Compassion For the Animals Who Are Killed For Our Plates

Ingrid Newkirk is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Change.org asked Ms. Newkirk to respond to questions to provide context for her work and the causes she supports.

Change.org: What cause or causes would you most like to promote as a Changemaker and why?

I would like to urge people to have compassion for the animals who are killed for our plates. Factory-farmed animals are probably both the most severely abused animals and the animals who are abused in the largest numbers. More than 9 billion animals are killed for food in the U.S. every single year—that's more than the planet's entire human population. By far, more chickens are killed than any other animal, and they are afforded the least protection. They are exempt from even the meager protection of the Humane Slaughter Act, which means that it is perfectly legal to paralyze them instead of properly stunning them before their throats are cut and they are plunged into tanks of boiling water.

Change.org: If you could ask 1 million people to all do one thing to advance causes that matter to you, what would it be?

Go vegan. By simply refusing to put meat, eggs, and dairy on your plate, you can save the lives of more than 100 animals every year. You also help save the planet, since animal agriculture is one of the largest polluters and producers of greenhouse gasses (it produces more greenhouse gasses than all the world's cars and trucks combined), and you also help protect your own health (vegans slash their risk of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and other top killers). If you don’t know how to be vegan, try Chef Tal’s book, “The Conscious Cook,” or Alicia Silverstone’s “The Kind Diet” – both on the New York Times bestsellers list. And try ethnic vegan foods like Ethiopian, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Chinese where everything from split peas to tofu to beans and super pasta sauces will leave you amazed at the variety in the diet.

Change.org: When did you first know you wanted to dedicate your life to creating change and helping others?

When I was a little girl growing up in India, I saw a man beating an overloaded bullock who had collapsed from exhaustion. Even at that tender age—perhaps led by the example of my mother, who volunteered with Mother Teresa's charities—it did not occur to me simply to stand by and do nothing. But it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I started looking at animals in a different way. I was living in Maryland and studying to become a stockbroker when a neighbor abandoned some kittens. I took them to the local animal shelter, which was so run down and sad that I couldn’t walk away and took a job there. During my work as a cruelty investigator, I found a fox and a squirrel caught in steel traps, a pig left to starve on a farm, and other animals victimized by what I now know to be fairly routine cruelty. It made me realize that there needed to be a group like PETA out there fighting for all animals, not just dogs and cats, showing how easy it is to be compassionate instead of unthinkingly cruel.

Change.org: If you could ask President Obama and the U.S. Congress to do one thing to advance your cause, what would it be?

I would ask them to cut funding for archaic, inaccurate tests on animals and replace them with modern, high-tech research methods, such as the use of human cell and tissue cultures and computer models based on human genetic data. Millions of animals—dogs, cats, birds, rats, mice, and even endangered chimpanzees—are currently kept in barren cages in laboratories, frightened, alone and hurting. Cats have electrodes implanted in their heads, dogs are forced to run on treadmills as experimenters induce heart attacks in them, pregnant macaques are addicted to cocaine, and chimpanzees are infected with hepatitis and anthrax—all to produce results that are inaccurate predictors of human responses because species differ from one another in so many biologically significant ways. In the 21st century, with whole human DNA on the Internet and modern human cell culture techniques and high speed computers programmed with human data, we should be doing better than this.

Photo credit: Takver