How PETA Made Radical Ideas Mainstream

Growing up, I spent a lot of time in my father’s research lab. He was a doctor, and a lot of his studies were done on mice and rats. So when an organization called PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, started to gain prominence, in part because of their opposition to animal testing, I was told they were radicals, terrorists, even.

NEWKIRK: The bigger challenge I have is saying to people, “I used to wear a fur coat.” I used to eat my way through the animal kingdom with my father, who used to eat calves’ brains on toast. But I did see videos. I did see photographs. I did go to places. And I know that you’re probably a kind person. And so you would not wish to support those kinds of industries if you saw it too.”

Welcome to People I (Mostly) Admire, with Steve Levitt.

That’s Ingrid Newkirk talking. She started PETA more than 40 years ago, and she’s been running PETA ever since. Today I get to talk with her for the first time. Is she a radical, a terrorist? Let’s find out.

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LEVITT: You started People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals back in 1980, and you’ve been running it for more than 40 years now. And I’m sure everyone already knows PETA, but how do you describe the organization to someone who isn’t familiar with it?

NEWKIRK: Well, I think it’s pretty simple, even though people think we’re edgy and we’re envelope pushers, and perhaps we are. If something is something you wouldn’t do to yourself or you wouldn’t have done to you, then it’s very easy to understand you shouldn’t do it to others. So, we’re against anything that’s cruel and we’re determined to go behind the scenes, go to places people don’t visit, like slaughterhouses and fur farms, and show people what’s actually happening to animals back there. Do the homework for them.  

LEVITT: Now, PETA has been so visible for so long that it seems now, looking back, almost inevitable that PETA would be successful. Of course, that’s the bias of hindsight. When it began, it was just five people in a basement. And I imagine at the outset, you certainly weren’t expecting it to blow up the way it did, or maybe you were?

NEWKIRK: I actually didn’t think about it. I just knew that there were injustices. I happened to be in a job where I saw them myself. I was inspecting laboratories. I went out on cruelty cases on farms. I saw these things and I thought, “I need to say something. I need to do something. I need to wake other people up.” And that’s how the group began.

LEVITT: Before this, you ran the pound in Washington, D.C. But you felt like that wasn’t giving you enough leverage?  

NEWKIRK: I was actually the pound master, which is just a wonderful name. It’s now, of course, very la di da. It’s called the Director of Sheltering or something. But yes, it was a dump. And the animals were in terrible condition. There was no veterinarian for them. So I cleaned it up. I instituted a spay and neuter clinic to stop overpopulation. And I passed it on to people who shared my objectives. And it was a fine facility when I went to start People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. But I really did want to reach people who understood cruelty to dogs or horses or some domesticated animal, some animal they were familiar with, and expand their pie of compassion, if you will, and say, “Hang on a minute, look at the rats and the monkeys in the lab; look at the pigs and the chickens on the farms.”

LEVITT: I think it’s hard for people to remember, or if you’re younger to imagine, how little concern was given to animal welfare when you were getting started. It was completely out of step with the zeitgeist of the times. And one of the first things you did already in 1980 with PETA was to organize the first World Day for Laboratory Animal protest in the U.S.A. How did that go? I can only imagine looking back that it was a pretty small crowd who came out for that first one. 

NEWKIRK: It was a small crowd and there were very few people who did anything other than gawk, but that seemed to catch on and it grew. It was before the internet, of course, so we were just leafleting and we were holding up big banners and posters and showing the pictures that we had of what was actually going on in the labs, and I think it sparked something in people. But it didn’t really take off until we did the Silver Spring Monkeys case, because that was a time when nobody thought you could question science. You know, a layperson had no business questioning somebody with a Ph.D. in biology or something, and we were trying to rock that boat.  

LEVITT: So that was your first undercover operation and your first broad media exposure. Could you talk a little bit about that operation?

NEWKIRK: We wanted to see what was going on in laboratories near where I lived. I was in a little apartment in Takoma Park, Maryland, and I looked up in the U.S.D.A., the government listing of labs, and found that one was basically a stone’s throw from my apartment. So the young man who had started the group with me, Alex Pacheco, went down and knocked on the door and asked for a job. They said they didn’t have one, but they’d take him as a volunteer. And so we were able to look inside that lab. And we were able to take photographs of 17 macaque monkeys who had been taken from their homes in the Philippines. They were being kept by a psychologist with no medical training, and this is par for the course, or certainly was then. No veterinary training. He was cutting open their backs and he was rendering one or both of their arms deafferented, meaning that they had difficulty using them because the nerves had been cut. Then he would shove them into a converted little — like a snack refrigerator, hook them up to electrodes and shock them until they used their bad arm, which they often couldn’t. The place was filthy. They weren’t fed. There were dead monkeys who died of gangrene from untreated wounds. And so we busted the place. We went to the police. The police issued a search warrant and we went in and took the animals out.

LEVITT: Now I assumed that you had operated on some kind of a tip, that you had been told ahead of time this lab was monstrous. It’s really interesting to me to hear that this was just a random door knocking that you found that. Another thing that’s interesting about that story was the police cooperation. You worked very closely with the police and they came and did this raid. Am I fair in saying that over the history of PETA, you’ve probably had people arrested by the police more than you’ve had the police cooperating with helping you bust other people?

NEWKIRK: Actually, surprisingly not, because we work very closely with a lot of law enforcement agencies and we always have. It’s not necessarily something that makes the nightly news. We are constantly giving tips to the police. We have been arrested, ourselves, many times for sitting down in front of a fur store or a laboratory or jumping onto a runway or something. But no, we work closely with a lot of law enforcement agencies, federal and state, and even city.

LEVITT: Now you already understood the importance of the media back then, right? Because I’ve read that you tipped off the news outlets for this raid and it actually irritated the police that you had done that. Is that true?

NEWKIRK: Oh yes, I mean — there’s a little rule that if someone’s going to serve a search warrant you shouldn’t say anything, but we were determined. We didn’t want this to be a story that was only on the nightly news in Silver Spring, Maryland. We wanted the world to know what was going on in these places that they actually are funding through the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.And so we went to people all over and said, “This is about to happen. Can you come with us and hide behind the dumpster?” And they did. They hid behind the dumpster with their cameras.

LEVITT: You had much of your playbook developed very early because you already were operating in a space right around the edges of legality. Because this researcher, Taub, after you took the monkeys, his lawyers went to court and demanded that they get the monkeys back and the judge said, “Yes.” And so they came to the place where the monkeys were supposed to be and somehow the monkeys happened to be off on a Florida vacation that was never well explained. Is that a fair assessment?

NEWKIRK: Yes, they made the mistake of telling us that they were coming to pick up the monkeys the next morning, which gave us several hours to get a truck, equip it, get some volunteers who could drive and look after the monkeys, who understood them, and zip them off down the road to Florida. There’s probably still a warrant outstanding for that, by the way. I hope the statute is run. But yes, they disappeared and I have marvelous pictures of them sitting out for the first time in years in somebody’s backyard and they’re trying to catch insects through the big crates.

LEVITT: For those particular monkeys, things didn’t turn out that great, right? This was a really interesting legal struggle all the way up to the Supreme Court. It went on for 10 years. But those poor monkeys just got caught in limbo, right? Because of how the law drags its feet.

NEWKIRK: It’s true. Of course, they were out of that disgusting, filthy dump where they weren’t being fed and given veterinary care, so they went into better care. They did go into cages. Some of them ended up in California at a zoo and they were in a group cage, and they lived out their lives there, and that was wonderful. Others had the misfortune to go down to one of the national regional primate centers, where there were all sorts of nasty things going on. We did manage to make the case that if they were going to complete this wretched experiment, which had no real purpose whatsoever, that the animals be knocked out before they operated on them and then let them die on the table, not revive them.

LEVITT: Believe it or not, my father was the head of research at a Veterans Administration Hospital. And I know that’s one of the organizations that PETA has had a lot of trouble with in the past. And he did animal research himself and he had some oversight of the animal research of others. And my dad went into work almost every weekend and he frequently brought me along, so I basically grew up in an animal research lab. And this is way back in the ’70s, even before Silver Springs. And I haven’t thought very much about that. It was interesting for me to reflect back on that experience so many years later, knowing that we’d be talking. My dad only used rats and mice for his experiments. And what’s so vivid to me is that at the age of six or seven, society had already taught me that mice and rats were disgusting. They were filthy, disease-ridden animals that had to be killed. And I remember being so surprised to see how beautiful and gentle and curious these little creatures were in the cages. And I still have a real soft spot for mice and rats. And I’m routinely surprised by how the people around me, the adults, are scared of them and disgusted by them.  

NEWKIRK: I’m glad you had that reaction. I think growing up we’re indoctrinated. We’re told things and we just believe them a lot of the time. And of course, if you think about who rats and mice are — they’re mammals, like us. They’re meticulously clean when they’re left to their own devices. They’re good mothers. They’re thoughtful. They will risk their lives for their young. It’s our bias, of course, that separates animals into those you know and those you think can be used in some abominable way. 

LEVITT: My father, he used rats and mice, but we would sometimes have to walk by the area where other researchers were using dogs and primates in their studies. And every time, I remember it so vividly, my dad would say how awful it made him feel. It clearly nauseated him that people were doing research on dogs and primates. I had never talked about any of this with my father. And just a few days ago, knowing we’d talk, I called him on the phone and we had a conversation. And he told me something else that I had never heard that really shocked him, and me, which is that when he was in med school, it was just completely routine that medical students in physiology or anatomy classes and surgery classes — they would just bring them dogs and they would cut them up and then sew them up just for some kind of practice. My dad was never going to be a surgeon. I think it was completely pointless. And he was shocked by it at the time already, but now as he’s older, he can’t believe the callousness with which animals were treated in medical schools. And I looked it up. It wasn’t until 2016 that the last U.S. medical school stopped using pigs for surgery, which I found really shocking.

NEWKIRK: And it was a huge fight because, as with anything that someone has been doing for a long time, they want to keep it that way. And no matter how sensible, what facts and figures and arguments you have, change is horrible, and they just don’t want to change!

LEVITT: So, my father, he only used rats and mice, but —  

NEWKIRK: You have to stop saying that.

LEVITT: “Only”? You don’t like the “only.” Let me defend that. It seems strange that routinely people are poisoning rats and using mousetraps. And I know you probably don’t like that, but it seems hard for me to get emotional about rats and mice that are reasonably well treated in medical research in a world in which we treat them like vermin. But I’d love to hear your counterpoint to that.

NEWKIRK: I don’t think they are treated well in most labs. They’re bled from the eye, they’re bled from the tail, they have parts of their ears cut off, they’re kept in a shoebox in their own waste. And that’s aside from the experiment itself, where they’re often starved or they have electrodes put in their heads. So, I would challenge that comfortable assumption. They are little animals, and just because they’re small doesn’t mean that they should be disregarded. They have feelings, they have thoughts, they have eyes, they have a heart. I was once asked to give a talk at the Navy lab in Bethesda. I’d arrived early, I was sitting in the back. And the chief experimenter had all the students there and he was saying, “Look, the Feds are making us fill out this new form and we have to say what kind of animal we’re using, how many, and why we’ve chosen that species. And will you please stop writing, ‘We’re using mice and rats because they’re small, easy to handle, nobody cares about them, and they’re cheap.'” And he said, “That doesn’t look good from a science perspective.” And I thought, “No, but it’s true, isn’t it?”  

LEVITT: What’s interesting to me is that within caring about animals, there’s a lot of diversity about what people think, even people who actually care about animal rights. So when I heard that in med schools, they were cutting up these dogs and sewing them together and it seemed ridiculous and unnecessary and I was outraged, I told a vegetarian that I know, someone who’s been vegetarian for 30 years, how horrified I was by this story. And she looked at me and she literally shrugged her shoulders and she said, “Well, they kill dogs in shelters all the time. Why not use them for research? How else would the doctors learn?” And I was really struck by — on this dimension of eating animals, where she’s absolutely, completely committed not to do it — that on this other dimension, it seemed fine to her. You must run into it all the time, that within the animal rights movement, what might seem to outsiders as a very coherent movement, that there are a lot of differences of opinions about topics that you might not expect.

NEWKIRK: We’re an odd species, aren’t we, human beings? And we have all sorts of compartments in our minds where this is acceptable, that’s not acceptable. And it’s not limited to what happens to other animals. It’s also what happens to human beings. And in the past, people have said, “Oh yes, give LSD to G.I.s without their knowing about it, because they’re just G.I.s. They’re basically cannon fodder.” And with orphans, you know, give them all sorts of things, experiment on them. Or Blacks in the south. People have all sorts of, through time, ability to just blot out or not even think about the suffering of others. So I’m not surprised. To me it’s one thing. It’s a principle that you either try and do your best not to cause suffering and to look for alternatives to causing suffering or you don’t; not just you pick and choose, because the ways we pick and choose, the biases we have, are not sensible. They’re not based on anything rational. They’re based on what we have grown up with, what we have been told, what we have read, and we’re not opening our minds and our hearts to really thinking, is that right? Isn’t there another way to do that? And there always is! Clothing, food, experimentation, entertainment. There always is if you look. But no, I don’t find it odd. I just find it human.

LEVITT: As I think about animals, I will admit I have an implicit hierarchy in mind and it’s almost completely arbitrary, the set of things on which I place value on animals. I like primates. I like big animals. I like rare animals. I like cute animals. And of course there’s also the bottom of the hierarchy. I will kill mosquitoes and ticks and anything that bites me, but otherwise, I would never try to kill an animal. So I’m curious about you. Will you admit to having a hierarchy of animals and what goes into it, if you will? 

NEWKIRK: I think it’s very predictable that we’re drawn to exotic and powerful animals. As a species, we look up to them or we want to be like them. It’s rather pathetic, but that’s how we are. And the fact that you can relate more to a chimpanzee, who is a fellow primate, is like you can relate more to someone from your own town or country rather than somebody perhaps from a faraway place. It’s just normal. But what PETA’s challenged with is trying to break this down and say, “We’re one species in what Roger Fouts called ‘the great orchestra of life,’ everybody playing their own instrument.” We are not superior in so many ways. You know, I wrote that book Animalkind and in it, I had the joy of collecting all these facts about the jaw dropping talent, skills, intelligence of other animals. We can’t do many of the things they do. I was once with Jane Goodall and two members of congress’s aides were making fun of Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee, who happened to be dressed in clothes and trying to eat from a plate. And she said, “If I took you and dropped you into the jungle where he would live ordinarily, and you had to fend for yourself, what would you eat? Would you get sick? How would you guard yourself against predators?” But other little animals, like pigeons, who we call pests, they can navigate by the Earth’s magnetic field. Animals have, like swans, a divorce rate that’s so minuscule and humans have this one that’s so huge. They can teach us about fidelity and love and affection and loyalty. We have to get over ourselves.

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with the founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, after this short break.

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LEVITT: Now, one thing that will probably surprise people about you, given what we’ve talked about so far, is that your views on euthanasia of animals have led to a lot of conflict with others in the animal rights movement, because you in some circumstances are in favor of euthanizing animals. And you’ve talked about the fact that when you were working in shelters, you put down thousands of animals yourself to avoid the suffering that they were going to face.

NEWKIRK: Yeah, absolutely. There’s this business of the “no kill” movement, which sounds fabulous. I mean, who’s in favor of killing? The fact is that people are neglecting animals out there. You can see it on our website — dogs on chains with fly-bitten ears, suffering from heartworm, cancer and whatever, and nobody doing anything about it. Sometimes somebody tries to turn them into a shelter. “No kill” shelters won’t take them because they only want to take adoptable animals. PETA operates one shelter in Virginia and we service North Carolina too, where there’s a lot of poverty. And people bring us their animals. They don’t have money for veterinary care, the animal is in pain. We will put them down, we will euthanize them, and we ask the people to stay with them so that their last moments are good. But there’s also this enormous crisis of overpopulation. And if no kill shelters close their doors and say, “We’re full,” there’s nowhere for them! And so people have to face the fact that animals need help. Even if that help is, “I’m so sorry, there is nowhere else to put you. I will hold you in my arms and I will let you drift away from this world that doesn’t love you and doesn’t want you.”

LEVITT: When you make that argument to other people in the animal rights movement, some of them are not swayed. What do they say back?

NEWKIRK: They have a pie in the sky idea that, “Well, if you tried hard enough, you would find homes for all of them.” And I say, well, you find people arriving at shelters desperate with a mother and kittens or a sick dog and they put them outside the closed shelter and drive away because the shelter has said, “No, we can’t take them.” They don’t have any options. And the cost of veterinary care is through the roof. To have your dog euthanized, to give them a merciful relief, costs you maybe 200 bucks. What are the solutions? We place every animal we can, but also if people would stop buying them, stop giving their money to breeders to bring more into this world. Stop wanting a little pug who can barely breathe. Stop looking for a dog to match your sofa, your drapes, your lifestyle, and go to the shelter and adopt them. I wrote books about cats and dogs saying, “Get two. If you can get one, if you’ve got the time and the patience, the money for veterinary care, please get two and save their lives.” Don’t bring more into this world. And lots of people do agree with us in the end because there’s a film we have on PETA.org which shows what we find and what we do. We don’t keep it a secret. We say, “Please have a look and see what reality is. And then please join us in trying to stop this. Get governments to require that pet shops can’t simply sell animals, that animals must be sterilized to stop this boom in overpopulation.”

LEVITT: One thing I personally find so puzzling is why standard practice — there’s even a social and moral obligation around euthanizing a pet dog or cat who’s suffering, but we don’t extend that courtesy to humans who are suffering at the end of life. I think this is actually a rare case where we do the right thing for animals and we do the wrong things for humans.

NEWKIRK: Oh, I’m with you, absolutely. And I’ve said, “Look, if I’m dying, if I’m in pain, please take me to Switzerland, take me” — I think you can do it in Oregon now, they will let you go. We have this desire to keep life going at all costs, and some lives are not happy ones. They are wracked with pain and they don’t want to be here, and there it’s a kindness, I think. 

LEVITT: Another topic that divides people in the animal rights movement are zoos. How do you feel about zoos?

NEWKIRK: Well, there are some excellent zoos today. That was not always the case. I mean, zoos came about because they were menageries. Rich people, kings and so on, went to foreign lands and captured animals, brought them back for people to look at. They used to take animals from the wild from their families, shoot the older animals to get the young ones, traffic in these animals, they would die in the holds of ships. Things have changed a lot. We have hideous roadside zoos. You know, those attractions where you’re driving somewhere in the country and there’s a billboard that says stop and see the, whatever it is, bears in cement cages. We are closing those and we have closed lots and lots of them. PETA has an active campaign to close roadside zoos and we have removed hundreds of animals and placed them in wonderful sanctuaries in Colorado and other places. There are some good zoos. It’s just that zoos should become shelters for animals who are rescued from horrible situations. They should not be breeding anymore. And elephants are going out of zoos. Gradually, zoos have understood, by and large, that you should not have elephants in captivity. You cannot possibly cater to any of the things that they need.

LEVITT: I couldn’t agree with you more about the idea that if you’re going to have zoos, it’s great to populate them with animals that have been bred in captivity or been harmed out in the wild and can’t survive. From an economic perspective — not economics like money, but thinking about utility and trade offs — my own view is by raising children as we do now in environments that are almost completely and totally devoid of nature, that is a dangerous proposition. Because, my own experience with the rats and the mice in the lab — it’s hard to be around animals and not feel something special for them and be able to recognize that they’re really not so different than humans and that they’re worth saving. And so for me, when I think about zoos, I think much less than you do about the experiences of the relatively small number of animals who are in these zoos being held captive versus the potentially huge spillover effects of creating attitudes in young people that could benefit enormous numbers of wild animals in the future. Does that logic ring true to you at all? Or you think that’s just inconsistency again on my part?

NEWKIRK: I am so delighted that you said this because you talk about people disagreeing. For years, people would say, why are you protesting the circus? Because it’s only a relatively small number of animals. But I wanted to make sure that children going into the circus knew there was a problem, that it wasn’t okay to take an animal like an elephant from the wild and dress them up in a stupid costume and have them stand on their head, or have a lion, a man with a whip making them go through a fiery ring. I didn’t think that’s what children should grow up thinking was acceptable. The other thing that I think it’s very important with zoos and with circus, with anywhere animals are in captivity — it’s not just physical suffering; it’s fear, it’s stress, it’s mental anguish.  

LEVITT: So let’s talk about PETA and its strategies. It seems to me that you employ two primary strategies and the first is undercover operations to provide firsthand evidence of animal mistreatment, like at Silver Spring. And the second strategy, which PETA is probably better known for, are eye-catching, media-grabbing stunts. I don’t use the word stunt in a pejorative way. I just can’t think of a more neutral word off the top of my head.

NEWKIRK: Gimmicks.

LEVITT: Gimmick. Okay. So maybe the best known of these is the, “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign, which got incredible traction and so much attention and my impression is has dramatically changed the trajectory of the fur industry and fur wearing across the world. Is that your impression as well?

NEWKIRK: Well, yes. I mean, when we started PETA, all little girls wanted to grow up and have a fur coat. They really, really did. It was a sign of having arrived. And now, young people wouldn’t be seen dead in fur. The media has some responsibility in that you can have all the facts and figures and the arguments about sentience and so on, and it’s boring. You want conflict and sex and all that sort of stuff on the news. And so we know that silence is a social movement’s worst enemy and we need people to see what’s going on. So somebody in Florida wrote to me and said, “What about this idea of standing on a corner somewhere in a bodysuit with a sign saying, ‘I’d rather go naked than wear fur?'” And I thought, why not? I mean, do anything, basically. And then, of course, we managed to get Kim Basinger and Pamela Anderson and everybody wanted to do this because they suddenly realized that what was happening to animals was hideous, and that nobody wanted to be a caveman survivalist in that kind of clothing anymore. It’s morphed though. And just this month, Stella McCartney, who of course is a fashion icon designer, is doing “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Leather.” And some of the fashion shows in Europe have now said, “No fur, no leather,” mostly because it’s an environmental disaster, leather. It’s like meat. But no fur, no leather, and some of them are saying no angora, no wild animal skins, no reptile skins. So, it’s evolving.

LEVITT: Do you have a personal favorite among the many gimmicks that PETA has carried out over the years?

NEWKIRK: Oh gosh. One of the things I did, is the Times of London, I think it was, was doing a profile on me and the woman, who was not sympathetic, who was writing it, said, “Well, you go naked all the time. Why don’t you stand on your office desk and we’ll have the Times photographer take a picture of you naked on an office—” And I said, “It doesn’t work that way. That’s not what it’s about.” I said, “If you want to have a photo like that, we’ll go down to Smithfield Meat Market in London and I’ll hang, if you can arrange it, from a hook with the pigs.” So we went down and I did that photograph. And it was — I think it was very compelling because it said, “Look at us.” My flesh was the same color as their flesh. I was about the same size as a hanging pig’s body. And all the butchers came out to have a look. I think they were very disappointed it was me, but it made a very compelling shot. And I’m always saying, “Lady Godiva did it for a good social cause. It’s your body. You don’t just have your voice. You don’t only have what you can write. You can use your whole being for what you believe in. Animals, child abuse, whatever it is. Just get engaged.”

LEVITT: Can I tell you my own personal favorite PETA gimmick? Your own will, your instructions for what should be done with your body when you die. Could you share some of those final wishes?  

NEWKIRK: It arose from a near plane disaster that I was in. There was wind shear, and we tried to land at one airport, failed, tried to land at an air force base, failed. Made a third landing with about a teaspoon of gas. And the next day I was sitting in a meeting thinking, as people do, “I shouldn’t be here. I’m very lucky to be here.” And while that was happening, I was thinking, “Oh, God, I’m going to die and that’s the end of my activism.” And I was really furious. And so I thought, “Well, what if my body was still intact? Is there anything I could do to carry on when I was dead?” And I thought, “Yes, you could give a part of your liver to whoever is the president of France at the time to protest foie gras,” where of course they force feed ducks and geese until their livers expand. I said, “You can take my leg and make an umbrella stand out of it.” Because when I was a girl, we had an elephant’s foot umbrella stand, a real one, and a lot of people did. So I just started to divide it up and then other people have had suggestions, not all very polite ones I might say. But I’ve amended it since so that I’ve got bits going to animal abusers all over the world.

LEVITT: One of them is just, you wanted part of yourself to be cut out and seared with onions on a barbecue and people to eat you like the flesh that you are. And also your skin is to be turned into a leather belt and purse and delivered to Hermès, the fashion company. 

NEWKIRK: Hermès has a lot to answer for. You know, we’ve been on their Crocodile farms where the animals live in this fetid water, their own waste, and they’re killed really, really badly. We have an ad called, “Filthy Rich or Just Filthy.” And that, to me, is Hermès. But yes, I actually have — people find this amusing because I’m 75 — but I have a tattoo of a lizard on my arm. And it came about because of a case we had with some starving lizards from a pet supply store. I’d like that cut off, made into a lizard skin purse. And I actually put that on eBay once and said, “It’s only available after death.” And somebody blew the whistle and so that had to be taken off eBay because it was offensive, but involuntarily obtained lizard skin, real lizard skin purses, can still be sold on eBay.

LEVITT: The last piece I remember of your will is that part of your heart is going to Elon Musk because he does not have a heart himself.

NEWKIRK: That’s correct. He’s a very callous man. So privileged, so wealthy — so clever. But he has, of course, a lab in which he has subjected monkeys, and pigs and many of them have died badly, to his experiments in which he puts a chip in their brain. There are other companies who are probably his competitors, I’m sure, who are trying to work on this without torturing animals and slaughtering animals. So I would love him to have a piece of my heart, clone it and shove it in his own chest.

LEVITT: What I find so interesting about your will is it’s really a microcosm of what PETA has done so well, which is to observe society, to see things other people don’t see, and then to turn it on its head in a way which is shocking sometimes. In many ways, it feels like modern art, much of what you do. And I think the will is especially interesting because of the sanctity with which we usually treat death and how you’ve managed to subvert that, it’s really fascinating to me.

NEWKIRK: I think that’s a beautiful analogy actually. It’s trying to be creative to get a very serious message out to people who don’t understand it, might not want to listen to it, and if they adopt it might inconvenience them. So we are trying to turn heads. In a way we’re a little bit like a car crash, you have to have a look. And I am fascinated with how people are so reverential to a dead body when they ignore the suffering of living beings. That’s another inconsistency that I find quite disturbing in our species.

LEVITT: Another guest I had on this show who you know well is Bruce Friedrich. He is currently running the Good Food Institute, and he’s trying to hasten the transition from meat to meat alternatives. But back in the day, he was a longtime colleague of yours at PETA, and he participated in all sorts of the spectacles that you created. And I was surprised how reticent he was now to talk about those things. I thought it would be a badge of pride that he had streaked in front of Queen Elizabeth and George Bush, but he really didn’t want to go near it. He seemed to somehow regret that part of his history. I suspect you don’t, but have there been some things that PETA’s done that you look back on and say, “God, I kind of wish we hadn’t done that”? 

NEWKIRK: Well, may I say, he’s still a colleague, Bruce, and I do understand that people in suits may not take him seriously if he’s streaked in front of the Queen. But no, I not only don’t regret anything we’ve done — because it always provokes conversation, discussion, things that need to be thought through, even if people hate us for doing those things. I wish we could have done more! I just ache for the fact I’m 75 and I’ve got to hurry up.

LEVITT: I’m curious how, as an organization, PETA thinks about and measures what works. Is it all just instinct and intuition, or do you use data to judge success? And if so, what kind of data?

NEWKIRK: We use a lot of data. It’s out of my element. It’s mostly social media to see how many likes, how many whatever you call them, forwards of our videos, how many views they have. You know, we count how many vegan starter kits are downloaded from our website. But it is a shotgun approach, because some methods will reach some people, and some won’t. So, I believe in doing as much as you can, in as many ways as you can, to try to reach as many people as you can.

LEVITT: It seems like one of the metrics that you might sensibly use would be donations and donations from new donors. Is that something that you look at and are able to judge success based on that?

NEWKIRK: No, absolutely not, actually, because we say we’re not donor-led. A lot of people will call up and say, “Look, I’ll give you this money if you do such and such, or if you don’t do such and such.” And we say, “No.” I mean, we look at the equation solely from what we think is best for the animals. Where can we have the most impact? Where can we best spend our time? We adore our donors. We can’t do anything without donors, but we are not led in that way. We say, if you don’t like what we’re doing, there is a gamut of animal protection organizations of all stripes. Please give to them instead. But if you want something edgy and envelope pushing, and you see how we’ve changed people’s minds and habits, then come on board with us. But some people are embarrassed to do that. We stand out and they don’t want to stick their heads above the parapet.

LEVITT: Do you worry at all that by looking at social media likes and whatnot, that you run the risk of getting off target, of doing things that get attention, but may not actually be resulting in change? When you have imperfect metrics, it’s really tempting to start optimizing everything you do to meet the metrics and to lose sight of the common sense and the creativity and the intuition that’s driven your organization for so long.

NEWKIRK: Oh, I know what you’re saying. And some of the people who happen to be young who work on our social — you have to sort of say, “No, no, no, we’re not doing that.” But I have come to realize that some of that stuff brings people to the website, and then they learn about something serious, and they change their minds. So I’m not totally against doing things that are fluffy and cute, but it must never ever distract us from our very serious mission.

You’re listening to People I (Mostly) Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with PETA founder, Ingrid Newkirk. After this short break, they’ll return to talk about the art of persuasion.

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One thing that’s always surprised me about PETA is how much effort they devote to issues like the wearing of fur or research on animals when it seems like factory farming is a problem that’s a thousand times bigger if you care about the welfare of animals.

LEVITT: Now, when I put on my economist hat and I think about animal cruelty, it seems pretty clear to me that factory farming absolutely swamps other activities like the fur industry or medical research or fox hunts or animal testing by cosmetics companies. Billions of chickens a year, maybe 75 million pigs. If you devoted PETA’s efforts in strict proportion to the amount of cruelty, you’d spend a lot less effort on fur and animal testing and a lot more on factory farming. Why do you focus so much on those issues?

NEWKIRK: Well, we focus where the largest numbers of animals suffer the greatest, and of course that is in food, in clothing, in entertainment, and in laboratories. While the volume of animals slaughtered for food and factory farmed and trucked and all the things that happened to them beforehand that are atrocious is enormous and does swamp all the others, their lives — and this is no excuse — but their lives are fairly short. A chicken might live four to six weeks in hell and be killed. I have an essay that means a lot to me because I’ve inspected laboratories, I’ve seen absolute horrors inside them, and this man worked in a lab in New York, and there was a baboon in a cage. He had some sort of device, a box of some sort, stuck in his head, and big stitches through his cranium, his shaved head. And he sat there in his metal cage. And the man worked around the lab He moved away. He changed his job. He came back eight years later to say hello to the people who were still in the lab he knew. And there was the baboon sitting in the cage with the box in his head, staring out at the whitewashed room. And so I think you have to take into account when you’re deciding how to spend your resources, your time, everything else, on the psychological suffering, the physical misery, the length of time. And with these other things, you know, with the circus, it’s what children see that they mustn’t see, because that gives them a world view of domination of animals that they shouldn’t have.

LEVITT: An addendum to that, I would think as well, is that there are certain human behaviors that you have more luck changing than others. And just my outsider perspective is you’ve really had a big impact on fur and on research labs, but it’s somehow proven really difficult to move the eating patterns of Americans. I haven’t looked at the data, but I would suspect that there’s just as much meat being eaten today as there was 20 years ago, maybe more.  

NEWKIRK: A lot has changed in the 44 years that PETA’s been in existence. I mean, you can go to the grocery store and just get lost looking at the aisle with the oat milk, the macadamia milk, the rice milk. The population of human beings, of course, is expanding so rapidly that, yes, there is more meat, dairy, eggs being consumed. But it’s very, very hopeful when you look around and you see this wealth of vegan products everywhere. And almost everybody you speak to says, “Oh yes, my daughter’s a vegetarian,” or, “My sister’s a vegan.” 

LEVITT: I have one vegetarian daughter, one vegan daughter, and a vegetarian wife. So I’m in that camp.  

NEWKIRK: See, and what’s wrong with you?  

LEVITT: No, it’s true. It’s a, it’s a good question. What is wrong with me?

NEWKIRK: And it’s men. Men are the primary problem. And I don’t say that as a woman. I just say that as a fact. There has just been yet another article saying, you know, men are so difficult to change because they’ve got this image of themselves, like the rodeo or trophy hunting or eating red meat. It’s just, you have to say, “That doesn’t make you a man.” What makes you a decent person is to have a heart and to have understanding. So get with it. So Steven, next time I speak to you, if I ever speak to you again, I will expect you to be a vegan and do your daughters proud.  

LEVITT: You’ve been working on the art of persuasion for over 40 years and you’re good at it. What have you learned about human psychology? What are the lessons people could take from what you’ve done?

NEWKIRK: Oh, I’m not good at this at all. I just feel it very much. And I can’t stand injustice. I think it’s just that I have to try to find ways to get through to people. If they care about any animal, a dog perhaps, I just try to make the connection. But the bigger challenge I have is saying to people, “I used to wear a fur coat.” Rather than shout at them, it’s to say, “I used to eat my way through the animal kingdom with my father, who was a gourmand, who used to eat calves brains on toast. But I did see videos. I did see photographs. I did go to places. And I know that you’re probably a kind person. And so you would not wish to support those kinds of industries if you saw it too.” If you can appeal to them understanding that you came from that place too, which I certainly did, then maybe you can get through to them. But there are a lot of people I don’t get through to at all, but never give up. You know, advertisers say someone has to hear something, a new idea, seven times before it even registers. So I always say to people, “If you think people aren’t listening to you, maybe you’re the fifth time, maybe the first or the seventh time, but you’re contributing to having that person’s mind change.”

LEVITT: I would not have expected, when I was in my 20s, that things had then sounded outrageous, if they were just said over and over for 10 or 20 years, it would start to sound normal. I think that’s how social movements work. If you think about what’s happened with gay rights or with civil rights, feminism, it takes a long time, but stuff that sounded radical just stops sounding radical after a while. It happens so bit by bit and it requires the kind of infinite patience that you’ve shown over the last 40 years, but I don’t have the right mindset to do it all.

NEWKIRK: I’m not a patient person, but I think why I’ve got my head in the clouds and my feet on the ground is I know what we as a species are like. And we really don’t like change. But as you say, if you are persistent, persistence pays. And if you keep repeating a message, if the message makes sense, finally our little computers between our ears start to process that. So, you’ve got to keep going.

LEVITT: Now, in stark contrast to that, one thing that I have been surprised by that is seemingly extremely effective for PETA are direct personal affronts. You throw a pie in the face of a C.E.O. or put fake blood on a fashion designer. And at least my impression is that you’ve had tremendous success in getting a lot of really fast change just by bringing the message directly home to decision makers. Is that your feeling as well?

NEWKIRK: It’s frankly annoying that you have to go to some sort of extreme measure. I think of it more as vaudeville when we throw a tofu pie at someone or throw some sort of glitter — we just did at the Harvard President for animal experiments. We always try, by the way, to have a polite meeting, to show alternatives, to bring in our scientists. And if they just slam the door in your face, we escalate. We don’t go away. And I remember a corporate executive was giving a speech somewhere. And we gave him a tofu cream pie. And he called me the next day and he said, “You’re not going to get anywhere with that kind of behavior.” And I said, “Well, actually, we’ve been trying to reach you for months and months and you’re on the phone now, so I think that belies it.”

LEVITT: Is it still fun to run PETA 40 plus years later? Or maybe I should ask, was it ever fun to run PETA?  

NEWKIRK: We have our good moments. We have wonderful victory parties. We seem to win something every week. It might be small, it might be big. The 4,000 beagles coming out of Envigo was just a huge party, and we were all very happy when we got that sorted. I cry a lot. I don’t like to see the videos I have to see every week. But it’s worthwhile and I feel extremely grateful that I found what matters to me and I can do it every day.

So, what do you think? Is Ingrid Newkirk a radical, a terrorist? There’s no doubt she’s unusual. It’s hard to find someone who both has a single-minded devotion to commit their life to a cause and is such an insightful thinker and marketer, that she can succeed in convincing others that her views actually make sense. Knowing that I talked with Ingrid, a few days ago, I asked my dad, the one who taught me PETA was a terrorist organization, what his views were now. He chuckled, and he said he mostly agrees with PETA these days. And then he added, “But the mice and rats we had in our lab, we treated them better than we did our human patients!” Which probably says more about the state of health care than it does about animal rights.

LEVITT: This is the point in the show where we invite on my producer, Morgan, and we answer a listener question.

LEVEY: Hi, Steve. A listener named Madhav sent us an email with an idea for boosting bone marrow donations. We recently had an episode with Suleika Jaouad, a writer and cancer survivor who needed two bone marrow transplants in the past. You two talked about ways to increase bone marrow donations, and Madhav wanted to offer another suggestion. So often people will sign up when a loved one needs a transplant, and then often people turn out not to be matches for their loved ones. However, they’re still on the donor list, and then maybe years later, they turn out to be a match for a stranger. Madhav’s idea is that if the donor agrees to donate to a stranger, then the person that they originally hoped to donate to gets moved to the top of the queue. This is a pretty bold idea, Steve. What do you think about it?

LEVITT: I think the idea won’t work very well in bone marrow for particular reasons, but I love the idea generally. It’s not really a queue in bone marrow. because the matches are so infrequent that if someone matches, then they go ahead and do it. It’s different from kidneys where there are a whole bunch of people waiting for kidneys to appear. And that’s where being put to the front of the queue is really, really important. And I love the idea, and there’s actually something kind of like it already in place from the National Kidney Registry. If you decide that you’ll donate a kidney to a stranger, you’re given a voucher. A voucher that allows you to push someone to the head of the queue, just as the listener suggests should happen. But there’s something peculiar about it, which is, this is not a fungible voucher that you can give to anyone. This is a voucher that you have to name the people ahead of time who you would like to move to the top of the list. You can list a maximum of six people.

LEVEY: So just to be clear about this program. If you have a loved one who needs a kidney donation and you’re willing to donate a kidney, but you’re not a match, you can get a voucher for your donation that you can give to your loved one who is in imminent need of a new kidney, and then they can go to the top of the queue. However, you can also list five additional family members in case your sick loved one doesn’t end up actually needing one of the kidneys, then you have five potential backup people — who might not be sick at all. But if they get sick, they can use the voucher. 

LEVITT: To an economist, what’s really strange about this is you would say, look, you donate a kidney. Why not get a voucher that says in the future, anyone I decide I’d like to give this voucher to should move to the front of the queue. That seems like it would be the sensible and the efficient approach that would align the incentives and make people want to donate now. I think the answer to why they did it this way is there’s been a deep fear of anything like a market existing in organ donation in the U. S. Payments were made illegal in 1984. So I think the design of this program was to be defensive. to make sure that nobody had this voucher and thought about selling the voucher. You know me, I completely disagree with this. Organ donation has a huge positive externality associated. We should be doing everything we can to get people to donate organs. And I do think actually the momentum is starting to swing in the direction of what economists — and I think what sensible people — think should happen, which is that we should be finding ways to incentivize people in ethical ways to give their kidneys. And in fact, the biggest development in a long time happened recently. Frank McCormick and Elaine Perlman, who are two of the leaders within the organ donation community, they’ve been working tirelessly and they finally got a law introduced into Congress. It’s called the End Kidneys Death Act. If it were to pass, it would give $50,000 in tax credits for people who donate a kidney. And if it were me, I would have made the number a lot higher. I think they’re thinking in terms of political viability and they kept the number lower, but anything we can do to get rid of this very backwards looking law that’s been passed would be fantastic.

LEVEY: So your center at the University of Chicago, RISC, also has some ideas about kidney donation. Do you guys have a different approach?

LEVITT: We do. I’m totally in agreement with these efforts to change the laws, but it’s too hard. We’re actually doing something much simpler and easier. It turns out that over half the people who want to donate are thrown out of the process at the very first stage because either they’re too heavy or they smoke. And the process at transplant centers is just to typically say to these potential donors, “Oh, we’re sorry, you can’t donate because your BMI is too high or you smoke.” So we just do this really simple thing where we work with transplant centers and we say, “Hey, don’t send them away, send them to us.” And we work with Noom and Weight Watchers and we try to help these potential donors lose weight or quit smoking. And it’s turned out to be a remarkably effective intervention. So we’ve done recently our 27th kidney donation, donations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise because these people were thrown out of the system. I would argue that our numbers in terms of the costs and the benefits are about as good as any non profit that’s going. So it’s been one of the most rewarding projects we’ve done at RISC.

LEVEY: What’s the project called?

LEVITT: It’s called Project Donor and people can look it up online and see what we’re all about. 

LEVEY: We’ll have a link to that in our show notes. Thanks, Madhav, for the question. If you have a question for us, our email is pima at Freakonomics.com. That’s P I M A at Freakonomics.com. It’s an acronym for our show. If you have a question for a past guest, we can try to get that to them and hopefully answer it in a future listener question segment. We read every email that’s sent and we look forward to reading yours.

And in two weeks we’re back with a brand new episode featuring author James Nestor. He’s written two absolutely fascinating books. They’re called Deep and Breath.

NESTOR: The lowest heart rate ever recorded in a conscious, aware human was about seven beats per minute. And that was with a freediver. That is not supposed to be possible. And yet these freedivers keep busting the rules over and over again.

As always, thanks for listening and we’ll see you back soon.

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People I (Mostly) Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, No Stupid Questions, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey and Julie Kanfer with help from Lyric Bowditch, and mixed by Jasmin Klinger.  We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at pima@freakonomics.com, that’s P-I-M-A@freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

NEWKIRK: Can I get where you hang your hat so we can send you some faux chicken?