Ingrid Newkirk is the co-founder and current president of PETA, the world's largest animal rights organization. Her books include Free the Animals, You Can Save the Animals, 250 Things You Can Do to Make Your Cat Adore You, The Compassionate Cook, The PETA Celebrity Vegan Cookbook, and Kids Can Save the Animals.

Newkirk was born in England on July 11, 1949 and grew up in New Delhi, India. In the 1970s, Newkirk worked for Montgomery County (Maryland), and then for the District of Columbia, as an animal protection officer and deputy sheriff, before becoming DC’s first female poundmaster in 1978. She co-founded PETA in 1980 with established animal-rights activist Alex Pacheco.

Quotations

• Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal.

• I don’t use the word 'pet.' I think it’s speciesist language. I prefer 'companion animal.' For one thing, we would no longer allow breeding. People could not create different breeds. There would be no pet shops. If people had companion animals in their homes, those animals would have to be refugees from the animal shelters and the streets. You would have a protective relationship with them just as you would with an orphaned child. But as the surplus of cats and dogs (artificially engineered by centuries of forced breeding) declined, eventually companion animals would be phased out, and we would return to a more symbiotic relationship – enjoyment at a distance.

• Probably everything we do is a publicity stunt ... we are not here to gather members, to please, to placate, to make friends. We're here to hold the radical line.

• Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it. -- in Vogue, 1 September 1989

• When it comes to feelings such as pain, fear, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.

• The bottom line is that people don't have the right to manipulate or to breed dogs and cats... If people want toys, they should buy inanimate objects. If they want companionship, they should seek it with their own kind.

• Pet ownership is an absolutely abysmal situation brought about by human manipulation.

• I wish we all would get up and go into the labs and take the animals out or burn them down.

• In the end, I think it would be lovely if we stopped this whole notion of pets altogether.

• Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.

Reference

• Ingrid Newkirk biography
• PETA timeline