The Observer’s Michael Specter wrote a nearly 6,000-word profile of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals chief Ingrid Newkirk that revealed her to be even more bizarre than her already bizarre media persona lets on.
Of course one accusation constantly leveled at animal rights activists (and vehemently denied by same) is that they care more about animals than human beings or are even outright misanthropes. Newkirk, however, always wears her misanthropy on her sleeves. Specter writes,
. . . When we were in Savannah, she told me, in the most unequivocal terms, that the world would be an infinitely better place without humans in it at all. I must have shown my astonishment, because by the time I got back to New York, later that day, she had already written thousands of words to me, of which this is only a sample:
‘There are a billion mean tricks of nature. And human beings, who aren’t “a thing apart” but part of nature, are cruel, out of sheer obliviousness if nothing else, but often out of malice or selfishness. A few clothes and a Jag and being able to read the NYT don’t separate “us” from or elevate “us” above the other species! . . . Why does feeling superior mean being able to treat those “beneath us” with contempt? That’s what the Nazis did, isn’t it? Treated those “others” they though subhuman by making them lab subjects and so on. Even the Nazis didn’t eat the objects of their derision.
It doesn’t come as any surprise then that not only did Newkirk have herself sterilized at the age of 22, but she actively opposes anyone having children,
I am not only uninterested in having children. I am opposed to having children. Having a purebred human baby is like having a purebred dog; it’s nothing but vanity, human vanity.
Apparently humans are outside nature, being the only species to reproduce simply for the sheer vanity of it all.
Some of Specter’s accounts are hard to believe. For example, we know from Newkirk herself that PETA doesn’t target children, but Specter seems to thing that it does,
Because circuses appeal so widely to the young, they arouse PETA’s particular wrath (circuswatch.com). One night in December, I stood in front of the Savannah Civic Center when the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town. Newkirk and several colleagues were there, and they spent the evening bearing placards, dodging police and hectoring scores of families who were entering the coliseum with young children. (‘Elephants are mammals!’ they shouted. ‘Mammals have hair. Do you know how trainers remove that hair so the elephants will look good for you tonight? They burn it off with blowtorches. Please make this your last visit to the circus.’) The PETA video truck was parked nearby. With elegiac music playing in the background, a continuous loop of clandestinely shot footage ran on the truck’s two giant screens, each showing trainers beating, shocking, whipping and even shooting elephants. The children who saw the video were horrified, and their parents were furious.
This is impossible, since just last year Newkirk said that PETA never engages in that sort of behavior at circuses,
TUCKER CARLSON: Last spring, I took my children to the circus here in Washington. I had my four-year-old son, very nice boy, in my arms walking up to go into the circus. And some monster from PETA leans forward and shoves in his face a photograph of a wounded elephant, and says, “This is what the circus is,” to my four-year-old son.
NEWKIRK: I doubt it very much.
CARLSON: I watched it. He was in my arms. And I want you to apologize for that.
NEWKIRK: If anyone did that, I absolutely apologize.
CARLSON: Well, good.
NEWKIRK: Because everything we do is based at adults. We’re asking adults be responsible. You were telling me about giving your children meat and milk. They’re going to be to grow up to be tubs of lard. They’re getting heart attacks.
And the clearest example of what PETA is all about is Specter’s description of what greets visitors who enter PETA’s Virginia office building,
Inside, the building could have been designed by Dr. Doolittle. There is a quotation from Leonardo da Vacini chiseled into the lintel about the reception area. ‘The day will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals the way they now look upon the murder of men.’
Of course, like most everything that emanates from PETA, this is sheer fiction. Da Vinici never said or wrote that. Instead, it was put into his mouth by a novelist in the 1930s and has been misattributed to Da Vinci ever since Jon Wynne-Tyson messed up the attribution in a collection of animal rights related quotes.
Somehow it seems like a fitting thing for PETA to affix a fake quote from Da Vinici in their reception area. At least the group is consistently wrong.
Source:
Mother Nature. Michael Specter, June 22, 2003.