Offering people a healthy, humane alternative in the grocery store.

Question: Where has the animal rights movement been successful?

Ingrid Newkirk: We’ve had so many successes. It’s hard when you’re looking at such an enormous field to keep a cheery countenance, because there are so many ways . . . I always say we don’t have the luxury of one cruelty in one place that we can work on, because it’s an all encompassing philosophy of all different animals used in horrible ways in all different pursuits.

But we’ve had many successes. For example when you see mannequins testing cars on TV, that’s because of the animal rights movement. They used to use baboons and pigs and slam them into walls in cars. PETA stopped that, and it was a lot of campaigning. When you see pleather instead of leather; or synthetic fur; or you see natural fibers, that’s because people said I don’t want to buy things that mean that an animal is skinned – sometimes alive – for his coat. So when you use the veggie burger and the Silk in the store, you can eat that and be healthier.

But it’s there because in the _________, not only were people pushing for it for health, but because especially young people see what is happening on the factory farms and in the slaughter houses and say, “Please give me something else to eat. I want the convenience that a meat eater or a dairy eater has, but I don’t want what they’re eating.”

Recorded on: November 12, 2007