Newkirk on humans and other animalsDS : 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. IN: I think it hokum. Total hokum. First, you can’t have it both ways. They are either like us or not like us. You’re using them because they’re like us, then recognize the ways they are like us. They are afraid to be in the cages. The cages are tiny and uncomfortable and miserable. They are frightened. They are not treated well in the course of being experimented on. It’s not as if it is just a few of them being used in life-saving experiments. There are millions being used every year for fool things, including, still, nicotine and cocaine experiments. You know nicotine is bad for you. Every little single thing is done to them. But, on the other hand, they’re not like us physiologically in many ways that are important, which is what makes these tests invariably unscientific. You can’t extrapolate from a mouse to a man. They have a different metabolism. They have a very different physiology. Christy Turlington during PETA's "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" campaign 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? IN: Yes! People are scared, and experimenters who still use animals are only a percentage of all the people who do research in the U.S. The other research fields are more profitable in terms of applicability; human clinical work, epidemiological work, computer mapping work, all those things where you use human data, all those researchers are doing more productive work. Cloning human skin, putting human DNA on the Internet. This is where the money should be going. Not doing things you did five hundred years ago by stuffing chemicals down animals’ throats, or performing some procedure that you later find out doesn’t even work on human beings. DS: Do you think blocking stem cell research is something that harms animals? IN: Yes, absolutely, if it’s human stem cell research, we’re in favor of it. If you are religiously opposed to abortion, you do not have to take stem cells from the unabortus. You can take stem cells in other ways such as from the placenta or a live birth. You can do other things. You don’t have to violate your religious principles if that’s the problem. 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?’ IN: It’s fascinating. DS: What do you think is happening with the bees? IN: They think it’s a virus or a bacteria, don’t they? DS: That’s the thing: they can’t find any bee bodies. Millions and millions have disappeared. IN: It’s always fascinating how animals go off somewhere to die. You don’t see a lot of dead birds anyway and there are birds in this city. I don’t know. Years and years ago I had not thought at all about bees and I went to a conference in upstate New York and there was a wonderful, gentle woman named Nermin Buyukmihci who talked about how violent bee keeping is. I never thought about or known about this. DS: In your book she calls them ‘honeystealers’ IN: She talked about the wire brush tearing off the wings and the smoking out. I thought it was fascinating that she could even care about bees. I thought to myself, “Well they make this honey and they make propolis and everything else for their own nourishment and typical we come stomping along and take it all for ourselves, give them cheap sugar and smoke them out and kill them.” I thought that I don’t need honey. It was just another thing where you think, “Why do I need this?” Ingrid Newkirk on Ingrid Newkirk Newkirk talking uncomfortably about herself DS: Did you and Alex Pacheco have a falling out? IN: No—well, we’ve had many fallings out in our years— DS: Like a family— IN: Yes, yes. We’ve had many an argument, many a falling out, but he separated a long time ago. DS: Are you still in contact with him? IN: Yes, he was in touch with the office a couple of weeks ago. I was on the road. DS: Is he looking at becoming involved again? IN: I’m not sure what he wants to do at the moment and I’m not sure he does, either. DS: How would Ingrid Newkirk twenty years ago look at Ingrid Newkirk now? IN: God, what a horrid question! [Laughs] Do you mean twenty years ago? Because we’ve had the group twenty-seven years. DS: Just twenty years ago, the person you were then looking at the person you are now. IN: God, less wrinkles! I don’t know the answer to that. I really don’t. PETA Board Member Bill Maher with Newkirk. DS: Do you think you’ve achieved a lot of the things you had wanted back then? IN: I’m never looking ahead. All I want is to reduce suffering and to get people to think of animals in a different way, and that’s as true then as it is now. Perhaps I was—I don’t know if I could say if I’m less or more optimistic, I really can’t. I think I was just me, only younger. DS: Do you think other people would say that? IN: I think so…I think so. I don’t know, really. DS: Do you have any regrets? IN: Professionally? Because that’s what we are talking about… DS: Or personally. IN: I’m not going to talk about personally! DS: Just in general—in your life. IN: These are just terrible questions! I think you can always look back and in hindsight, knowing the results of what you’ve done, think, ‘Maybe I could have been more strategic then’; or ‘If I had only known…maybe I could have pushed harder then.’ But I think in compromising sometimes, people may find it surprising, but I’m so anxious not to lose ground, but to gain ground so that we can move ahead, that I might take less than if I had known I could have pushed harder what I could have got. DS: See. Sometimes terrible questions birth wonderful answers. IN: Oh, pwah! DS: The nature of this interview is on a permanent encyclopedia— IN: Ah! God, help me, kill me. DS: --so the questions are designed not just around your work, but also around who you are as a person. IN: I don’t know. 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. In Taiwan, standing in a slaughterhouse for dogs. You have to get through it, and to me, having foster-cared chickens; I know if anyone took a chicken in the way they took a dog in they would come to love that chicken and come to see that chicken had personality. That chicken would wait for you to come home in the evening. They can’t laugh this off, because it’s actually true! Chickens develop bonds with people the same way dogs do. They know you’ve rescued them if you’ve rescued them; they’ll sit on your lap while you’re watching TV. Having had those relationships it’s just as hard for me to stand in a chicken slaughterhouse. But if anyone had had those experiences they would feel the same way. I think it’s hard to pigeon-hole me as sad. I’m not. I’m joyous. DS: I didn’t see you as sad in that movie. IN: Oh really? Oh, good. 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. IN: Right. Thank you. Thank you. DS: You’re either milking it for all it is worth— IN: Or you are some weird ascetic. DS: What do you think drives people to jump at negative spin? IN: It’s human nature. You see the thing at a silly level with celebrities. They love them, and then they tear them down. Or they are just salivating, hoping for somebody to trip and fall. I think it’s jut another nasty past of human nature. Especially if you think somebody has done something that makes you a little guilty, it’s very hard to overcome people’s guilt. I know I was the same way when somebody first suggested to me I should not eat animals. I was quite defensive about it. I remember that. There are many other things along the way that I have had to fight out in my own head and get rid of the defensiveness. I think people are defensive, and they don’t want someone to tell them what to do. They know a lot of their life is frivolous. I had an assistant once who wanted to leave for the evening, and I said, “Could you just finish this before you go home?” and he said, “I’ve got a life!” and I said, “Yeah, me too, but mine doesn’t consist of playing video games for five hours!” [Laughs]. But as you get older I think your perspective might change and whatever drives you it occurs you only have so much time, and you want to accomplish this. 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— IN: It does. 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— IN: You’re a good man. DS: But it was hurtful. IN: Yeah, it’s very painful! DS: Where do you draw your strength to continue on and to not hate humanity? IN: I definitely don’t hate humanity, because I am one. I think we’re weak. I think our species loves to think of itself as all important and knowing and clever; and we’re not. Fundamentally, we like a chocolate soda and stay in bed late. We like some rubbish on TV. It’s just the way we are. If everyone could come to America from all over I think they would so they could all get fat and rich and do almost nothing, and collect unemployment. Anyway, whatever. Substitute something there. [Laughs] Anthropologists have said that it is only human conceit that has separated us from the other apes; for starters the apes. Really, there is no such thing as a hominid. They say there are hominids and pongids, and we’re probably all in it together and that we are probably all the same taxa. I see chimpanzees are very much like human beings, and they are very aggressive. The males will go out together and hunt, and they’ll take apart a Colobus monkey just for the fun of it, like a gang on the street. The males will beat their chest and are full of testosterone, and they’ll gang-bang the females, which happens every day if you read the newspaper. And they are lazy. If you put them in captivity they’ll throw their feces at you, but they don’t mean it! That’s just their nature; it’s not as if they sat there thinking this up. It’s their nature. DS: Animals don’t scheme. IN: No! They are just angry, upset and agitated. I think that’s the same with human beings. We’re all a bit like that. We have to discipline ourselves and not going around saying how great we are. We have to have some discipline and not be brats and fat little kids. SO I don’t hate humanity, and I forgot what the first one was—oh, how do I get my strength! Where I get my memory is the next one you’re going to ask…[Laughs] DS: You do have a great memory. IN: I obviously don’t—a selective memory, maybe. I don’t know that it’s strength so much as I am driven by if I see a cruelty in front of me, which I have many times, and I have the power to stop it, then something comes from inside me and I will try to stop it, and I will really mow people over to get to an injured animal, for example. Or move heaven and Earth to get something fixed. More than that, I have a strong sense of guilt. If I’m not doing anything I don’t know how I could forget that the cruelty is there, or that the pain is there. I don’t think I could just decide, “I’m going to the beach, and I’m going to live on the beach and be a beach bum for the rest of my life” and pretend it doesn’t exist and that it’s not going to haunt me. So I probably do it to ease my own pain, in part, in knowing that it exists and trying to do something. You know! DS: Yes, I do know. IN: ''' I’m so glad you did that. And you did not give that one away [referring to Little Man].
Newkirk on humans and other animals 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. IN: I think it hokum. Total hokum. First, you can’t have it both ways. They are either like us or not like us. You’re using them because they’re like us, then recognize the ways they are like us. They are afraid to be in the cages. The cages are tiny and uncomfortable and miserable. They are frightened. They are not treated well in the course of being experimented on. It’s not as if it is just a few of them being used in life-saving experiments. There are millions being used every year for fool things, including, still, nicotine and cocaine experiments. You know nicotine is bad for you. Every little single thing is done to them. But, on the other hand, they’re not like us physiologically in many ways that are important, which is what makes these tests invariably unscientific. You can’t extrapolate from a mouse to a man. They have a different metabolism. They have a very different physiology. Christy Turlington during PETA's "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" campaign 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? IN: Yes! People are scared, and experimenters who still use animals are only a percentage of all the people who do research in the U.S. The other research fields are more profitable in terms of applicability; human clinical work, epidemiological work, computer mapping work, all those things where you use human data, all those researchers are doing more productive work. Cloning human skin, putting human DNA on the Internet. This is where the money should be going. Not doing things you did five hundred years ago by stuffing chemicals down animals’ throats, or performing some procedure that you later find out doesn’t even work on human beings. DS: Do you think blocking stem cell research is something that harms animals? IN: Yes, absolutely, if it’s human stem cell research, we’re in favor of it. If you are religiously opposed to abortion, you do not have to take stem cells from the unabortus. You can take stem cells in other ways such as from the placenta or a live birth. You can do other things. You don’t have to violate your religious principles if that’s the problem. 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?’ IN: It’s fascinating. DS: What do you think is happening with the bees? IN: They think it’s a virus or a bacteria, don’t they? DS: That’s the thing: they can’t find any bee bodies. Millions and millions have disappeared. IN: It’s always fascinating how animals go off somewhere to die. You don’t see a lot of dead birds anyway and there are birds in this city. I don’t know. Years and years ago I had not thought at all about bees and I went to a conference in upstate New York and there was a wonderful, gentle woman named Nermin Buyukmihci who talked about how violent bee keeping is. I never thought about or known about this. DS: In your book she calls them ‘honeystealers’ IN: She talked about the wire brush tearing off the wings and the smoking out. I thought it was fascinating that she could even care about bees. I thought to myself, “Well they make this honey and they make propolis and everything else for their own nourishment and typical we come stomping along and take it all for ourselves, give them cheap sugar and smoke them out and kill them.” I thought that I don’t need honey. It was just another thing where you think, “Why do I need this?” Ingrid Newkirk on Ingrid Newkirk Newkirk talking uncomfortably about herself DS: Did you and Alex Pacheco have a falling out? IN: No—well, we’ve had many fallings out in our years— DS: Like a family— IN: Yes, yes. We’ve had many an argument, many a falling out, but he separated a long time ago. DS: Are you still in contact with him? IN: Yes, he was in touch with the office a couple of weeks ago. I was on the road. DS: Is he looking at becoming involved again? IN: I’m not sure what he wants to do at the moment and I’m not sure he does, either. DS: How would Ingrid Newkirk twenty years ago look at Ingrid Newkirk now? IN: God, what a horrid question! [Laughs] Do you mean twenty years ago? Because we’ve had the group twenty-seven years. DS: Just twenty years ago, the person you were then looking at the person you are now. IN: God, less wrinkles! I don’t know the answer to that. I really don’t. PETA Board Member Bill Maher with Newkirk. DS: Do you think you’ve achieved a lot of the things you had wanted back then? IN: I’m never looking ahead. All I want is to reduce suffering and to get people to think of animals in a different way, and that’s as true then as it is now. Perhaps I was—I don’t know if I could say if I’m less or more optimistic, I really can’t. I think I was just me, only younger. DS: Do you think other people would say that? IN: I think so…I think so. I don’t know, really. DS: Do you have any regrets? IN: Professionally? Because that’s what we are talking about… DS: Or personally. IN: I’m not going to talk about personally! DS: Just in general—in your life. IN: These are just terrible questions! I think you can always look back and in hindsight, knowing the results of what you’ve done, think, ‘Maybe I could have been more strategic then’; or ‘If I had only known…maybe I could have pushed harder then.’ But I think in compromising sometimes, people may find it surprising, but I’m so anxious not to lose ground, but to gain ground so that we can move ahead, that I might take less than if I had known I could have pushed harder what I could have got. DS: See. Sometimes terrible questions birth wonderful answers. IN: Oh, pwah! DS: The nature of this interview is on a permanent encyclopedia— IN: Ah! God, help me, kill me. DS: --so the questions are designed not just around your work, but also around who you are as a person. IN: I don’t know. 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. In Taiwan, standing in a slaughterhouse for dogs. You have to get through it, and to me, having foster-cared chickens; I know if anyone took a chicken in the way they took a dog in they would come to love that chicken and come to see that chicken had personality. That chicken would wait for you to come home in the evening. They can’t laugh this off, because it’s actually true! Chickens develop bonds with people the same way dogs do. They know you’ve rescued them if you’ve rescued them; they’ll sit on your lap while you’re watching TV. Having had those relationships it’s just as hard for me to stand in a chicken slaughterhouse. But if anyone had had those experiences they would feel the same way. I think it’s hard to pigeon-hole me as sad. I’m not. I’m joyous. DS: I didn’t see you as sad in that movie. IN: Oh really? Oh, good. 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. IN: Right. Thank you. Thank you. DS: You’re either milking it for all it is worth— IN: Or you are some weird ascetic. DS: What do you think drives people to jump at negative spin? IN: It’s human nature. You see the thing at a silly level with celebrities. They love them, and then they tear them down. Or they are just salivating, hoping for somebody to trip and fall. I think it’s jut another nasty past of human nature. Especially if you think somebody has done something that makes you a little guilty, it’s very hard to overcome people’s guilt. I know I was the same way when somebody first suggested to me I should not eat animals. I was quite defensive about it. I remember that. There are many other things along the way that I have had to fight out in my own head and get rid of the defensiveness. I think people are defensive, and they don’t want someone to tell them what to do. They know a lot of their life is frivolous. I had an assistant once who wanted to leave for the evening, and I said, “Could you just finish this before you go home?” and he said, “I’ve got a life!” and I said, “Yeah, me too, but mine doesn’t consist of playing video games for five hours!” [Laughs]. But as you get older I think your perspective might change and whatever drives you it occurs you only have so much time, and you want to accomplish this. 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— IN: It does. 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— IN: You’re a good man. DS: But it was hurtful. IN: Yeah, it’s very painful! DS: Where do you draw your strength to continue on and to not hate humanity? IN: I definitely don’t hate humanity, because I am one. I think we’re weak. I think our species loves to think of itself as all important and knowing and clever; and we’re not. Fundamentally, we like a chocolate soda and stay in bed late. We like some rubbish on TV. It’s just the way we are. If everyone could come to America from all over I think they would so they could all get fat and rich and do almost nothing, and collect unemployment. Anyway, whatever. Substitute something there. [Laughs] Anthropologists have said that it is only human conceit that has separated us from the other apes; for starters the apes. Really, there is no such thing as a hominid. They say there are hominids and pongids, and we’re probably all in it together and that we are probably all the same taxa. I see chimpanzees are very much like human beings, and they are very aggressive. The males will go out together and hunt, and they’ll take apart a Colobus monkey just for the fun of it, like a gang on the street. The males will beat their chest and are full of testosterone, and they’ll gang-bang the females, which happens every day if you read the newspaper. And they are lazy. If you put them in captivity they’ll throw their feces at you, but they don’t mean it! That’s just their nature; it’s not as if they sat there thinking this up. It’s their nature. DS: Animals don’t scheme. IN: No! They are just angry, upset and agitated. I think that’s the same with human beings. We’re all a bit like that. We have to discipline ourselves and not going around saying how great we are. We have to have some discipline and not be brats and fat little kids. SO I don’t hate humanity, and I forgot what the first one was—oh, how do I get my strength! Where I get my memory is the next one you’re going to ask…[Laughs] DS: You do have a great memory. IN: I obviously don’t—a selective memory, maybe. I don’t know that it’s strength so much as I am driven by if I see a cruelty in front of me, which I have many times, and I have the power to stop it, then something comes from inside me and I will try to stop it, and I will really mow people over to get to an injured animal, for example. Or move heaven and Earth to get something fixed. More than that, I have a strong sense of guilt. If I’m not doing anything I don’t know how I could forget that the cruelty is there, or that the pain is there. I don’t think I could just decide, “I’m going to the beach, and I’m going to live on the beach and be a beach bum for the rest of my life” and pretend it doesn’t exist and that it’s not going to haunt me. So I probably do it to ease my own pain, in part, in knowing that it exists and trying to do something. You know! DS: Yes, I do know. IN: I’m so glad you did that. And you did not give that one away [referring to Little Man].
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