PETA Is Founded in a Basement

In March 1980, Ingrid Newkirk, who had worked as the District of Columbia's first female poundmaster, and Alex Pacheco, a political science student she had met and fallen in love with, founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals near Washington, D.C. Newkirk later described the group's entire early membership as, in her own words, five people in a basement. Fourteen months after that, Pacheco took a job inside a primate research laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland, photographed the monkeys' conditions at night, and passed the pictures to police. The raid that followed was the first on an animal laboratory in U.S. history, and the case it produced eventually reached the Supreme Court. A basement meeting had turned into the country's loudest, and most argued-about, animal rights organization within about a year.