Pictures of adorable animals filled Barus and Holley 166 Tuesday during a lecture delivered by Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder and president of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Newkirk spoke to an audience of nearly 50 during a lecture hosted by the Brown Vegetarian Society.
Newkirk began her lecture by quoting comedian George Carlin’s definition of animal rights activists. “An animal rights activist — they’re the kind of people that when cockroaches invade their home, they develop a spray that doesn’t kill the cockroach, it just confuses them so they go next door to think things over,” she said to a laughing audience.
To give some context to the animal rights movement, Newkirk drew parallels between the way humans treat animals now and the way humans treated other humans in the past. Tragedies like the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust and tuberculosis testing on orphans arose because people “who those things were inflicted upon were considered ‘others,’” Newkirk said. “They were considered different.”
Part of the problem, Newkirk said, is that humans don’t equate things done to animals with those done to fellow human beings. “If you’re against discrimination, gratuitous violence, against prejudice, then you have to be for animal rights,” Newkirk said.
She focused not exclusively on what PETA does as an organization, but rather on how people should view animals and enact their ideologies. She spoke of animals’ intelligence, telling stories of how chimpanzees can beat college students at short-term memory computer games and how crows have their own complex language system that uses their wings and beaks.
She also emphasized animals’ empathy, and their ability to feel the same emotions humans feel, including love, pain, loss, fear and shock. “All living beings love their babies,” Newkirk said, while flashing pictures of baby animals with their mothers on the screens behind her. “We need to be in awe of animals.”
In order to effectively communicate the type of treatment she was inveighing against, Newkirk also showed the audience pictures and videos of animals undergoing different procedures. After warning audience members of the videos’ graphic nature, she showed clips of baby calves being separated from their mothers to be slaughtered for veal, rams getting beaten during shearing and Angora rabbits screaming during live plucking of their fur, among others.
Positive steps have been made in the effort to protect animal rights, Newkirk said. She listed examples of accomplishments that happened just in the last year, including the European Union banning Canadian seal pelt imports and Norway banning circuses with animal acts.
“Hopefully (this lecture) inspires people to look at the world and change how they think about things,” said Adam Horowitz ’16, president of BVS and campus representative for PETA. Horowitz said he has been in contact with PETA all year about having someone lecture at Brown, and that he jumped at the opportunity to have Newkirk speak.
“I’m pretty sure BVS won’t get someone as high profile as Newkirk for a while,” he added.
Audience members said they found Newkirk an effective and engaging speaker, and many said they enjoyed her focus on the hardships animals endure rather than on the organization itself.
“I think that point was very salient, that we should be focusing on pain and suffering,” said former BVS member Jason Kirschner ’13. “I think that was perfectly appropriate for what (the event) was advertised for.”
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