UnchainedTV: PETA's Ingrid Newkirk Turns 75 & Reveals Her Fascinating Life!

0:01 We have a very exciting show for you today with some breaking news. It is Ingrid Newkirk's 75th birthday. This is the woman who launched PETA back in 1980, the world's most powerful, most influential animal rights organisation. And leave it to Ingrid Newkirk to use her birthday not to celebrate herself, but to issue a call to action to you, to you to speak for voiceless animals. There are 75 simple ways that you can help animals for Ingrid's birthday.

0:45 Animals used in experimentation, food, animals used for clothing, animals used for entertainment, companion animals, of course, wildlife, as well as those poor creatures used for dissection. There are many, many other ways that you can help celebrate Ingrid Newkirk's birthday. And I am so honoured that we have Ingrid Newkirk, my hero here for the hour on Unchained TV, straight out to you, Ingrid, happy birthday. Thank you. I'm the same person I ever was. I don't know what happened that I came to be 75, but I'm as determined as ever to do as much as possible for animals.

1:28 I just hate that the clock is still ticking. Well, tell us, you founded PETA way back in 1980. How far have we come? Oh boy, we have come a long, long, long, long way. I always say it's like a massive mountain range that we have to conquer or we have to climb. But we have gone up and up and up and we've got a long way to go, but it's nothing like what it was in 1980. And I guess people who are 20 today or 15 or 25 haven't the faintest clue of how there weren't all these extraordinary options available in 1980.

2:14 I mean, we didn't even have the internet, so you had to leaflet on the street, but you couldn't get plant milk to save your life. So it's been extraordinary. Well, I always say you are my hero because every single day, I get a call to action from PETA and every single day I follow that call to action. And what's so fantastic about it is once you sign up to PETA.org, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. In 10, 15 seconds, you can send letters out to your members of Congress, your representatives and your senators, to the head of the USDA, to the head of the NIH.

2:58 It is so unbelievable, the effectiveness of your organisation. It is a fine-tuned machine and that's why they come after you because you are the largest and most powerful animal rights organisation in the world. So I wanna talk to you about some big moments. I don't think a lot of people know your life story. You were born in England, but you moved to India when you were a child. Will you tell us about your formative years and how they influenced you devoting your life to speaking up for voiceless animals? Well, Jane, I'm the poster child for slow learning because I grew up in the land of Ahimsa from the time I was seven years old until I was 16.

3:44 And you'd think that I would have emerged at least as a vegetarian, but I didn't. I grew up in a family that we considered ourselves animal lovers. My mother, bless her heart, she adored children. She loved animals, but we never connected the dots between the shoes that we had. I had a wild cat fur hat from Kashmir. We had ivory on the ornamentation on the sideboard. We had an elephant's foot umbrella stand in the hallway and people would come over and talk about pig sticking, which is going out and hunting wild boar.

4:25 So all those things were going on, but my friends were all vegetarian. They were all Indian. Nobody was vegan, but I met the Jains, which is a wonderful religious sect. And they would be so considerate of animals. They would sweep the ground before they walked to make sure they didn't step on insects. They would never have a meal after sundown because insects might be drawn to the light of the cooking fire, all sorts of things like that. But when I went back to England, I was still a meat and potatoes person and I loved organ meats and all that stuff. But I will say this.

5:06 Our house was full of injured animals, stray animals, and stray and injured people. Unwed mothers who'd been thrown out of their home. We worked for the leper colony. We worked for Mother Teresa. We packed pills, we stuffed toys for kids because my mother said, even though she didn't understand the whole concept, she said, it doesn't matter who suffers. It matters that they suffer and what you can do about it. So I grew up stopping people on the street from beating the bullocks that pulled the heavy carts, taking in the stray dogs with mange and had all sorts of experiences like that, but still kept on eating and wearing animals and buying things that were tested on them.

5:52 It just wasn't on the radar. Wow, well, your story is so inspirational because you're so honest. I mean, some people might say, well, it'd be easy to pretend I was born perfect, but very few people are born vegan. Very few people are perfect at any point. So by expressing your journey, you give everyone hope that they can move forward. Now, you launched PETA in 1980 and in the 44 years you've accomplished so much, let's go back to what I would consider, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, a pivotal image and a pivotal moment in the development of PETA as a global organisation.

6:36 This image, this image, tell us what this image is all about and what impact it had on the world. Well, when we started PETA, I was already a law enforcement officer and I had been inside laboratories, big ones, the US Navy laboratory, which became Walter Reed and is where the presidents go to get their medical exams. I'd been inside NIH's, their pride and joy facility, their flagship facility in Poolsville, Maryland, where they keep all the monkeys, but I hooked up with a young man who came into the animal shelter where I was working and when together we formed PETA because I figured if people hadn't seen inside those places, they hadn't read Animal Liberation, which was a pivotal moment for me reading that book, they probably had no idea that the money they were spending on household products and shampoo and shoes and belts and food was going to hurt animals that they really thought they cared about.

7:50 So we formed the organisation. He, Alex, his name was, didn't have any experience with laboratories. He'd been out on a whaling ship or an anti-whaling ship called the Sea Shepherd and they had been tracking down whaling vessels and they actually sunk one. And so he had a wealth of experience. He'd been in England disrupting fox hunts and so on. So I had a completely different set of experiences, stopping trapping and working to end pet shop cruelties and going into laboratories. So I thought, well, he should get some experience. So we looked in the United States Department of Agriculture list of the laboratories that have to be registered with the government, animal experimentation places.

8:39 And right near my apartment, there was one. It was called the Institute for Behavioural Research, which sounds really grand. Turned out to be basically a warehouse down a dirt road, just awful place. Nobody would ever find it. And he went along, knocked on the door and asked for a job. And they said, well, they didn't have any jobs, but he could volunteer if he liked. So he did. And when he went inside, he was able to take pictures. I would sit outside in a cardboard box in a car to let him know with a Radio Shack walkie talkie if anyone was coming so he could put the camera away.

9:23 And he would take pictures of what was happening to these poor monkeys. There was 17 macaque monkeys, 16 of whom had come from the Philippines, captured from the jungle. And they were in these, and one other one that was bred in captivity, a rhesus macaque. They were in these tiny, rusted, broken wired cages, barely bigger than their bodies. They couldn't stand up or stretch their arms. And they were missing most of their fingers. Because the experimenter, who Jane was, as you know, a psychologist, he had no medical training, no veterinary training at all, was getting a lot of money from the federal government to open up their backs, perform surgery on them, deafferentate them, which means cutting some of the nerves in their spines so that one or both of their arms would be almost or totally useless.

10:24 Then he would put them in this converted mini fridge that he had made into an electrical device, and he would shock them to make them use their bad arms. This was all, this is all supposed to be to help people. This is the stated intent of his grant application, to help people with therapy for stroke. I mean, can you imagine locking someone with a stroke in a refrigerator and giving them electric shocks if they don't use a bad arm? And he was- The whole thing is insane. It's insane. It's sociopathic. Yeah, and it still is. I mean, throughout the National Institutes of Health, which is where we have a massive campaign now.

11:08 I mean, Fauci was just before Congress, and his boss was Francis Collins, still advises President Biden, and they admitted. They have no idea when they give money to a laboratory, overseas, for example, if there are any laws or regulations, and at this Silver Spring Lab, there were no inspections. A U.S. Department of Agriculture man would come, and he would sit and have coffee in the front office, and he would never even go in the back and look at the monkeys in their cages. Oh my God. Jane, we found a barrel of dead monkeys with their arms bandaged up who had died of gangrene and other things because of no medical care.

11:53 And if anyone thinks, oh, that must have been an aberration, oh gosh, that sort of stuff doesn't go on, I inspected labs. I know it goes on, and it goes on today as if you go to peter .org, you'll see the videos. You'll see the photographs. You'll read about what they're getting money to do, and we just closed down a massive lab in Columbia, South America. I wanna talk to you about that, but first I wanna play a clip of Bill Maher basically saying the same thing you're saying on national television. New rule, listen to PETA. According to polls, the majority of people now agree with what PETA's been saying since 1980.

12:34 Experiments on animals are not only cruel, they don't work. 95% of new medications that work when tested on animals fail in humans. 95%. A drug tested on a mouse has about as much chance of making it to the market as Joe Exotic has of seeing his mullet come back in fashion. Tax payers have spent billions funding junk science like cutting open cats' skulls and deafening them or tearing baby monkeys from their mothers and tormenting them with loud noises and rubber snakes, all the while admitting that their work isn't applicable to humans. These are the sort of things that if a child did them, you'd know they were gonna grow up to be a serial killer.

13:15 And the National Institutes of Health that funds these experiments, more like National Institutes of Hell. Wow. Well, I think he says it in a very clever way, but he's making the exact same point. With artificial intelligence, organs on a chip and all of the other advances technologically, are we any closer to ending animal experimentation? Well, there is some good news because the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, we've been hammering on their front doors for a long time and we've actually got ourselves onto some committees about the use of animals in experimentation.

14:01 And they have made some pronouncements that in certain areas like toxicity testing, poisoning, they're gonna move away from the use of animals. And a lot of industries have come behind us to say, why should we have to spend years and years testing on first mice, then beagles, then monkeys before we release a drug? We have high-speed computers that we can programme now with human information, not information from a slug or a chicken or whatever they're going to use. And we've got state-of-the-art technology. So let's not withhold good drugs and let's not put bad ones on the market because as you say, 95%, and it's actually a little higher of drugs tested safe on other species go on to give us side effects like anaphylactic shock and even death.

14:58 So they're no good. Let's move to state-of-the-art stuff. But yes, we are slowly moving away. And it's vital that people do not give up on their members of Congress because there are bills now before Congress like the Cargo Act that we need every member of Congress to sign on to. That would stop the importation of monkeys, for example, from Vietnam and the Philippines and Cambodia and all these places where they're caught in the jungle. They come in with diseases. They are not quarantined properly anyway. They live in hell and their babies are taken away from them. They're just breeding machines. And they're just like us.

15:39 They're just like us. So please, everybody get to your member of Congress and don't take no for an answer. And that's it, the Cargo Act. We have to support the Cargo Act. We've got some breaking news to tell you about. Just got this call just in from the President of Social Compassion and Legislation, Judy Mancuso. Judy has a positive breaking news story to bring us live. Tell us about it, Judy. Hi. Hi, Jane and happy birthday to Ingrid. Well, we are co-sponsoring my group, Social Compassion and Legislation, along with PETA, what's called the Compassionate Advancements in Science Studies Act.

16:32 So that's the CLASS Act. It's AB 2640. And it just passed the California Senate Education Committee with a unanimous vote of six to zero. Woo, congrats. What's your reaction to that victory? And can you tell us a little bit about your thoughts regarding that legislation, Ingrid? Well, first, hi to Judy, who does wonderful work. Everybody should support her group. And she's put super legislation through the California legislature. Oh, we're delighted. It just passed out of committee. I think it's got one more to go, but Judy would know more.

17:12 It's very important, I think, that children are not desensitised. And that's one of the reasons that we went after Ringling so heavily. People would say, oh, it's only so many elephants. And we would say, yes, but the last thing that you want a child to see is human beings dominating this wonderful wild creature and making him stand on his head. But it's the same thing with dissection. Jane, it just drives me insane. I have no idea who started the idea that a child needs to see what's inside a frog. Nobody's going to grow up to be a frog doctor, but they do. And when I was in school, it was a cow's eye, it was a cat, it was a frog.

17:53 And we have been working diligently to say, children need a choice at the very least. Actually, all dissection should go because they're taking frogs out of ponds in Louisiana. There's a depletion of frogs and frogs are the climate bellwethers. They're taking cats from pounds that still release them, or maybe they're taking barn cats that are rounded up and given to them. We've been inside the supply houses where they inject them with formaldehyde and what have you. They don't die a nice death. And then all these other things. So we say, we've been pushing the sin frog and these other models, plastic models of frogs.

18:37 If you're going to see inside a frog, look inside a plastic one. They have all the little organs. You can take them out with your forceps. There are no frog guts to dangle in front of little girls and make them feel sick. There's no formaldehyde for you to inhale and get ill and it's cheaper and you can reuse them. So there are practical reasons as well as the ethical reasons to not desensitise kids. Well, thank you, Judy Mancuso. We're very excited about that victory. Let's get to the finish line and pass that law. Thank you, social compassion and legislation. So I wanna talk about some of the other battles you're waging. I actually interviewed recently somebody from PETA on a battle to stop this new monkey breeding facility.

19:27 It seems like every time we put one down, they come up with another location where they're trying to start it up again. Can you talk a little bit about this constant effort by the vivisection industry to create laboratory monkey breeding facilities in the United States? Two words, big business, a lot of money to be made. It's just like career experimenters and the people who make the monkey chow and the monkey cages and the monkey decapitators and the monkey everything else. They want to produce more monkeys so that they can use them. And this is why the Cargo Act is so important is it stops one stream of monkeys who are tortured overseas.

20:15 They go on days long, nights long journeys in cargo holds of planes in wooden crates with no food and water. But they also are trying to breed them once they get here. And that's what we're trying to do in Texas. We've already started and in Georgia, big facility. They have very secretly, quietly gone to see the local government, got all their permits without saying a word to the residents who would find suddenly a 30,000 monkey facility on their doorstep. You know, you think of all, if you want to look at practical issues, the disease risk, I mean, Ebola came in on monkeys.

20:59 Everybody knows you get Ebola, you're gone. We've had all sorts of other dangerous diseases like the Marburg virus come in with monkeys. We are primates, they're primates. It's very, very easy for these diseases, which can be fatal to cross the species barrier. They also carry tuberculosis, the human variety of tuberculosis. So there are good reasons that the people in Georgia who we have now alerted to the fact that these sneaky people were coming in to build the lab are up in arms. And at the moment there is a stalemate and we hope to win. We hope the citizens of Georgia are able to keep this place out.

21:42 Then yes, they'll try to pop it up somewhere else. They tried to pop it up in Texas and we stopped it there. They tried to pop it up overseas in St. Kitts or somewhere and we stopped it there. I think you were a great help there. Where was that? I can't remember the island. Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico, it was Puerto Rico. So it's big money. And everybody I think remembers the In Vigo Beagles in Virginia. We had an undercover agent who went in and got the dirt on them, 350 puppies dead in the drainage ditches or for other reasons, mothers going without food, the whole gamut.

22:23 The same characters who have now been forced to close that facility, forced to give up the over 4,000 beagles and they're all in good homes now. It's just wonderful. Great cooperative effort from humane societies everywhere. They, some of them are involved in these other facilities. In Vigo isn't finished. It's got other irons in the fire with other exploitive facilities around the country and around the world getting government money. So we all need to be very aware and we all need to just look at the very simple facts on peter.org for the Cargo Act for this primate facility in Georgia.

23:05 And please, please get to your representatives. And again, do not take no for an answer. They will fob you off and you need to come right back and say, I'm a citizen, I have a vote. I've got friends. I'll get my friends and my family and my coworkers involved. And we want you to stop this bleeding of money from NIH into animal experiments that go nowhere that have a 95% failure rate and cost the taxpayer billions of dollars a year and a lot of grief for the animals. Well, I also just read an article yesterday about how artificial intelligence is revolutionising drug research and they can take all the information that's ever been gathered on any drug and put it into a formula.

23:52 And it was a fascinating article. And I was looking at this going there. I mean, animal experimentation is mediaeval at best compared to these high-tech systems that can come up with solutions and analyse in a moment what would take people years to do by hand. It just brought home how backward the NIH is for still continuing to try to push animal experimentation. And of course, the universities, they get money. That's why they push it. It's easy to get a grant when you show, oh, it's gonna cause 50% of the animals tested to die. It doesn't take any really creative thinking to do those kinds of tests.

24:34 So I will just say one more time. Yesterday, I heard somebody, an animal activist say, if every single person who is vegan became an activist, we could achieve animal liberation tomorrow. I think that there's a lot of truth to that statement. Maybe it's not tomorrow, maybe it's the day after tomorrow, but how do you do it? Because there are so many people out there who are waking up, they're going vegan, they're going plant-based, they love animals, but it can be tough being an activist. How do you do it? This is your 75th birthday. You're celebrating your birthday with us. We're so honoured.

25:14 Give us some pointers for all the activists out there and all the people who are maybe afraid to become activists. How the heck have you been able to do this for so many years without burnout? Oh, I can't imagine burnout because there's so much work to be done. And I have the luxury perhaps of looking back and seeing how far we've come, which is how you started the show, is that I see progress, enormous progress, but I also see the mountain to climb in front of me. And so I get up every morning thinking, gosh, there's a lot to do today. So there's no time to spare. But I think you also hit on something else. There is irrational fear in people that they don't want to stick their head above the parapet.

25:58 They don't want to say something. They're afraid of what? Remember during the fur wars, and we always said to people, we can get rid of fur. You just need to say something to anyone you see wearing it. And there were people in fur everywhere. So people said, oh, I don't know. I can't say anything. You said, what's the worst that can happen? You say politely to somebody, if you like, excuse me, I used to have a fur. I know you think it's beautiful, but if you could see the blood and the guts and how animals are suffering and the steel traps and the fur. And even if they say go to hell or something much worse, who cares?

26:42 It's just words. It doesn't hurt you. And you have done something wonderful. Animals who were killed for fur couldn't say anything themselves. The animals in the future who would be killed for fur couldn't say anything, but you have used the act, never be silent. You've used your voice. You've got a voice. In many countries, you don't have a voice. We have the luxury of that. Say something. You can do it so nicely. When you go to a party, when you're out with friends, if someone's ordering or buying something, you could say, by the way, you know, that does involve animal suffering. And I know you don't want to hear this, but I didn't want to hear it when someone told me the first time, but I'm glad they did.

27:26 So forgive me, but I'm going to tell you how that comes about. And I'm going to give you an option and maybe you'll take it. You know, it's up to you, but please, so at least you're saying something. It doesn't take any more time if you're going to the grocery store or the gym to take, and we give them free, free newsletters, vegan starter kits, and leave them in the magazine rack, leave them on the table. There are so many things that you can do every single day. I try to do five things a day outside my work. You know, going to work, coming back from work, speaking to somebody on the elevator. There are so many things, leaving a sticker, putting a sticker on the little library.

28:12 And let me say this, for those who are afraid of just mentioning to somebody, please don't wear fur. There are others who really go out on a limb thanks to encouragement from PETA. Check this out. Coach Runway, New York Fashion Week, Leather Kills. These two activists jumped on the runway. Anna Wintour and all the other fashionistas were right there, and they strutted the runway with a PETA sign, Coach Leather Kills. And this got so many headlines. So if you're afraid of just speaking up politely to a friend or neighbour, imagine the guts it took to do this, the world watching, jumping on the stage.

28:58 Nonviolent, nothing's destroyed, just walking the runway with a powerful message, speaking truth to power, and watch how she gets tackled in just one second. It's coming up. Oh, there she is. She's grabbed. That's Jamie Logan, who has a lot of shows on Unchained TV, as well as the PETA channel on Unchained TV. So tell us about that, about how you, I'll give you one more example, PETA goes out on a limb to do provocative demonstrations. This is an anti-leather demonstration where they've poured what appears to be tar on their bodies.

29:41 Turns out it's molasses. What's the inspiration behind all this, Ingrid? Well, you know, I said the very simple things that people can do, because anyone and everyone can do that. But I adore our girls. I shouldn't just call them girls, I suppose, but to me, they're my girls. I adore these girls who get on the runway. It was Victoria Beckham's too, and it was others that they did, H&M and so on, and Paris and London and New York, all over. We liked people to do outrageous things. They're not so outrageous when you compare them to what happens to animals, which is truly outrageous. Sit in a cage, drag yourself somewhere, lock yourself to a doorway.

30:25 We've done so many things, set fire to cars that were donated to us so that we could stop experiments on pigs and baboons who were used in old car crash experiments. But, you know, people, if you feel strongly, don't just bottle it up. Don't just be vegan yourself. Being vegan yourself is not enough. It's just a step. We can't grow our movement if you sit at home and eat vegan food. You need to bring other people into the movement, and that's why we have all the videos and the pamphlets and the stickers and everything else, and you have your voice. But it's wonderful to see activism. It's vital to see activism, and what you said is right.

31:07 If each of us converted five people, or each of us spent time really agitating in nice ways or in pushy ways, who cares, we would be able to get the animal liberation going. We would be able to get the animals out, and we wouldn't have to settle for a slightly bigger cage, a slightly longer chain, you know, slightly less cruel procedure. We need them out. We need liberation for the animals. They are us. They are the same as us. It's only our prejudice, our feelings of superiority, which are totally false.

31:48 If you learn anything about bats or snakes or insects, these animals we despise often, you find out jaw-dropping facts about their abilities, their talents, their thinking, their altruism, everything else. We are garbage compared to so many species' abilities. I wanna ask you a tough question because I think it's one that a lot of activists grapple with. You know, there are days where I say, yeah, wow, we're winning, blah, blah, but there are other days, whether it's an encounter with somebody who you're close to, who no matter what you say, continues to insist on serving dead animals at their functions, or certain things that just make you deflated.

32:36 Do you experience that? And do you ever get like, do you ever feel hopeless? You know, I mean, it doesn't last long, but there are times where it's just like, what's it gonna take to wake people up? What's it gonna take? Yeah, this species makes me despondent and I'm a member of it. And I think, as I said, what a slow learner I was. So I don't despair because I look at myself and I know all the things that I did. I wanted to be a falconer. My uncle had falcons that he hunted with and I thought how glamorous, how exotic, how wonderful. I went fishing. I went deep sea fishing.

33:17 I mean, I did everything. And what was it? For me, it was a heart matter. It was seeing animals suffer that I hadn't seen and suddenly thinking, what in God's name am I doing to cause suffering like this? But for other people to tell if it's the environment, you don't know what will ping them into consciousness. So you have to keep going and you have to keep trying angles. And I have somebody I knew years ago. His name was Michael Handley. He was an NRA spokesperson. He found a dog. It was just before the internet or before cell phones. He found a dog who'd been hit by a car. And he was desperately, he was on the Beltway in Washington.

33:58 He didn't know which county he was in. Was he in Prince George's or Montgomery? And so he had to go off the Beltway, find a call booth, call the local police. They said they didn't help. Call animal control. It was closed. Try and find in the yellow pages a veterinarian. So he came to me at the Washington Humane Society at the time and he said, I will pay for a commercial and I'll appear in it and I'll give one number for people so if they find an animal in trouble, they can call and you have an answering service and take care of it. I did. He made such fun of me for being a vegetarian. All he cared about was dogs. He worked for the NRA. He was a racist. He was just an incredible challenge.

34:41 By the time he died, he had raised a 17-year-old vegan son. He spoke out against fishing. He had resigned from the NRA. He himself was a vegan. He wouldn't use anything that came from animals. If you had ever said, here's a hopeless case, Mike was a hopeless case. But it worked in the end. Well, I think you raise an important point. I've heard people say that it's the people who fight you the most vigorously who may be the most open to change because it's a defence mechanism so they're pushing back. No, you're not gonna change me but it's the people who absolutely have no reaction that you really have to worry about.

35:27 Through your years of activism, PETA founded 44 years ago. You launched the world's most powerful animal rights organisation. Have you made any observations or conclusions about what personality types are low-hanging fruit? Actually, that's a very tough question because Mike, I would have said, was the highest hanging fruit you could get. I don't know because I've seen almost everybody change for one reason or the other with no particular type. I mean, people say, oh, well, liberals, they're gonna be, no, I find more Republicans, if anything, in Congress who are against animal experimentation and more Democrats who are in favour of veganism.

36:16 And they both involve horrendous suffering of animals. So it's not that, I honestly don't know. And people say an old dog can't learn new tricks and yet you find here's Ruth Heydrich becoming a vegan that whatever she was, 70 or something. And I find those things every day. And kids, of course, if you don't desensitise them, maybe they're the low-hanging fruit because they've got many years ahead of them if you can change them early, so that's good. But also because, maybe because they're small, that they relate to animals. Maybe because they're not listened to as much, they relate to animals.

36:57 And it's only when they grow up and they're taken aside by career or money or the way culture is or who their loved one, what they think, that they start to change and become a little bit cold. So everybody is fair game. Don't give up on anybody, go for it. That's what I say. When people say, what's your target audience? I say people who eat food. Speaking of food, the vast majority of animals killed for food are chickens. If we could just get people off chickens, we would literally be able to reduce by more than three quarters the number of animals killed.

37:38 You've spoken about this. For my 75th birthday, may I ask you to do one thing? Don't eat chickens or eggs. And in one year, I believe that you will have saved the lives of about 20 of these dear, wonderful little birds. And can you please decide to feed vegan chicken salad, vegan hard-boiled eggs, maybe vegan scramble to non-vegans. Post our chicken in reverse or other videos on your social media pages and talk to people about the fantasy of cage-free eggs so that other people can save chickens too. That way, you'll have soon saved 75 of them.

38:23 What a great video. What can we do about chickens as I drive down the Miracle Miles and I see Chick-fil-A and all the other chicken -centric fast food joints? I just, that's the kind of moment that gets me a little overwhelmed. Like, how are we going to handle this? But then I realised that when change happens, it happens very rapidly. Looking back at some old documentaries, you see the moment where cars entered the picture and since time immemorial, people were getting from point A to point B on horseback. And then in a very tiny period of time, you saw the streets change radically where the horse was the outlier and it was all cars.

39:10 Yeah, you've got to certainly speak to store managers, to fast food outlets, go online, speak to them there. Ask them when they're getting faux chicken. You know, in England, you can get it. The KFC in England, as soon as I get off the plane, I don't go to some gourmet place. I go to the KFC and get a faux chicken sandwich because they're just so great. But all these things, Gardein has chicken nuggets and they're there. But if we are the squeaky wheels, we are consumers. Our purse, our pocketbooks count. Everybody's looking at us to see what we're going to buy. So we need to make sure they know we'll be there if you sell it. But I think the big thing, as I said in that video, Jane, is vegans shouldn't just be talking to other vegans and looking after their own interests.

40:00 We need to find people who are getting the chicken salad or getting the chicken drumsticks and talk to them. We were talking to United Airlines for a long time. I was just on a United Airlines flight back from Europe and they, and this is the second one that I was on in two weeks or so, and they had the meal option. Meal option is always beef or chicken, beef or chicken. And this time, of course, it was chicken, but it was also a vegetarian option, which was a lasagna. I mean, I'm against dairy, but there you are. We've come a step. And I thought, you know, it's moving.

40:40 The needle is moving, but agitation, asking for the special meal if you fly, asking on the website for, you just got to say what you want and push and educate others to get it and feed the non-vegans, feed the people who are buying the chicken meat. Give them the Gardein stuff and say, look, it's so much better for your health, your arteries, the earth, the chickens, whatever moves you. Well, so many things to respond to with that. There is an ongoing coordinated multimillion dollar campaign by the meat industry. It's been documented in a Gardein article. It's been documented by a new, more than 100 page report by the Freedom Food Alliance.

41:26 They are trying to demonise a plant-based meat as processed or ultra processed, not mentioning that processed meat from animals is officially cancer causing according to the World Health Organisation. What's your response to that? Is PETA doing anything to counteract that campaign? Yes, and a bunch of other stupid campaigns that these frat boys come up with. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, I think this week is issuing some videos about how processed regular meat that comes from cows and chickens is. I mean, the cow and the chicken is a processing machine and there are hormones in it.

42:08 There are chemicals in it. The fat is put in from the chicken. The fibre is taken out. It's just, it's such a ludicrous thing. It reminds me of when, during the fur wars again, that the furriers came up with this great thing. We don't use any fur from endangered species. Well, nobody said you didn't, nobody cares anyway. We just, all animals, thank you. So they're always coming up. They're now trying to ban in vitro meat before it's a real thing. I mean, it's not in the supermarkets. It's not in the restaurants, except for an occasional very elite taste testing, but they're trying to ban it. They've already banned it in Florida, I think.

42:49 So this reactionary kowtowing to the Cattlemen's Association, worrying about what's woke and what's traditional, all this sort of rubbish. And it's so easy to combat because everything they say is gibberish. And it's so easy to just say, no, actually, what you're eating is not only highly processed, but no matter whether it's bologna or it's a chicken thigh, it's processed. And it also has no fibre. It has tonnes of cholesterol. It's gonna clog your arteries and eventually animals will bite back and kill you. One of the things that highlights, Peta, is you're going out on a limb with creative, controversial campaigns that attempt to wake people up.

43:39 And critics of Peta love to throw the, oh, red paint thing, like anybody at Peta has thrown red paint for 40 years, if you ever did it. But I always respond by saying, look, they have something like 19 lawyers. They file lawsuits. They issue Freedom of Information Act requests. They put out in-depth news releases that I read. They don't get covered by mainstream media. It's almost like you have to get naked or you have to get arrested in order to get mainstream news media coverage of this issue. And the reason, of course, is look at the advertisers on mainstream media, meat, dairy, and pharmaceuticals, okay? So you do very creative things.

44:22 I'll just play one that you just have going right now. We got this from a volunteer, a member of our team in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We've been giving away vegan hot dogs. We've been giving away vegan hot dogs and they're going like hotcakes. We've only got 20 left. We've got a bit of 150 in five seconds flat. And I am gonna eat one before they're all gone.

45:08 So this truck was outside a rib festival. Tell us about that strategy, Ingrid. Well, you're right that nowadays it's very hard to get serious discussion going. You have to have gimmickry. You have to have sex or controversy, confrontation, and so on. So people are always astonished when they hear how many scientists we have, how many lawyers we have, how many undercover investigations, how many everything other than a catchy demonstration, which is interesting to look at. We have our pig truck, Hell on Wheels. We have chicken trucks, Hell on Wheels, that are going around the country to rib fests, to hot dog eating contests, to hot dog and hamburger outlets.

45:56 And they all have soundtracks. So you hear the pigs screaming and those are real pigs screaming. That's an audio recording. You hear the chickens crying and being upset. And we drive around, people look at it, and it says at the bottom, after you've stared at it, you'll see, it says, if this upsets you, please go vegan. And there are vegan starter kits there for people and we hand them out. So it's gimmickry because otherwise you can't get people to turn around and look in this day and age of so much competing for everyone's attention. What would you say to the mainstream media? I was in the mainstream media for more than 30 years.

46:38 And I know having been behind the curtain, it's just incredibly slanted against plant-based because of the advertisers who keep the lights on, meat dairy and pharmaceuticals, also because a lot of the people who are deciding what's news are not vegans, they're meat eaters. And so they ignore stories, important stories that talk about the benefits of a plant-based diet, for example, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They completely ignore it. The New York Times did a story that said that people who go from being heavy meat eaters to plant-based can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 75%.

47:21 I thought, surely, it's in the New York Times, it's an Oxford University study. They'll cover that, right? No, once again, disappointed. I mean, how bankrupt has the media become on this issue? Well, we try, as you know, to run commercials and then they're mild because we know we can't get the gory ones on, the real life things, the real life pictures and so on and videos that we have. We try to get them on major networks, national networks, and we'll pay top dollar and they won't take them because they know that we are a one-off advertiser or a few-time advertiser, whereas Butterball and all these other companies are going to put money in their pockets.

48:06 And media is hurting at the moment, as you know, and people aren't watching TV news, they're watching on the internet. Newspapers have lost so many reporters. It's very, very hard. And that, I think, comes back to why it is beyond important that people use their own voices, their own social media platforms, that they talk to everybody and that they show the videos and they get the facts out there. We have an ad now that says, you know, if you're talking about, you say you're an environmentalist, if you still eat meat or eat dairy, put a cork in it, and it's a picture of the earth. I mean, just be quiet if you say you're an environmentalist but you still eat animals and dairy products, dairy is worse, of course, than meat.

48:52 Yes, another major frustration, people who say they're environmentalists and they're having organisational meetings and they're serving meat. You know, you raise the point of, it's important for every one of us to use our voice. With 8.1 billion humans on the planet, we can't hope to talk to them all individually, which is why I started Unchained TV, the world's only vegan streaming television network. This is my opportunity to urge everyone watching, please download Unchained TV, it's absolutely 100% free, takes a second to go to your app store on your phone and download it, you can also watch it online and you can watch it on any Samsung TV and any TV if you've got an Amazon Fire Stick, a Roku device or an Apple TV device.

49:38 So it's a vegan Netflix. Okay, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard. I love Unchained TV. Unchained, Unchained TV, your life will change, it's just that easy. Unchained TV has all sorts of content for everybody. Unchained TV changed my life. Unchained TV is crushing it. I love Unchained TV. Unchained TV is my go-to. Unchained TV, who knew? Unchained, baby, yeah! Yes, and that last lady was the director of the Twilight series and she actually said that she made some of her characters vegetarian, that's vegetarian, but to encourage people from not eating animals.

50:25 So we only have a couple of minutes left. What is the future? What does the future hold, Ingrid? I think the future depends on everybody watching and everybody they know. You hold the key to the future. You know, Jane, you've got these fabulous talents. Everybody has some fabulous talents. I'm basically talentless, but I'm enthusiastic. And everybody can get out there and make this happen. And that will be our future of animals still in chains and cages. I mean, we've even got dogs out in this extreme heat on a chain in the backyard in a dirt patch in their own urine. I mean, if we can't get with our legislators locally and get that banned, come on, there's something that will call to you, something you can do.

51:12 Never sit home and think, there's nothing I can do. I'm only one person, one person, one person. I wrote a book called, One Can Make a Difference. And you are that one. Every single person listening is that one. So thank you, Jane, for having this fantastic, phenomenal podcast. You are changing the world and everybody can. We all can. Well, you fill me with hope. I'm gonna get all teary-eyed because you are my hero. I often say to myself, what would Ingrid Newkirk do? And I'm not joking, because your consistency, your relentlessness, your strategic brilliance.

51:54 I mean, everybody, it's easy to be an activist if you go on PETA's website, sign up for these alerts. I get them on my phone and I literally, I stop whatever I'm doing. If I get them on my email or I get them on my phone, because I know I can get to the finish line and reach somebody important with, just like this, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. In fact, for your 75th birthday, you have an entire way that people can do this. It's very simple and we'll just put this up so everybody can just go to PETA .org forward slash 75. And what it does is, if you wanna celebrate Ingrid Newkirk's birthday, she's 75 years young, you can take these actions by going to that PETA.org forward slash 75.

52:46 And it's so easy. I literally clicked bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And then I got all these notifications on my email. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for doing that. You know, it doesn't require you going out and getting sweaty and having a confrontation with somebody. PETA's doing all the heavy lifting. All you need to do is sign up and be part of their rapid response team. And it's super fun. I feel very empowered. Like if I'm struggling with a project one day and then I get this and I go bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, I already feel like, okay, I've accomplished something.

53:27 It energises me to move forward. So I just wanna say thank you, Ingrid Newkirk, for starting PETA, for your 44 years of relentless activism as the head of PETA. And I just urge everybody, I wish we could all get together and sing happy birthday to you. And many more. Talk to you soon. Thank you, Jane. Thank you. Bye.