Review: I Am An Animal (Ingrid Newkirk and PETA)
If you’re vegan, you have to have an opinion on PETA. It will come up, guaranteed.
My take has always been that they provide a valuable role, because their outlandishness at least gets the issues of animal cruelty and compassion, as well as vegetarianism, on the nightly news and talked about. No press release put out by the Humane Society or any vegetarian group will get the same attention. The question is, though, does attention lead to results?
I just watched the recent HBO documentary “I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA” and found it a pretty compelling piece. You can call Newkirk crazy, but I don’t think you could watch this and doubt her sincerity. She truly believes in everything she is doing.
Watching a board room full of PETA members as they watch footage taken undercover at a Butterball turkey processing plant, and no one in this room is phoning it in. They are horrified and affected on a deep emotional level. At one point, Newkirk is driving her car while being interviewed. Suddenly, she sees a dove on the opposite sidewalk and immediately makes a U-turn. She says they are usually dead but, you never know. The bird is dead, so she gets back in the car and continues her drive, as though this was the most commonplace thing anyone would do in this situation.
As much as I admire the efforts of PETA (and let’s face it, at the end of the day we all have the same vision no matter how we arrive there), I just do not believe people will stop eating meat or being cruel to the animals that aren’t their pets anytime soon. Over the summer, I watched a BBC 3 show called Kill It, Cook It, Eat It,” which was a sort of reality show. Each week focused on a different animal, and invited guests would see the live animal enter a working abattoir. It would then be killed, processed, and butchered while the audience/diners watched every step of the proceedings. The meat was immediately brought into the restaurant side of the building, and a chef would prepare the minutes-old meat for the crowd to enjoy. Without fail, audience members said the same things each week, “I was impressed by how humane the process is.” Now, this was a high-end abattoir and not a factory farm without cameras running, so this meat was probably not what you’d be getting at your local supermarket, but even so, I found the comments telling in that they all spoke to a common understanding: I eat meat, I’m going to continue to eat meat, so I’m glad it is at least killed humanely.
That’s sort of the root of the issue to me. I don’t know that you can go up against “My dog is my friend and that cow is my dinner.”
The documentary also featured footage of Alex Pacheco, who founded PETA with Newkirk. When he first appeared, he immediately seemed to have a more level approach about him. By the documentary’s end, we find out that he had since left PETA and questions the group’s focus on media attention.
I don’t think this documentary will change too many people’s minds, and certainly not the people who already have a clear opinion of the group. But, personally, it did put them in a positive light for me. I respect them more because it let me see behind the publicity stunts and what I saw there was compassionate group expressing itself against almost an entire world opposing them.
As per usual, PETA Board member and comic Bill Maher cuts through the fog and does his usual no-bullshit spin. On the topic of whether PETA crosses the line, he said, “It’s not the worst sin in the world to cross the line. To me, a much worse sin is to never approach the line.”
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For more information on the documentary, visit
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/iamananimal/. And PETA, of course, is at http://www.peta.org/.
December 9th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
After watching this I found Ingrid to come off as cold. Which is weird because of her compassion for animals. But that’s the impression she gives off. There is a scene where she’s sitting in this stark room explaining her position on god (that she doesn’t believe in God) and there is this look in her eyes of coldness and godlessness. I may be an atheist myself (some days I am, some days I’m not) but it even sent a chill up my spine. Parts of it were funny, like when she gets in the Jean Paul Gaultier store window with the day glo paint. I have no doubt she’s sincere in what she’s trying to accomplish. But I feel like there are more reasons than even she knows. There is something driving her that’s dark and scary. Like Mother Theresa who wrote in a letter, “as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak.”
January 6th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
There are a great number of people throughout history (Hitler, Stalin, KKK members, I know these are over the top but that usually helps get a point across) that sincerely believed in what they were doing but that in no way excused there means or the ends they hoped to achieve. A number of these people used fear in an attempt to get what they want, just as Ingrid and PETA do. Now I don’t care if people want to be vegans and whatnot, it is your body and your choice what you put in it. I do however take offense when people like many of those within PETA look down on me as unenlightened and simplistic when trying to tell me why I should not eat meat, nobody in my family should hunt, we shouldn’t be able to fish, etc. Honestly a number of the people that say how cute cows are have never seen one up close the number of times I have (most of my mom’s relatives work and live in a farming community, so I’ve been on or around farms a lot when we visit them), I honestly have never found them cute and think the only reason they’re alive is through human intervention (i.e. dairy production and eventual slaughter, as they really probably are too inept to survive in the wild here). Now if you don’t want to eat the cute cow or pig or whatever for whatever reason you choose that’s fine, I honestly don’t care, just please stop telling me that if I just knew I wouldn’t want to eat those animals. Guess what, I do know, and I disagree with your opinions, so give me the same respect to make my own choices and have my own opinions like I give to you.
January 7th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
OK, not quite sure why you’re seeking out two-year old posts to complain about PETA, though. Seems like you’re specifically looking for this stuff to comment on.