New Podcast release: Ingrid Newkirk

The next episode of "Lives Well Lived", the new podcast I am releasing with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, is now live.

In this episode, Kasia and I speak with Ingrid Newkirk. To give you a taste of what she said, here is some of the transcript, lightly edited for clarity.  You can listen to the full episode now, live on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

On Experimenting on Animals and Factory Farming:

Ingrid Newkirk

If people realized, Peter, that it's not just a few animals being used for a really good purpose to cure some incredibly important human disease, but it's psychologists, it's people with no medical training, it's barbarians, basically, who are interfering with their eyesight, with their brains, who are putting them in chambers, scaring them with rubber snakes and plastic spiders for years in metal boxes where they can't even turn around. This is not science. This is not medicine. This is a massive funding of things that no one should ever do and which have no benefit to humanity or anyone else.

Peter Singer

I totally agree with all of that. I agree that the horrible things are done. But I suppose I feel that factory farming is just even larger by maybe a thousand times larger perhaps when you look at the total numbers. And I also think that it's basic to the way people feel about animals. If we can't get them to avoid buying meat or other animal products that they don't need and for which now, at least in affluent societies, there are very good alternatives, then it's going to be harder still to get them to say, no, stop the experimentation, when the experimenters, of course, are going to say, well, you know, it's either a rat or your daughter kind of argument. you know, it's either a rat or your daughter kind of argument. We've had that argument around for decades, of course.

On a life well lived

Kasia de Lazari-Radek

So you will turn 75 this year, and three quarters of a century seems like a good time to reflect on how you have lived your life. So our last question is, considering everything, you know, the excitement of starting PETA and seeing it succeed to a great extent, and then at the same time living daily with the horror of what humans are continuing to do to animals, do you think that you have lived your life well?

Ingrid Newkirk

Oh Lord! I've lived my life squeakily. When I realized that you can use your voice, I started using it. And so I've been a squeaky wheel for probably 45 years. Maybe I was always a squeaky wheel. I was an annoying squeaky wheel. About things that didn't count until I found things that did. I mean one tries to do one's best. I don't think it's ever good enough. I wish I were cleverer, more creative, and had more hours in the day, and had more stamina, and never got sick and all those things. But those are things you probably can't control much.

So what I can control, I've done my best, but being a human being, I'm pretty inadequate. I just do some things. I do feel I can look back on my deathbed, which I tell everybody, this is the question, you know, the deathbed question, is look back and think: should I have said something then? Did I miss an opportunity then? Could I have done something in a better way, more strategically? Because that's retrospectively impossible. But at the time you can say something, do something, stick up for your beliefs and empower other people, encourage other people, help other people so that you can spread the things that you believe that are good to other people so that they too can be useful. So I hope to have been somewhat useful, but that's the best I can say.