The PeTA principal - Great Article

November 7, 2008

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8c8d285c-aad2-11dd-897c-000077b07658.html

By Suzanne Glass

The coffin lay open in the middle of Times Square. Inside, naked and very much alive, Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), sported “just a spray of flowers on my naughty bits”. The stunt was part of Peta’s “I’d Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur” campaign, one of dozens of projects designed to attract attention to the international animal rights organisation. The controversial charity has nearly two million members, including high-profile celebrities such as Paul McCartney, Sarah Jessica Parker and Pamela Anderson, who espouse Newkirk’s mantra: “Animals are not ours to kill, eat or experiment with.”

Peta boasts an annual income of almost $40m, making it the third biggest animal rights organisation in the world, after the RSPCA and the Humane Society of the United States. And in both the US and UK, Newkirk’s adversaries in the food, fashion and pharmaceutical worlds are as ardent as her advocates, if somewhat quieter. “I don’t want to talk about Peta,” said a McDonald’s spokeswoman, a refrain that resonates throughout industry. To comment on Peta is to risk being the focus of her next media campaign. Last month, it was Ben & Jerry’s turn. Newkirk suggested that the company stop buying milk from producers who, she says, allow calves to be dragged away from their mothers’ udders. To underscore the point, she told the ice-cream maker to use human breast milk instead.

When I met Newkirk, who turns 60 next year, in the hemp-and-pleather headquarters of Peta, in Norfolk, Virginia, I suggested that her Ben & Jerry’s proposal was ludicrous. “It was tongue-in-cheek, of course,” she said – but by using the word “breast”, she was able to get the media to broadcast images of the inhumane conditions in which the milked cows were housed. “And they got it, they finally got it,” she cries in her upper-crust British accent.

Do unto others, Newkirk says, is her philosophy – for her, though, the “others” includes Noah’s Ark in its entirety. But the belief that the welfare of the pig, porcupine and panther is as significant as our own is problematic. Humanity is outnumbered and, if Newkirk espouses the utilitarian ideal of promoting the greatest good of the greatest number, then, taken to its logical extreme, her thesis would see our wellbeing submerged by the wellbeing of fish and fowl.

“It’s just too simplistic to say I’m going for the greatest good of the greatest number,” says Newkirk. “I’m much more pragmatic than that. I’m not trying to get humans and animals to compete. I’m trying to get humans to modify their behaviour. We think we’re teaching our kids compassion, but then they have a choice between a beef burger and a veggie burger, and they go for the beef, which causes suffering. I care less about philosophy than the fact that we should avoid being demonstrably cruel by endorsing factory farming and the slaughtering of cattle.”

But if she considers animals “equal” to us, and we are dwarfed by their numbers, is it not inevitable that their interests will ultimately overwhelm ours? “No, no, no, ‘equal’ doesn’t mean ‘the same’. Happiness for a bird is not the same as happiness for man. I’m not suggesting we buy the chicken a golf-club membership, but if he has wings, let him fly and don’t keep him in a cage. Let him be who he is,” she says. And she turns away, composure dissolving.

Newkirk’s office overlooking the Potomac River is a far cry from the crowded basement in which she co-founded the organisation in 1980 with Alex Pacheco, her former boyfriend. In their bedroom – shared with Joanna the pig – they planned their first protest, at a pigeon shoot. It led to their arrest. I ask her how it felt to be locked up. “In prison?” Newkirk says. “I suppose I felt the way animals feel much of the time.”

Over the years, Newkirk has perfected strategies that “scream bloody murder”, but which often teeter between ethically acceptable protests and offensive stunts. In September, at New York Fashion Week, Peta members threw themselves on the red carpet in protest at Donna Karan’s use of fur trimmings. At London Fashion Week, they went for Burberry. And in Paris, Newkirk stood in Oscar de la Renta’s window display, protesting against the use of fur – a human mannequin smeared in fake blood – until the gendarmerie came and dragged her away.

Newkirk has also gatecrashed Vogue’s Manhattan premises, prompting Anna Wintour (pictured left), the magazine’s redoubtable editor-in-chief, to barricade herself in her office. Wintour and Newkirk have met before – a few years ago, Newkirk dropped into the Four Seasons to serve Wintour a dead raccoon. Wintour covered it with her napkin and ordered coffee.

Newkirk’s commitment to animals began during a solitary childhood in the Orkney Islands. At the age of seven, she moved with her parents to India, where her mother worked in a leper colony. “She taught me it doesn’t matter who needs help. It’s that they need help,” says Newkirk. Her father, meanwhile, taught her to be thick-skinned and to “spit cherry pits”.

It was in India that Newkirk saw locals stuffing a dog’s mouth with mud and laughing as they watched it drowning. “I asked my servant to get it for me. The dog died in my arms,” she says. “That was a turning point.”

At 21, Newkirk trained, for a brief and “misguided” period, to become a broker. But she left to work as an animal protection officer in Washington DC, then trained with the police “so that I could enforce animal cruelty laws”. As the first female pound master in Washington, she established a spay clinic and stopped the sale of animals to universities for experimentation.

Newkirk had married at 19, and by the age of 22 had had herself sterilised, a decision she says came from the conviction that the world was full of unwanted babies. At one point, she considered adopting, but she “just got too busy with the animals. I am interested in the underdog. I went to a boarding school where the nuns beat the five-year-olds. I cried for them, and I cry for the rabbits separated from their mothers.”

Unable to separate herself from her work, Newkirk saw her marriage fail. She remains a workaholic. She responds instantly to e-mails, and hers often read: “Just hopping on a plane to go and protest.” Her current long-term partner is obviously accommodating. “Hands off the subject,” Newkirk laughs, “but I will tell you I’m lucky. Very lucky.”

Peta now has offices in the US, Britain, India and China, and its activities have provoked dread, ire and change in the business world for the past 28 years, during which period Newkirk has turned the charity into an international campaigning organisation. It was after Newkirk’s intervention that Burger King introduced the veggie burger, McDonald’s began auditing its slaughterhouses, Calvin Klein abandoned furry cuffs and collars, Mercedes-Benz began offering a pleather upholstery option, and Gap stopped importing leather from India. Simon Cowitt, owner of Cowitt Furs, a long-established fur shop on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, says: “Yes, she has the power to hurt businesses.”

Cowitt’s willingness to speak on the record was unusual, however. My repeated invitation to Vogue’s editor to express a view on Newkirk was met only with: “Ms Wintour chooses to decline.” Similarly, Donna Karan’s office wanted to stay out of it. So, too, Calvin Klein’s. At first the British Fur Trade Association agreed to comment, then changed its mind.

But why does Newkirk focus so intently on the fur industry? It represents no more than a minuscule fraction of the animal products we consume. Fur is high-profile, she explains, and her exploits in fashion alert other sectors to her potential to “out” those whom she considers to be violating animal rights. “Businesses are terrified,” she claims, unable to contain a certain glee. “They have no idea what I’m going to do next.”

Newkirk runs Peta like an activist investment fund. Under the auspices of the “corporate division”, Peta members “attend” shareholder meetings of target companies. “We buy enough shares to allow us into the meetings so that we can inform ourselves,” says Newkirk. But before Peta “outs” a company, Newkirk claims it is given a chance to reform its ways. It’s only when the blue bunny logo in the top right-hand corner of the Peta envelope hops on to the desk of the relevant executive or pharmaceutical researcher that they can be sure the sword of Damocles is hanging over them.

Robert Adamec, research professor at Memorial University, Newfoundland, remembers the bunny logo only too well. “We had advertised a medical research course on infant intubation, whereby a tube is inserted into a baby’s trachea to aid mechanical ventilation. The research involved working on pigs. The letter with the bunny logo arrived. She wanted us to use mock-up human models which cost $300,000 apiece. As it happened, we’d already ordered a couple of them, which was all we could afford.” Adamec’s team say they told Peta as much, and the next thing they knew, chocolate-chip cookies arrived with a thank-you note. Adamec was infuriated by Peta’s insinuation that he had given in to its demands. Newkirk says she couldn’t care less whether her targets admit Peta’s influence or not. As far as she’s concerned, every time someone agrees to an alternative route to experimentation on animals, the world becomes a

better place. But the obvious question remains. Is implicit threat, in which Newkirk is clearly engaged, a justifiable means of pressure?

Adamec argues that it’s absolutely not – and he proffers a solution. “I officially invite Newkirk to put herself forward for toxicology testing. Perhaps she can find enough human volunteers, so that we will no longer need to test on animals.”

Newkirk’s critics rarely succeed in being as provocative as she is. Her will states that her flesh should be barbecued, her skin used for leather, her liver sent to France for foie gras and her eyes skewered and delivered to the Environmental Protection Agency, so that she can watch over the American administration ad infinitum. “My point,” she says “is that I am an animal.”

At Peta, Newkirk is Queen Bee. Her 400-strong staff defer to her on all decisions involving more than $5,000. And when she summons an employee to provide me with filmed proof of her claims that the slaughtering of cows in India is particularly inhumane, her assistant is there at once, documentary in hand. Narrated by Pamela Anderson, Skins follows Newkirk through Indian slaughterhouses, where she watches cows having chilli rubbed in their eyes to force them to remain standing.

Newkirk wants to convert individuals, not just companies, to her way of thinking. In her boardroom, she serves me a beautifully prepared avocado sushi and tofu lunch. While I eat, she details the practice of wringing chickens’ necks. In place of dessert, she produces a booklet on how to counteract anaemia with vegetables – though her assistant does eventually turn up with dark, dairy-free chocolate bars.

When, after many hours in Newkirk’s company, over a snack of root vegetables, I flippantly ask her if I now ought to throw away my old rabbit-lined gloves, the air grows charged. “Would you use a lamp shade made of human skin?” she snaps. I am stunned into silence. “Look,” she adds, “what I am saying is that animals deserve equal consideration. An animal feels pain. The rabbit suffers at being separated from her babies and they cry when they’re murdered.”

Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, perhaps the most respected intellectual in the animal-rights movement, and author of its bible, Animal Liberation, disagrees with Newkirk’s view that there is no hierarchy at all between man and beast, or indeed within the animal world itself.. He believes that the hierarchy depends on a creature’s level of self-awareness and its ability to see itself existing over time. “A chicken feels pain,” he says, “but the chicken doesn’t know he’s going to lose his life.” In other words, for Singer, the difference between killing a chicken and killing a man is that the chicken is unlikely to be making plans for its retirement.

Newkirk has been criticised for her “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign, which equates our behaviour towards chickens with the Nazis’ behaviour towards Jews, gypsies and the mentally handicapped. Singer says: “I don’t think it was a smart move.” Newkirk now says she is considering “refining” the analogy.

Where Singer does agree with Peta is on the subject of “equal consideration for all beings”. He, like Newkirk, argues that a cow, a pig or a pigeon has as much right to live a painless and free life as do human beings. In the views of both Newkirk and Singer, the fact that we possess the power to hunt and catch salmon does not accord us the right to do so, any more than our ability to pounce on an office colleague and kill him would render such action ethically acceptable.

.. . .

Both Newkirk and Singer also struggle over testing of medical treatments for humans on animals. In the early 1980s, Newkirk’s partner Pacheco managed to film, undercover, proceedings at a medical laboratory in Maryland, where a researcher was paralysing monkeys’ limbs to monitor the animals’ ability to re-adapt to an acceptable mode of functioning. The footage led to the Silver Spring monkey case, the first animal cruelty prosecution to be brought before a US Federal Court. Peta won the first trial but lost the case at appeal – though not before making headlines.

Newkirk believes it was both cruel and unnecessary to induce pain and paralysis in the monkeys when there must have been significant numbers of human accident victims willing to participate. “If you really look hard,” she says, “I don’t think you’d find a single case where you actually have to use animals.” While she is absolute on the issue, Singer’s view is tempered. “In many, but not all cases, one might use consenting human volunteers.” Still, Singer is highly cynical about the pharmaceutical industry’s reasons for resorting to animal testing. “It’s cheap and convenient for them. Let’s just say they could drastically reduce the number of animals they use.”

Peta is not the most radical animal-rights group going. The Animal Liberation Front is notorious for breaking into laboratories to release animals. Newkirk declines to condemn the group, saying only: “If my dog was locked up in a lab I’d find a way to get him out. Wouldn’t you do the same?”

Meanwhile, the RSPCA, founded in 1824 in the UK, and the Humane Society of the United States, founded in 1954, enjoy significantly larger budgets than Peta, but both these organisations follow a significantly more conventional protocol. Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, is currently lobbying to reduce inhumane practices in factory farming and the agribusiness in general. He says of Newkirk: “Let’s just say we are less provocative ... and we don’t suffer from a lack of coverage in the press because of it.” He thinks her sensationalism alienates some would-be supporters. She thinks he compromises too much. Yet, despite their differences Pacelle admits: “Newkirk has had a major effect in raising awareness. She’s also had important successes in forcing industry to consider what it’s doing in terms of cruelty to animals. She forced General Motors to stop crash-testing on animals. She

forced Benetton to stop animal testing for their cosmetics.”

Peta recently put out a book, One Can Make a Difference. In it, Newkirk writes, “I live only for [animals], because if I didn’t have them I would have killed myself a long time ago.” Suicide averted, Newkirk still has to find a successor. I am looking for a “Mini-Me”, she says.

The internet has ensured that Peta’s message is pervasive. “One click and we’re everywhere,” Newkirk says; and Peta’s website receives four million clicks a month. Many of the visitors are children and teenagers, in whom Newkirk’s hope resides. “When I leave this vale of tears, I hope to leave a ‘generation of the kind’. These children wouldn’t be caught dead in fur. It’s going to be up to them to ensure that society is doing the right thing by animals.”

Her most ardent supporters, were they able to express themselves, would surely be animals themselves. Her denial of the hierarchy between man and beast and its implications for business will remain highly controversial, but Newkirk is the loudest voice the animal kingdom has ever known. If Dr Dolittle talked to them, then Newkirk talks for them.

Suzanne Glass is working on her third novel, ‘The Milliner’