Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Long time listeners may know the story of my introduction
Speaker 1: to the cause of animal rights. I was on a
Speaker 1: date with a woman who told me that she was
Speaker 1: a vegetarian. I told her I was too, except I
Speaker 1: wasn't yet. But life works in mysterious ways. Preventing animal
Speaker 1: suffering has become one of my greatest passions, and nobody
Speaker 1: was more central to that journey than my guest today.
Speaker 1: Ingrid new Kirk is the co founder of People for
Speaker 1: the Ethical Treatment of Animals or PETER. It may be
Speaker 1: America's best known animal rights organization thanks to its formidable
Speaker 1: combination of legal sophistication, scientific seriousness, and off the wall
Speaker 1: publicity stunts like this one showcasing a young volunteer in
Speaker 1: downtown Toronto. Folks, right now, I'm looking at an almost
Speaker 1: naked woman covered in rague spaghetti sauce. Yes, it must
Speaker 1: be another PETER protest. Yeah, this is our volunteers, nearly
Speaker 1: naked on a point to represent that just like us,
Speaker 1: animals have personalities, they're intelligent, they farm families and friendships.
Speaker 1: If given the chance to understand what drives Ingrid new Kirk,
Speaker 1: you have to understand something counterintuitive. Peter's focus is on
Speaker 1: the well being of individual creatures, not species. Species have
Speaker 1: come and gone throughout history, new Kirk argues, and that's okay.
Speaker 1: She would rather see some threatened or domesticated animals go
Speaker 1: extinct to see members of those species suffering at the
Speaker 1: hands of hunters or farmers. For some animals, they're better
Speaker 1: off not being managed and not being conserved, because what
Speaker 1: happens is you reintroduce the species and then you say, okay,
Speaker 1: now it's reached this level where we can hunt them
Speaker 1: as if they don't have relationships, and as if they
Speaker 1: as individuals aren't important. It's not about a species. It's
Speaker 1: about to me reducing suffering. And that's the pragmatic part
Speaker 1: is does it reduce suffering or not. We had a
Speaker 1: documentary at the Hampton's Film Festival. The film was called Trophy.
Speaker 1: It was the documentary but the South African rhino richards
Speaker 1: name was John Hume, who has the farm in Africa,
Speaker 1: who's trying to save the species, and the way that
Speaker 1: he saves the species he calls horns. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: a really thorny one, you know, it's thorny in a
Speaker 1: number of ways. I mean, I remember when Prince Philip
Speaker 1: decided long ago that we should farm spotted leopards so
Speaker 1: that women like Jackie Kennedy was wearing a leopard coat,
Speaker 1: that they would be farmed rather than we'd go out
Speaker 1: into the wild and shoot them. But that doesn't take
Speaker 1: into account the individual animals suffering. If you're taking the
Speaker 1: horn off and it's harmless, I'm not sure that that's
Speaker 1: a problem at all. But we act as if the
Speaker 1: world is sort of a Disney park. We want some
Speaker 1: of these, some of those, and some of the others
Speaker 1: so that they're always there for us to look at
Speaker 1: and for us to do whatever with. I'm not so
Speaker 1: keen on saving the species as saving the individuals. Well,
Speaker 1: to go back to the origins here of not only
Speaker 1: myself and my relationship with you and your organization, but
Speaker 1: your own career. You know, how did this start for you?
Speaker 1: How well? I've always cared about animals, but where I
Speaker 1: grew up in two places in England, mostly a little
Speaker 1: bit in Europe and mostly in England, and then when
Speaker 1: I was seven we went to India. But you know,
Speaker 1: as much as Indians are supposed to care about animals.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like Christians not cheating on their wives.
Speaker 1: It's the same all over the world, and that's good
Speaker 1: and as bad. But it didn't dawn on me. Even
Speaker 1: though I loved animals that I was eating them, I
Speaker 1: was wearing them. I had my first fur coat when
Speaker 1: I was nineteen. I thought I looked like the cat's whiskers.
Speaker 1: What your dad do? My father was a navigational engineer,
Speaker 1: so he did war projects, who designed bombing systems. So
Speaker 1: we would go to India to work on the Indo
Speaker 1: China War. When I came to America and he ate
Speaker 1: his way through the animal kingdom and took me with him.
Speaker 1: I was like his son, you know. We tried everything,
Speaker 1: but um much later, I had been a law enforcement officer.
Speaker 1: I had seen cruelty to animals on factual farms Maryland.
Speaker 1: In Montgomery County, Maryland, I was a sheriff, and so
Speaker 1: I went That happened because first I started with a
Speaker 1: humane society, and I thought, I want to know exactly
Speaker 1: how to prosecute a cruelty case. So I went to
Speaker 1: the Sheriff's office and they were just hiring their first
Speaker 1: women and so I got through the door, much to
Speaker 1: the resentment of the guys there, who thought, these women
Speaker 1: are never going to be able to do this, and
Speaker 1: that opened my eyes to cruelty. I went inspected laboratories,
Speaker 1: went on factory farms, saw one thing after another. Found
Speaker 1: a squirrel and a fox caught in steel traps some
Speaker 1: kids had set behind a seven eleven. One was alive,
Speaker 1: one was dead. And so I thought, why haven't I
Speaker 1: connected these dots? And so I stopped eating animals, and
Speaker 1: I stopped wearing animals, and I realized that in experimentation,
Speaker 1: it's not just a few animals used for these wonderful
Speaker 1: purposes to save children's lives or something who had treated
Speaker 1: with respect. It was lousy. And I found things in
Speaker 1: those labs that changed me forever in my perspective. And
Speaker 1: I thought, if I didn't know this and I care
Speaker 1: about animals, then there are a lot of people who
Speaker 1: are just like me. I need to spread this word
Speaker 1: and then do the homework, find out what people can
Speaker 1: do instead of this. There were scant choices back then,
Speaker 1: and then helped them make transitions, and that's how it began.
Speaker 1: And had Peter been started by someone else and you
Speaker 1: joined a group of or you phone. I founded it
Speaker 1: and then I wrote Alex check O in and friends.
Speaker 1: I met him when I was running the d C
Speaker 1: what was called then the dog Pound. It's now all
Speaker 1: Lardie Darts the Animal Shelter. But I was the pound master,
Speaker 1: an old old school pounder. I was the first lay
Speaker 1: pound master. It had always been a veterinarian. And he
Speaker 1: came in one day. He had just got off the
Speaker 1: Sea Shepherd. They had been out looking for the whaling
Speaker 1: ships and they had actually sunk one. And he said
Speaker 1: to me, yes, we found out that we both similar
Speaker 1: in that way. So he said, a youth vegetarian. I
Speaker 1: said yes, because I had read Peter Singer's book Animal
Speaker 1: Liberation that had changed me. And he said, but why
Speaker 1: are you putting milk in your tea? I've always put
Speaker 1: milk in my tea. I'm English English. I said, they
Speaker 1: don't kill the cow, and he said, well, actually they do.
Speaker 1: He said, where is this giant retirement home for cows
Speaker 1: that you think exist? And then of course he told
Speaker 1: me about veal farming being created so we could take
Speaker 1: the mill. That was that, And then I told him
Speaker 1: about animals and laboratories because I had inspected them, and
Speaker 1: it went from there were sort of like Jack Spratt
Speaker 1: and his wife. We both knew a bit about something.
Speaker 1: I didn't know anything about Wales, and so we thought,
Speaker 1: let's put this group together, and he was one of
Speaker 1: the founding members. And silver Spring Monkeys take us through that. Well.
Speaker 1: That was interesting because back then no one thought they
Speaker 1: could do anything about animals in laboratories, even if in
Speaker 1: their hearts they knew that there was something that was
Speaker 1: probably horrible going on. So I looked at a list
Speaker 1: put out by the U. S Department of Agriculture and
Speaker 1: chose the nearest one to my apartment where there was
Speaker 1: a lab that they inspected, supposedly, and um Alex was
Speaker 1: a law student at g W. I had a full
Speaker 1: time job at the Pounds. I said to him, why
Speaker 1: don't you wander over there and see if you can
Speaker 1: get a job. So he wandered over and they said,
Speaker 1: no jobs, but we'll take you as a volunteer. And
Speaker 1: so once he got in, I knew from my law
Speaker 1: enforcement training how to put a case together. And what
Speaker 1: he saw was worse than what we had imagined, because
Speaker 1: there were seventeen monkeys in small metal cages with broken wires.
Speaker 1: Many of the monkeys had lost their fingers because the experimenter,
Speaker 1: who didn't have one minute of medical training. He was
Speaker 1: a psychologist, had cut open their backs, interfered with their nerves,
Speaker 1: and had rendered most of their arms useless. He would
Speaker 1: put them in an electric shock chamber and shock them
Speaker 1: so that they had to use that what they called
Speaker 1: de affronted arm. These were blood splattered converted refrigerators he
Speaker 1: had made into basically tortured chamber us. So we documented
Speaker 1: it all. We bought committed. How well I would hide
Speaker 1: in the parking lot in a big cardboard box. We
Speaker 1: had radio shack walkie talkies. He had one. I had one.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they worked and if someone pulled into the parking
Speaker 1: lot at night, which is when he would go in
Speaker 1: and take the photographs, I would try to alert him.
Speaker 1: And after that we bought in. Actually he was hidden inside.
Speaker 1: He got his job as a volunteer, so he could
Speaker 1: want what did they tell people they were doing me?
Speaker 1: Were they contracted that somebody was hiring who was hiring them?
Speaker 1: They got lots of grants, and one of their grants
Speaker 1: was from the National Institutes of Health, but there was
Speaker 1: no oversight. So the purpose of this de affrontation experiment
Speaker 1: with these poor monkeys who had all been captured in
Speaker 1: the wild, was to see if a lecture shock would
Speaker 1: cure stroke victims who had lost the use of their arm.
Speaker 1: And of course, are you going to electro shock somebody
Speaker 1: with a stroke whose luck lost the use of their arm. Also,
Speaker 1: they didn't lose it that way by having nerves cut
Speaker 1: in their backs. A stroke is completely different. But people
Speaker 1: were applying for grants for all sorts of full purposes,
Speaker 1: and nobody ever tapped them on the shoulder and said
Speaker 1: that doesn't sound feasible. They just accepted it, and we
Speaker 1: did eventually have his grant suspended and then cut off
Speaker 1: all the monkeys taken away. They them, yes, many of
Speaker 1: them survived. They first went to the National Institutes of Health.
Speaker 1: Well actually they first went to one of our members basements.
Speaker 1: And then when we realized the National Institutes of Health
Speaker 1: was applying pressure to the police and that they were
Speaker 1: going to be given back to this experimenter, all the
Speaker 1: monkeys disappeared. They went on a little trip and we
Speaker 1: negotiated with the Underground Railroad of Monkeys. Correct We negotiated
Speaker 1: with the police, and in return for prosecuting Edward Taube,
Speaker 1: the monkeys came back. They ended up in another spacious laboratory,
Speaker 1: in a clean place, not a happy place, and eventually
Speaker 1: some were retired to the San Diego Zoo. And the
Speaker 1: person that was prosecuted in the name was Edward Taub
Speaker 1: And what happened. He was found guilty by a jury.
Speaker 1: He appealed, He went before a judge and the judge
Speaker 1: ruled that in the state of Maryland, a federally funded
Speaker 1: experimenter was exempt from state law. Is he still alive today?
Speaker 1: He is. He hasn't touched an animal since he's at
Speaker 1: the University of Alabama and he teaches classes. What kinds
Speaker 1: of companies are among the rogues gallery here, the youthin
Speaker 1: Growl among the worst in terms of what they've done
Speaker 1: to animals. The pharmaceutical industry certainly take surprise there. We
Speaker 1: have just actually managed to change a few of the
Speaker 1: really big ones. You you'd recognize them. But what were
Speaker 1: they doing, for example, well, testing depression drugs, pie, feeding
Speaker 1: them to animals, dropping the animals into vats of water
Speaker 1: with sheer sides, and then just recording how long it
Speaker 1: took for the animals to stop struggling. The animals obviously
Speaker 1: think they're going to drown. They're totally panicked. You see
Speaker 1: them dive to the bottom and look for an escape,
Speaker 1: and of course they can't there isn't one. They claw
Speaker 1: at the sides of these containers they can't get. Usually hamsters, rats,
Speaker 1: my small animals because they're convenient, they're cheap, and eventually
Speaker 1: they'll decapitate them or they'll they'll freeze them. Um. We
Speaker 1: have a woman now who is capturing wild songbirds. Birds
Speaker 1: are very popular in the lab. You never think of that. Why, Um,
Speaker 1: they're easy to handle and they're small, and again that's
Speaker 1: not a scientific reason to use them. They have almost
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the human animals physiology. She captures
Speaker 1: wild songbirds. We actually found her illegally capturing some, even
Speaker 1: though she's on a federal grant. She puts electrodes in
Speaker 1: their heads, she puts them in a cage, and she
Speaker 1: does various things to them and just for forty years
Speaker 1: has been recording what they do, whether they can tell
Speaker 1: of the sunlight, whether their song is affected. We have
Speaker 1: owls being used at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. In Colorado,
Speaker 1: we have crows being used and you think, you know,
Speaker 1: find something useful that you can do with your lives.
Speaker 1: Stop torturing animals. We have lungs on a chip, we
Speaker 1: have organs on a chip. We have whole human DNA
Speaker 1: on the internet. You know you can take slivers of
Speaker 1: human brain now and throw it in a Petrie dish.
Speaker 1: What are you doing tormenting, traumatizing and eventually killing these
Speaker 1: animals that you've heard so much? Advances that equal the
Speaker 1: advances in crash tests where they would crash tests live animals,
Speaker 1: dogs and pigs. Now, of course it's dummies and computer
Speaker 1: modeling and so forth to achieve this, and are virtually
Speaker 1: all at least domestic manufacturers. No more animals live tests
Speaker 1: internationally alex so exciting. Yes, we stopped them all. There
Speaker 1: is no car company that chooses anything but crash test
Speaker 1: dummies these days. No pigs, no badans, nobody, It's all
Speaker 1: finished Ingrad new Kirk, one of the founders of Peter.
Speaker 1: If you're a fan of the organization or just want
Speaker 1: to know more about the tactics that gained it notoriety,
Speaker 1: you'll want to listen to my conversation with Dan Matthews.
Speaker 1: He's Peter's senior vice president for campaigns, the brain behind
Speaker 1: I'd rather go naked than were for and lots more.
Speaker 1: One of his biggest successes involved Calvin Klein. It started
Speaker 1: with a plan to occupy the designer's office. We asked
Speaker 1: to meet, We asked to show him the evidence, and
Speaker 1: we never got a call back. So I went to
Speaker 1: his office UH and case the place. I were all black,
Speaker 1: so it looked like I might be part of the
Speaker 1: fashion pact that was there. Made friends with the security
Speaker 1: guard UH, and came back the next day with a
Speaker 1: dozen other interns and we went up and took over
Speaker 1: his office, and we put literature on all the desks.
Speaker 1: We were screaming, Calvin Klein kills animals. Uh. Somebody spray
Speaker 1: painted kills animals beneath the Calvin Klein logo. So I
Speaker 1: picked up my phone four days later and it's Calvin
Speaker 1: Klein's vice president asking if I would come in for
Speaker 1: a meeting. Flash forward many years now, he and Calvin
Speaker 1: are good friends. You can get a link to my
Speaker 1: full interview with Dan Matthews by texting more Peter to
Speaker 1: seven zero zero one. That's m O r E p
Speaker 1: E t A to seven zero zero one. Now back
Speaker 1: with Peter founder Ingrid new Kirk. We all know people
Speaker 1: who say they love to go vegetarian but for one thing,
Speaker 1: taste new Kirk. Here's that too, which he says, it's
Speaker 1: an old excuse. Times have changed, Thank god. I think
Speaker 1: you can get probably anything as a taste alike these days.
Speaker 1: I mean, some of the old veggie burgers used to
Speaker 1: taste like dog food, terrible. But now I mean, you've
Speaker 1: got the Beyond burger. They taste tested. With people who
Speaker 1: love a regular burger, they prefer the Beyond sometimes. And
Speaker 1: you can dress anyway you want. Now everything has changed.
Speaker 1: You've got pineapple leather and apple leather, and I mean
Speaker 1: all these wonderful things. And people are talking about the
Speaker 1: environmental destructiveness of animal skins. But people would come to
Speaker 1: me and say, it's one thing if you want to
Speaker 1: protect animals and performance. It's one thing if you want
Speaker 1: to protect animals in terms of clothing, medical experimentation, the
Speaker 1: whole body. But don't tell me what to eat. Well, look,
Speaker 1: our taste bud's usually for most of us, we've grown
Speaker 1: up eating meat. As I said, you know, my father
Speaker 1: and I basically ate our way through the animal kingdom.
Speaker 1: The only two things that I wouldn't eat. One was
Speaker 1: tongue because i'd seen a cow stick it out and
Speaker 1: I don't know that. And the other was intestines. My
Speaker 1: father loved intestines and my mother would cook them in
Speaker 1: the house. Would stink too high heaven. But I do
Speaker 1: think that people cling to reasons to continue to have
Speaker 1: the taste they've grown up with and they've come to
Speaker 1: like I did, because you know, I didn't want to
Speaker 1: give up meat. Now as time has passed, you look
Speaker 1: back at it and it's no different than roadkill, except
Speaker 1: itselfered more. But we've got faux grow instead of foi gras.
Speaker 1: We have a camera there instead of a camem bear.
Speaker 1: We have all these things. There's even a cavey art
Speaker 1: that's like Caviare this beef burger substitute. I'm so ecstatic
Speaker 1: about that idea because fast food companies they're everywhere, They're everywhere,
Speaker 1: and you have a chance to eat a vegetarian option,
Speaker 1: and every one of these places that served that food.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great, great, great beginning. It's fantastic
Speaker 1: because only vegans will go to a vegan restaurant unless
Speaker 1: someone's dragging them there. But if you can go to
Speaker 1: Denny's and you can, or you can go to Duncan
Speaker 1: Donuts and get a Beyond Burger. And they're not just
Speaker 1: selling it on the side, they're advertising it on the board.
Speaker 1: People are wearing t shirts saying try this. And I
Speaker 1: wonder when the time will come in Beyond Burger or
Speaker 1: Impossible will open their own fast food restaurants which are
Speaker 1: purely vegetarian. Absolutely. If I have to tell you, Christie
Speaker 1: Hine and I were locked up for protesting leather in
Speaker 1: New York once and we went down into I think
Speaker 1: they call it the dungeon in the jails, the tombs,
Speaker 1: that's it, sure, in the called the tombs, and they
Speaker 1: gave us that special sandwich which was the vegetarian version
Speaker 1: of the ballogny sandwich, which was the sandwich without the ballooney.
Speaker 1: You know, Paul McCartney was fooled by his wife. Linda
Speaker 1: McCartney used to say, I cheated on Paul, And what
Speaker 1: she meant was he used to love Lasagnia and she
Speaker 1: got these soy crumbles that she made and she put
Speaker 1: them in as if they were ground beef, and he
Speaker 1: never knew the difference. Later she told him and they
Speaker 1: both became a vegetarian. I cheated on Paul. She was
Speaker 1: one of the great proponents. Loved her. She was just
Speaker 1: an animals angel. And we still have roses in our
Speaker 1: garden at the Peter Headquarters in Norfolk, in her honor,
Speaker 1: Linda's roses. And so there's nothing in the animal kingdom though,
Speaker 1: even eggs that are freely given, that are free range eggs,
Speaker 1: there's nothing in the animal kingdom you think is allowable,
Speaker 1: you kid, I don't think you need it. I do
Speaker 1: think it's allowable. If you come across an abandoned egg,
Speaker 1: go for it. If you want to eat road kilc
Speaker 1: for it. But I don't think we need it. And
Speaker 1: this anthropological argument is bogus, you know, because Richard Leakey
Speaker 1: is the father of anthropology basically, and he says, hang on,
Speaker 1: we're primates like monkeys, chimpanzees, bonobos, and the primary diet
Speaker 1: of a primate is not meat. Some chimpanzees, not gorillas,
Speaker 1: not not other do eat meat. They'll go hunting like
Speaker 1: a pack of young men and they'll eat maybe a
Speaker 1: colobus monkey they'll gang up on this monkey like a
Speaker 1: street gang and tear them apart, living from them. But
Speaker 1: the primates diet is not meat, and so if we
Speaker 1: really want to be true, we're not carnivores. We don't
Speaker 1: have these giant teeth and these claws, we don't hunt
Speaker 1: at night. We're omnivores. Are there any gradations for you?
Speaker 1: Meaning if people go out and they are, especially people
Speaker 1: who live in a culture, we're hunting, because I'm often
Speaker 1: asked this question, we're hunting as a part of their culture,
Speaker 1: and they're going to store or cure or freeze that
Speaker 1: food and eat that food. You're still opposed to that,
Speaker 1: you know, it kind of smacks you're trying to take
Speaker 1: our guns away. You're trying to take our hunting away. Well,
Speaker 1: I'd love to take the hunting away. There was a
Speaker 1: time when hunting was what many people had to do
Speaker 1: to survive, and just as other animals hunt, some humans
Speaker 1: had to hunt. I think those times have also largely gone,
Speaker 1: and most people who hunt today are not just getting
Speaker 1: one caribou to put it on the table. It does happen. Um.
Speaker 1: I think being pragmatic is very good. You have to
Speaker 1: have your head in the sky and your feet on
Speaker 1: the ground. But these days, I don't really think that
Speaker 1: we're looking at say, Aboriginal people somewhere may maybe they
Speaker 1: have to that's fine, but we're looking at you know,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump Jr. Going out to put a head on
Speaker 1: his wall. That's a different story. But talk for a moment,
Speaker 1: if you would, about what your organization did in terms
Speaker 1: of circuses and the work you did in order to
Speaker 1: expose circuses. So we went to the Department of Justice,
Speaker 1: to the Attorney General's office, and we had very carefully,
Speaker 1: painstakingly documented how Ringling had allowed this lion to burn
Speaker 1: to death basically in the Mohave Desert. Three baby elephants.
Speaker 1: They killed them in training. One brand from the trainer
Speaker 1: with the bullhook, went into the pond and drowned. Another
Speaker 1: one fell off one of those pedestals they used to
Speaker 1: train them. Another one three times in a day. When
Speaker 1: he was deathly ill, they forced him back into the ring.
Speaker 1: So we went to the d o J. And we said, look,
Speaker 1: Ringland gets away with this all the time. So that
Speaker 1: resulted in the biggest fine in US history against a circus.
Speaker 1: We were relentless with that, and in the end they
Speaker 1: just had to give up. But today we're very happy.
Speaker 1: We got trip Advisor and Airbnb to say we will
Speaker 1: not promote any animal acts, any wild animal acts. No
Speaker 1: sea worlds, no dolphins shows, no elephants to rides, nothing.
Speaker 1: But also we ask people don't go to these places
Speaker 1: that say we're an elephant camp of orphanage in Thailand
Speaker 1: or can rescue. No, those babies are taken stolen from
Speaker 1: their mothers. You know, this applies to people that are
Speaker 1: political figures. This applies to people who are corporate leaders
Speaker 1: who are trying to sell a product or a service
Speaker 1: and make money for their investors. And this applies to
Speaker 1: people in the n g O world and in the
Speaker 1: not for profit world. And that is the leadership. Real leadership.
Speaker 1: Great leadership is helping people to see something they need
Speaker 1: to do correct. What is the relationship between global warming,
Speaker 1: climate change and animal rights. Well, you know, it's totally connected.
Speaker 1: And there are things that are unpopular to say, perhaps,
Speaker 1: but they're hard truths. You take Australia and you know
Speaker 1: that animal based agriculture with methane carbon dioxide, that that's
Speaker 1: contributing to climate change more than anything. United Nations says.
Speaker 1: You could put all the transportation, you know, trains, planes, automobiles,
Speaker 1: put it in one heap. You still don't equal the
Speaker 1: damage done by animal based agriculture. It's for food, and
Speaker 1: of course they are stripping the Amazon, burning it, and
Speaker 1: we've seen that so that they can grow soy crops.
Speaker 1: And people say, oh, well, isn't soy environmentally destructive? Yes,
Speaker 1: but it's being grown for animal feed. Is the least
Speaker 1: efficient way of getting food is to grow soy, cut
Speaker 1: all the habitat down, then grow soy and then feed
Speaker 1: it to chickens and pigs and and cows. So animal
Speaker 1: based agriculture is definitely part of it. Australia, of course,
Speaker 1: it's just one big sheep farm. Basically plastic pollution. You
Speaker 1: can stop using straws, you can stop using those small
Speaker 1: plastic bottles, but really the biggest polluter in the ocean
Speaker 1: is discarded fishing gear. It's killing the whales. They are drowning,
Speaker 1: tangled in crab nets. All the turtles, the dolphins are
Speaker 1: what they have by catch, you know, and they are
Speaker 1: trolling with these football field sized nets, taking up every
Speaker 1: living thing, and then they discard them. They dropped them overboard.
Speaker 1: That is the biggest polluter, and a lot of those
Speaker 1: nets are plastic. I'm wondering how you come out on zoos.
Speaker 1: Are there any kind of animals on display operations that
Speaker 1: you do uh support? I think that zoos are changing. Um,
Speaker 1: the big zoos really understand now that they can't provide
Speaker 1: the habitat, for example, four elephants. You've got the Detroit Zoo,
Speaker 1: the wonderful director there and he said, you know when
Speaker 1: the last elephant goes, the last elephant goes, He said,
Speaker 1: we realize they're so intelligent, there's so complex. There's no
Speaker 1: way that we can possibly pretend to be looking after
Speaker 1: their interests. So that sort of evolution is happening because
Speaker 1: we know so much more behaviorally about animals than we
Speaker 1: ever did. They can actually tell a herd one or
Speaker 1: two miles away that there's a threat or that they
Speaker 1: found water in a drought, and no one can hear
Speaker 1: it except with instrumentation, except the elephants themselves, and they
Speaker 1: understand what they're saying. So zoos can't deal with that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. First, we have to close the roadside zoos.
Speaker 1: Those are little pits of despair, and you've helped us
Speaker 1: with that all the bears that are on cement, turning
Speaker 1: in circles, banging their heads against the bar, banging met
Speaker 1: you know, going insane. And the same with tigers and
Speaker 1: the same with lions. I think we've taken eighty three
Speaker 1: tigers out of those places is and they can now
Speaker 1: roam in Colorado and these vast enclosures and looked after that,
Speaker 1: those have to go. No one should stop the car
Speaker 1: and go to a roadside zoo, and then let's hope
Speaker 1: that the other ones evolve. Who's someone that you would
Speaker 1: say that you really had an incredibly positive experience in
Speaker 1: addressing one of your issues. I think there are so many,
Speaker 1: because you know, people are people, and whether they're the
Speaker 1: head of the corporation or they're out on the street,
Speaker 1: some care and some don't, and some can have their
Speaker 1: eyes opened and some won't. UM. The very first one
Speaker 1: I think who really impressed me was the head of
Speaker 1: Benetton at the time, and later somebody at Gillette. Both
Speaker 1: issued cosmetics. Benetton had a perfume. Gillette, of course, their
Speaker 1: whole line is from toothpaste to shampoo and so on.
Speaker 1: UM all used animals and experiments and Gillette actually said
Speaker 1: to us. You have changed our corporate culture. We have
Speaker 1: a lot of scientists on the Peter staff and they're
Speaker 1: in all kinds of disciplines and they've read every regulation
Speaker 1: and they know all the alternatives that they could ever research,
Speaker 1: and we actually fund alternatives to some things. And they
Speaker 1: were able to go and meet with these corporations and
Speaker 1: say here's a better way to do it. And to
Speaker 1: their credit, both of those corporations listened, thought it through
Speaker 1: and decided, actually, you're right. And it took some doing,
Speaker 1: but they changed. You've had a lot of success over
Speaker 1: the years with the fashion industry back and I was
Speaker 1: invited to a party at Anna Winter's house and there
Speaker 1: was a moment where I just was tempted to wear
Speaker 1: a Pita T shirt. But you've had tremendous success in
Speaker 1: converting people in the fashion industry to get off of
Speaker 1: fur and so forth. What are some of your latest victories?
Speaker 1: There were not Anna, I've never had any success with her,
Speaker 1: and of course actually occupied her office at some point.
Speaker 1: But we've had super success and now it's really terrific.
Speaker 1: We just disbanded our I'd rather go naked and where
Speaker 1: for campaign because we don't need it. Anymore. I mean, yes,
Speaker 1: they're Canada. Goose, you know, has still coyote fur on
Speaker 1: the trim and so on. But it's these are outliers.
Speaker 1: Now you've got Galliano, Gucci, Donna, tellaver Sacchi. You can't
Speaker 1: name a designer. The sale just don't. Thanks to you. Thanks.
Speaker 1: We were merciless, threw a lot of paint on people
Speaker 1: on the way. We also negotiated and we got people
Speaker 1: to not want it, and I think that was the
Speaker 1: key is as you people have got to go along
Speaker 1: with it. And the next generation up was not like
Speaker 1: my generation and generation after it. They just thought, I
Speaker 1: really I'd rather be seeing dead than in for and
Speaker 1: they shunned it. And then all these other things came
Speaker 1: along and they're not synthetic, they're just natural fibers and fat.
Speaker 1: Anna Wintour was just seen in a Stella McCartney faux
Speaker 1: fur that you would not mistake for a real fur
Speaker 1: at all. It's so beautifully crafted and obviously so different,
Speaker 1: but soft and beautiful and just the epitome of fashion.
Speaker 1: She looks so much better in it than all the
Speaker 1: assaulted animal things. Do you find that when people are
Speaker 1: exposed two film, when you show them inside. I did
Speaker 1: the documentary Meets Your Meet with You guys a while ago,
Speaker 1: and when you show them the conditions there and how
Speaker 1: animals go from farm to table if you will, does
Speaker 1: it have an effect you think, on a critical mass
Speaker 1: of people or most people don't care. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: they say a pictures worth a thousand words, videos worth
Speaker 1: much much more. A lot of people wake up for
Speaker 1: the first time when they see those images, because it's
Speaker 1: not just you telling them, and they have to wonder
Speaker 1: if that's true. They can actually see it with their
Speaker 1: own eyes. They might as well be standing there. Of course,
Speaker 1: they're all the Attila the hunt types, and there are
Speaker 1: people who cling to what they want to continue to do,
Speaker 1: even when you show them that there's suffering involved in it.
Speaker 1: You'd have to be a very strong, odd callous person
Speaker 1: to say, well, yes, that's what they go through. The fear,
Speaker 1: they smell the blood, and you know, I've stood on
Speaker 1: the slaughterhouse floor and all of them are petrified. And
Speaker 1: then just they know what's happening. They absolutely know what's happening.
Speaker 1: And I was in Taiwan at a dog soup slaughterhouse
Speaker 1: and it was the exact same eyes on the dogs
Speaker 1: who smell it, they hear it. It's in the air
Speaker 1: to them. Their nostrils are so sensitive as any cow,
Speaker 1: any chicken, any pig. Yeah, absolutely, throwing the piglets against
Speaker 1: the wall, punching the sheep in the face. I don't
Speaker 1: think anything makes me more disturbed than seeing that. It's
Speaker 1: like abu grape for animals. The attitude is I've got you,
Speaker 1: and now I'm going to show you whose boss. And
Speaker 1: you think how smaller person you have to be that
Speaker 1: you think that it builds you up to be so
Speaker 1: mean and disgusting and cause such pain it cannot get
Speaker 1: away from you, cannot escape and would love to if
Speaker 1: they could. Um, you see so much domination, bullying, people
Speaker 1: actually getting their kicks out of A person takes a
Speaker 1: cinder block and drops it on a crippled sow's head
Speaker 1: and they laughed. They just think it's so funny. Well,
Speaker 1: you've taught the world a lot. You've taught the world
Speaker 1: a great deal, and I hope you're very proud of
Speaker 1: the work you've done. You're very kind and as you say,
Speaker 1: it's taken everybody six point five million members and supporters.
Speaker 1: When we put out an action alert, we couldn't do it,
Speaker 1: and as all those people, it pulled a heart string
Speaker 1: and they thought, I'll be part of this solution. But
Speaker 1: I cry a lot, I feel a lot, and sometimes
Speaker 1: I do things that are provocative just because I can't
Speaker 1: get someone's attention on an issue that's vitally serious for
Speaker 1: the animals. But you're right, negotiation and persuasion are usually
Speaker 1: better than litigation and demonstrations. Any day. You have a
Speaker 1: new book out called Animal Kind Remarkable Discoveries about Animals
Speaker 1: and the remarkable ways we can be kind to them.
Speaker 1: This is what book you've written. How many of you written?
Speaker 1: I've written twelve. But this is my favorite, of course,
Speaker 1: because I really think it speaks to the way people
Speaker 1: are thinking about animals today. They see those videos and
Speaker 1: they have learned so much and they now think, well,
Speaker 1: maybe there are some more things I can do. And
Speaker 1: so two parts telling you who animals are, how or
Speaker 1: inspiring they are, and the second part is all the
Speaker 1: things you can do in your daily life. Ingrid new
Speaker 1: Kirk the founding figure of the modern animal rights movement.
Speaker 1: You can learn more about her work at Peter dot org.
Speaker 1: To animal Kind, her new book about animal cognition and
Speaker 1: psychology can be found in the show description that Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing dot org. While many of us remain quarantined
Speaker 1: due to a pandemic purportedly caused by the handling, slaughter,
Speaker 1: and marketing of animals for food. Now might be a
Speaker 1: good time for you to acquaint yourself with the writing
Speaker 1: of Ingrad new Kirk. You're listening to Here's the Thing.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin.