Ingrid Newkirk
Ingrid Newkirk
Ingrid E. Newkirkis an English-born British-American animal rights activist and the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the world's largest animal rights organization. She is the author of several books, including Making Kind Choicesand The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights: Simple Acts of Kindness to Help Animals in Trouble. Newkirk has worked for the animal-protection movement since 1972. Under her leadership in the 1970s as the District of Columbia's first female poundmaster, legislation was passed to...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth11 June 1949
I will be the last person to condemn ALF [the Animal Liberation Front].
...no movement for social change has ever succeeded without 'the militarism component'....Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out
Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals.
Euthanasia is the kindest gift to a dog or cat unwanted and unloved.
I find that as I get older I seem to become more of a Luddite... And hearing animal experimenters describe me as a Luddite--which used to think I was not. And now I think Ned Lud had the right idea and we should have stopped all the machinery way back when, and learned to live simple lives.
Since we can't count on the meat, egg, and dairy industries to protect animals from the most egregious forms of cruelty, what can we, as consumers, do? Opting out of paying someone to allow animals to die in a barn fire or at the slaughterhouse seems pretty reasonable.
Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses.
Eating meat is primitive, barbaric, and arrogant.
In order to be kind, one must do. There is no point in thinking good thoughts and not acting on them. There is no currency in wishing things were better but not rolling up one's sleeves and helping to change them.
When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
There's nothing humane about the flesh of animals who have had one or two or even three improvements made in their singularly rotten lives on today's factory farms.
Our nonviolent tactics are not as effective. We ask nicely for years and get nothing. Someone makes a threat, and it works.
In the end, I think it would be lovely if we stopped this whole notion of pets altogether,
Pet ownership is an absolutely abysmal situation brought about by human manipulation.