they're everywhere, They're everywhere, and you have a chance to eat a vegetarian option, and every one of these places that served that food. I think that's a great, great, great beginning. It's fantastic because only vegans will go to a vegan restaurant unless someone's dragging them there. But if you can go to Denny's and you can, or you can go to Duncan

Donuts and get a Beyond Burger. And they're not just selling it on the side, they're advertising it on the board. People are wearing t shirts saying try this. And I wonder when the time will come in Beyond Burger or Impossible will open their own fast food restaurants which are

purely vegetarian. Absolutely. If I have to tell you, Christie Hine and I were locked up for protesting leather in New York once and we went down into I think they call it the dungeon in the jails, the tombs, that's it, sure, in the called the tombs, and they gave us that special sandwich which was the vegetarian version of the ballogny sandwich, which was the sandwich without the ballooney.

You know, Paul McCartney was fooled by his wife. Linda McCartney used to say, I cheated on Paul, And what she meant was he used to love Lasagnia and she got these soy crumbles that she made and she put them in as if they were ground beef, and he never knew the difference. Later she told him and they both became a vegetarian. I cheated on Paul. She was one of the great proponents. Loved her. She was just

an animals angel. And we still have roses in our garden at the Peter Headquarters in Norfolk, in her honor, Linda's roses. And so there's nothing in the animal kingdom though, even eggs that are freely given, that are free range eggs, there's nothing in the animal kingdom you think is allowable, you kid, I don't think you need it. I do think it's allowable. If you come across an abandoned egg, go for it. If you want to eat road kilc

for it. But I don't think we need it. And this anthropological argument is bogus, you know, because Richard Leakey is the father of anthropology basically, and he says, hang on, we're primates like monkeys, chimpanzees, bonobos, and the primary diet of a primate is not meat. Some chimpanzees, not gorillas, not not other do eat meat. They'll go hunting like a pack of young men and they'll eat maybe a colobus monkey they'll gang up on this monkey like a

street gang and tear them apart, living from them. But the primates diet is not meat, and so if we really want to be true, we're not carnivores. We don't have these giant teeth and these claws, we don't hunt at night. We're omnivores. Are there any gradations for you? Meaning if people go out and they are, especially people who live in a culture, we're hunting, because I'm often asked this question, we're hunting as a part of their culture, and they're going to store or cure or freeze that

food and eat that food. You're still opposed to that, you know, it kind of smacks you're trying to take our guns away. You're trying to take our hunting away. Well, I'd love to take the hunting away. There was a time when hunting was what many people had to do to survive, and just as other animals hunt, some humans had to hunt. I think those times have also largely gone, and most people who hunt today are not just getting one caribou to put it on the table. It does happen. Um.

I think being pragmatic is very good. You have to have your head in the sky and your feet on the ground. But these days, I don't really think that we're looking at say, Aboriginal people somewhere may maybe they have to that's fine, but we're looking at you know, Donald Trump Jr. Going out to put a head on his wall. That's a different story. But talk for a moment, if you would, about what your organization did in terms of circuses and the work you did in order to

expose circuses. So we went to the Department of Justice, to the Attorney General's office, and we had very carefully, painstakingly documented how Ringling had allowed this lion to burn to death basically in the Mohave Desert. Three baby elephants. They killed them in training. One brand from the trainer with the bullhook, went into the pond and drowned. Another one fell off one of those pedestals they used to

train them. Another one three times in a day. When he was deathly ill, they forced him back into the ring. So we went to the d o J. And we said, look, Ringland gets away with this all the time. So that resulted in the biggest fine in US history against a circus. We were relentless with that, and in the end they just had to give up. But today we're very happy. We got trip Advisor and Airbnb to say we will

not promote any animal acts, any wild animal acts. No sea worlds, no dolphins shows, no elephants to rides, nothing. But also we ask people don't go to these places that say we're an elephant camp of orphanage in Thailand or can rescue. No, those babies are taken stolen from their mothers. You know, this applies to people that are political figures. This applies to people who are corporate leaders who are trying to sell a product or a service

and make money for their investors. And this applies to people in the n g O world and in the not for profit world. And that is the leadership. Real leadership. Great leadership is helping people to see something they need to do correct. What is the relationship between global warming, climate change and animal rights. Well, you know, it's totally connected. And there are things that are unpopular to say, perhaps,

but they're hard truths. You take Australia and you know that animal based agriculture with methane carbon dioxide, that that's contributing to climate change more than anything. United Nations says. You could put all the transportation, you know, trains, planes, automobiles, put it in one heap. You still don't equal the damage done by animal based agriculture. It's for food, and of course they are stripping the Amazon, burning it, and we've seen that so that they can grow soy crops.

And people say, oh, well, isn't soy environmentally destructive? Yes, but it's being grown for animal feed. Is the least efficient way of getting food is to grow soy, cut all the habitat down, then grow soy and then feed it to chickens and pigs and and cows. So animal based agriculture is definitely part of it. Australia, of course,

it's just one big sheep farm. Basically plastic pollution. You can stop using straws, you can stop using those small plastic bottles, but really the biggest polluter in the ocean is discarded fishing gear. It's killing the whales. They are drowning, tangled in crab nets. All the turtles, the dolphins are what they have by catch, you know, and they are trolling with these football field sized nets, taking up every living thing, and then they discard them. They dropped them overboard.

That is the biggest polluter, and a lot of those nets are plastic. I'm wondering how you come out on zoos. Are there any kind of animals on display operations that you do uh support? I think that zoos are changing. Um, the big zoos really understand now that they can't provide the habitat, for example, four elephants. You've got the Detroit Zoo, the wonderful director there and he said, you know when the last elephant goes, the last elephant goes, He said,

we realize they're so intelligent, there's so complex. There's no way that we can possibly pretend to be looking after their interests. So that sort of evolution is happening because we know so much more behaviorally about animals than we ever did. They can actually tell a herd one or two miles away that there's a threat or that they found water in a drought, and no one can hear it except with instrumentation, except the elephants themselves, and they

understand what they're saying. So zoos can't deal with that sort of thing. First, we have to close the roadside zoos. Those are little pits of despair, and you've helped us with that all the bears that are on cement, turning in circles, banging their heads against the bar, banging met you know, going insane. And the same with tigers and

the same with lions. I think we've taken eighty three tigers out of those places is and they can now roam in Colorado and these vast enclosures and looked after that, those have to go. No one should stop the car and go to a roadside zoo, and then let's hope that the other ones evolve. Who's someone that you would say that you really had an incredibly positive experience in

addressing one of your issues. I think there are so many, because you know, people are people, and whether they're the head of the corporation or they're out on the street, some care and some don't, and some can have their eyes opened and some won't. UM. The very first one I think who really impressed me was the head of Benetton at the time, and later somebody at Gillette. Both

issued cosmetics. Benetton had a perfume. Gillette, of course, their whole line is from toothpaste to shampoo and so on. UM all used animals and experiments and Gillette actually said to us. You have changed our corporate culture. We have a lot of scientists on the Peter staff and they're in all kinds of disciplines and they've read every regulation and they know all the alternatives that they could ever research,

and we actually fund alternatives to some things. And they were able to go and meet with these corporations and say here's a better way to do it. And to their credit, both of those corporations listened, thought it through and decided, actually, you're right. And it took some doing, but they changed. You've had a lot of success over the years with the fashion industry back and I was invited to a party at Anna Winter's house and there was a moment where I just was tempted to wear

a Pita T shirt. But you've had tremendous success in converting people in the fashion industry to get off of fur and so forth. What are some of your latest victories? There were not Anna, I've never had any success with her, and of course actually occupied her office at some point. But we've had super success and now it's really terrific. We just disbanded our I'd rather go naked and where for campaign because we don't need it. Anymore. I mean, yes,

they're Canada. Goose, you know, has still coyote fur on the trim and so on. But it's these are outliers. Now you've got Galliano, Gucci, Donna, tellaver Sacchi. You can't name a designer. The sale just don't. Thanks to you. Thanks. We were merciless, threw a lot of paint on people on the way. We also negotiated and we got people to not want it, and I think that was the key is as you people have got to go along with it. And the next generation up was not like

my generation and generation after it. They just thought, I really I'd rather be seeing dead than in for and they shunned it. And then all these other things came along and they're not synthetic, they're just natural fibers and fat. Anna Wintour was just seen in a Stella McCartney faux fur that you would not mistake for a real fur at all. It's so beautifully crafted and obviously so different, but soft and beautiful and just the epitome of fashion. She looks so much better in it than all the

assaulted animal things. Do you find that when people are exposed two film, when you show them inside. I did the documentary Meets Your Meet with You guys a while ago, and when you show them the conditions there and how animals go from farm to table if you will, does it have an effect you think, on a critical mass of people or most people don't care. Well, you know, they say a pictures worth a thousand words, videos worth

much much more. A lot of people wake up for the first time when they see those images, because it's not just you telling them, and they have to wonder if that's true. They can actually see it with their own eyes. They might as well be standing there. Of course, they're all the Attila the hunt types, and there are people who cling to what they want to continue to do, even when you show them that there's suffering involved in it. You'd have to be a very strong, odd callous person

to say, well, yes, that's what they go through. The fear, they smell the blood, and you know, I've stood on the slaughterhouse floor and all of them are petrified. And then just they know what's happening. They absolutely know what's happening. And I was in Taiwan at a dog soup slaughterhouse and it was the exact same eyes on the dogs who smell it, they hear it. It's in the air to them. Their nostrils are so sensitive as any cow,

any chicken, any pig. Yeah, absolutely, throwing the piglets against the wall, punching the sheep in the face. I don't think anything makes me more disturbed than seeing that. It's like abu grape for animals. The attitude is I've got you, and now I'm going to show you whose boss. And you think how smaller person you have to be that you think that it builds you up to be so mean and disgusting and cause such pain it cannot get away from you, cannot escape and would love to if

they could. Um, you see so much domination, bullying, people actually getting their kicks out of A person takes a cinder block and drops it on a crippled sow's head and they laughed. They just think it's so funny. Well, you've taught the world a lot. You've taught the world a great deal, and I hope you're very proud of the work you've done. You're very kind and as you say, it's taken everybody six point five million members and supporters.

When we put out an action alert, we couldn't do it, and as all those people, it pulled a heart string and they thought, I'll be part of this solution. But I cry a lot, I feel a lot, and sometimes I do things that are provocative just because I can't get someone's attention on an issue that's vitally serious for the animals. But you're right, negotiation and persuasion are usually

better than litigation and demonstrations. Any day. You have a new book out called Animal Kind Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and the remarkable ways we can be kind to them. This is what book you've written. How many of you written? I've written twelve. But this is my favorite, of course, because I really think it speaks to the way people are thinking about animals today. They see those videos and they have learned so much and they now think, well,

maybe there are some more things I can do. And so two parts telling you who animals are, how or inspiring they are, and the second part is all the things you can do in your daily life. Ingrid new Kirk the founding figure of the modern animal rights movement. You can learn more about her work at Peter dot org. To animal Kind, her new book about animal cognition and psychology can be found in the show description that Here's

the Thing dot org. While many of us remain quarantined due to a pandemic purportedly caused by the handling, slaughter, and marketing of animals for food. Now might be a good time for you to acquaint yourself with the writing of Ingrad new Kirk. You're listening to Here's the Thing. I'm Alec Baldwin.