Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Last night HBO premiered I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. Since its inception, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made headlines and raised eyebrows. They are almost single-handedly responsible for the movement against animal testing and their efforts have raised the suffering animals experience in a broad spectrum of consumer goods production and food processing into a cause célèbre.
PETA first made headlines in the Silver Spring monkeys case, when Alex Pacheco, then a student at George Washington University, volunteered at a lab run by Edward Taub, who was testing neuroplasticity on live monkeys. Taub had cut sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to the monkeys’ fingers, hands, arms, legs; with some of the monkeys, he had severed the entire spinal column. He then tried to force the monkeys to use their limbs by exposing them to persistent electric shock, prolonged physical restraint of an intact arm or leg, and by withholding food. With footage obtained by Pacheco, Taub was convicted of six counts of animal cruelty—largely as a result of the monkeys’ reported living conditions—making them “the most famous lab animals in history,” according to psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Taub’s conviction was later overturned on appeal and the monkeys were eventually euthanized.
PETA was born.
In the subsequent decades they ran the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty against Europe’s largest animal-testing facility (footage showed staff punching beagle puppies in the face, shouting at them, and simulating sex acts while taking blood samples); against Covance, the United State’s largest importer of primates for laboratory research (evidence was found that they were dissecting monkeys at its Vienna, Virginia laboratory while the animals were still alive); against General Motors for using live animals in crash tests; against L’Oreal for testing cosmetics on animals; against the use of fur for fashion and fur farms; against Smithfield Foods for torturing Butterball turkeys; and against fast food chains, most recently against KFC through the launch of their website kentuckyfriedcruelty.com.
They have launched campaigns and engaged in stunts that are designed for media attention. In 1996, PETA activists famously threw a dead raccoon onto the table of Anna Wintour, the fur supporting editor-in-chief of Vogue, while she was dining at the Four Seasons in New York, and left bloody paw prints and the words “Fur Hag” on the steps of her home. They ran a campaign entitled Holocaust on your Plate that consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels, each juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming. Photographs of concentration camp inmates in wooden bunks were shown next to photographs of caged chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. In 2003 in Jerusalem, after a donkey was loaded with explosives and blown up in a terrorist attack, Newkirk sent a letter to then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat to keep animals out of the conflict. As the film shows, they also took over Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Paris boutique and smeared blood on the windows to protest his use of fur in his clothing.
The group’s tactics have been criticized. Co-founder Pacheco, who is no longer with PETA, called them “stupid human tricks.” Some feminists criticize their campaigns featuring the Lettuce Ladies and “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” ads as objectifying women. Of their Holocaust on a Plate campaign, Anti-Defamation League Chairman Abraham Foxman said “The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent.” (Newkirk later issued an apology for any hurt it caused). Perhaps most controversial amongst politicians, the public and even other animal rights organizations is PETA’s refusal to condemn the actions of the Animal Liberation Front, which in January 2005 was named as a terrorist threat by the United States Department of Homeland Security.
David Shankbone attended the pre-release screening of I Am An Animal at HBO’s offices in New York City on November 12, and the following day he sat down with Ingrid Newkirk to discuss her perspectives on PETA, animal rights, her responses to criticism lodged against her and to discuss her on-going life’s work to raise human awareness of animal suffering. Below is her interview.
David Shankbone: How did you feel about the film?
DS: You are pretty media savvy; was that okay with you that they crafted the film the way they did?
DS: Many people when they hear about PETA think they are an organization that is more concerned with the well-being of chickens than they are with the well-being of humans. How would you respond to that?
DS: Jim Young, one of the lab people with the really red ears—
DS: Everyone was looking at them. One of the things he had said was that you want to completely disassociate animals with humans.
DS: Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
DS: How do you feel when you hear other animal rights organizations coming out against PETA?
DS: What is something you have been asked to condemn?
DS: By the Animal Liberation Front?
DS: So you are okay with ALF activities? Some of that was covered in the film.
DS: L’Oreal, Maybelline—
DS: How do you feel about the ALF?
DS: Is arson a lesser of two evils proposition for you, then?
DS: A critic would say that there is no equating humans with animals. That by stopping research that saves lives based upon these animals you are valuing chickens or mice over people.
DS: Like the saccharine experiments, which were ridiculous because they showed it causes cancer in mice when you inject them with eight times their body weight daily with saccharine. We aren’t mice, and who consumes such amounts?
DS: Do you think blocking stem cell research is something that harms animals?
DS: In your book Making Kind Choices you have a chapter on bees. Have you been following the recent development on the ‘Rapture of the Bees?’
DS: What do you think is happening with the bees?
DS: That’s the thing: they can’t find any bee bodies. Millions and millions have disappeared.
DS: In your book she calls them ‘honeystealers’
DS: The Bible talks about humans as custodians of the Earth, and the religious community is beginning to awaken to the notion that this means they need to be involved on environmental issues. What is the religious community’s relationship to animal welfare?
DS: Sam Brownback raised that exact same quote in my interview with him, that God cares even when the smallest sparrow falls—
DS: In the movie they show PETA making a change in tactics from focusing on exotic animals to focusing on livestock such as turkeys. Exotic animals are things most people could support, but livestock is more out there for many. How would you respond to the argument that progress is incremental and by taking a leap from focusing on exotics to focusing on livestock you could be overreaching?
DS: A religious argument might be that they were put on Earth for Man.
DS: Did your protest at Jean-Paul Gaultier have any effect?
DS: You had mentioned earlier wool clothing in relation to Australian exporters. Are you against wool clothing or against how it is made and harvested?
DS: When you think of companies—obviously Butterball would be one—
DS: Who are some of the most egregious abusers of animals?
DS: “Oh God, here comes Ingrid Newkirk with her soy chickens again!”
DS: What is Controlled Atmosphere Killing?
DS: Tell me how the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act impedes you, and what you are doing to defeat the Act.
DS: Would you do a target investigation in a state where they have that act passed just to test its Constitutionality?
DS: Did you and Alex Pacheco have a falling out?
DS: Like a family—
DS: Are you still in contact with him?
DS: Is he looking at becoming involved again?
DS: How would Ingrid Newkirk twenty years ago look at Ingrid Newkirk now?
DS: Just twenty years ago, the person you were then looking at the person you are now.
DS: Do you think you’ve achieved a lot of the things you had wanted back then?
DS: Do you think other people would say that?
DS: Do you have any regrets?
DS: Or personally.
DS: Just in general—in your life.
DS: See. Sometimes terrible questions birth wonderful answers.
DS: The nature of this interview is on a permanent encyclopedia—
DS: –so the questions are designed not just around your work, but also around who you are as a person.
DS: I didn’t see you as sad in that movie.
DS: It’s interesting you brought that up, because a thought I had watching the film is that people always find something to criticize with a person. It’s not, “Okay, Ingrid just really loves animals and wants to help them” but “you’re obsessed and sad.” If you were taking a $1,000,000 salary every year and driving around in a Mercedes, they would say, “She’s not really in it for the animals, she’s completely stuffing her pockets with her cause.” But you are not doing that [Newkirk earned $32,000 from PETA in 2005] and the film makes that clear; so instead, the criticism is that you are sad and obsessed.
DS: You’re either milking it for all it is worth—
DS: What do you think drives people to jump at negative spin?
DS: Where do you draw your strength from? What’s behind that question is when I was in law school I did a Chihuahua rescue and helped to save perhaps 15 to 20 dogs. I thought it would be a great fulfilling thing, and it would be easy to do to host these animals while I read my law books. Instead, it was grueling. It ended up tearing me apart—
DS: –watching your film I thought, “I would be a terrible investigator. I would be like the guy in the movie who simply couldn’t do it.” I saw a 14-pound dog that was raped by a man and her insides were torn up; I had a dog who almost died on me because it had been so severely starved and beaten, and the only thing I could do to get it to survive was to take a syringe full of blended dog food liquidated with heavy cream and feed it while it bit my fingers. It took its toll on me and it was one of the things that made me very down on humanity—
DS: But it was hurtful.
DS: Where do you draw your strength to continue on and to not hate humanity?
DS: Animals don’t scheme.
DS: You do have a great memory.
DS: Yes, I do know.
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