On this day in vegan history · June 11, 1949
PETA's Co-Founder Is Born
The woman who'd spend fifty years making animal cruelty impossible to look away from arrived in a London suburb decades before anyone had heard of PETA.
The facts
- Born
- June 11, 1949, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England
- Co-founded PETA
- March 1980, with Alex Pacheco
- Earlier career
- Headed Washington, D.C.'s animal-disease-control division by 1976
Ingrid Newkirk was born on June 11, 1949, in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England, the only child of Noel and Mary Ward. She worked her way up through Washington, D.C.'s animal control system in the 1970s, eventually heading the city's animal-disease-control division. In March 1980, she and fellow activist Alex Pacheco founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, what she later called 'five people in a basement.' The group's early campaigns against a Maryland primate lab helped establish the animal rights movement as a force American institutions had to answer to, and Newkirk's blunt, headline-hungry style became as famous, and as argued-over, as the cause itself.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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five people in a basement
Ingrid Newkirk, describing PETA's founding in March 1980
Source: Wikipedia -
A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals.
Ingrid Newkirk, 1985
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
PETA became the loudest, most confrontational voice for animal rights in America, and Newkirk's willingness to court controversy dragged animal suffering out of the shadows and into ordinary conversation. Whatever anyone thinks of the tactics, the fight got harder to ignore because of her.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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