PETA's Ingrid Newkirk

It's much easier for us to condemn -- rightly or wrongly -- things that others are doing or have done and in McVeigh's case, I think, rightly. But it's far more difficult and uncomfortable for us to examine what's on our own plates or how we're contributing to needless pain and death.

I think the Nazi war posters are extremely interesting because categories of people are accused of having no feelings, being inconsequential and outside the realm of human consideration. What we're doing now is exactly what we condemn others for doing in the past. It's simply that the category of victims is different. And who the victim is shouldn't make a bean's bit of difference if you're fighting to stop any violence or any unnecessary suffering or any needless death.

Just in the last 10 days there have been two significant pieces in the mainstream press. The Washington Post had a front-page article exposing conditions in slaughterhouses, letting people know -- perhaps for the first time for many people -- that conscious cattle are having their legs cut off and are being skinned.

Another piece, in USA Today, discussed culture among animals; they have family relationships, they learn, they are feeling and thinking beings. This is no news to animal rights activists. It's just that now scientific study after scientific study has confirmed animal culture.

The tragedy comes after all these articles come out, while we say, "Gosh, animals have culture." We carry on slaughtering animals for nothing more than a sandwich or, in Jennifer Lopez's case, some mink eyelashes. So we don't use the knowledge that we're gaining because it's inconvenient for us. Just as we treated blacks as incapable of maternal love and so on, we continue to use animals as if they are commodities when they are actually families, cultures and individuals.

In this instance, and in past campaigns, PETA has offered plausible, well-intentioned motives: Bruce wrote the McVeigh letter after encouragement from concerned friends in Oklahoma. Some people will give you the benefit of the doubt, but a lot of intelligent people will simply see these explanations as part of a P.R. ploy. And you don't always get to go into depth on the issues as we are doing here -- do you ever worry that you're not getting through to enough smart, influential people?

I could say yes or no. Because yes, I worry that we're not reaching enough of any kind of people simply because it is so tough to have a very serious social issue and to be able to get it into the public's mind in any significant way, or to reach significant numbers of people unless it is couched in something sexual, something confrontational, something provocative. We had Monica Lewinsky every day for over a year, like it or lump it. We have McVeigh probably almost every other day. It's very, very hard to penetrate the news. And we have this enormous obligation. You mention some people tuning out because they just think our approach is cheap; if we didn't do this, no one would hear us. If we didn't use these natural links, and they are to us natural links, no one would hear us. So our obligation is clear.

How do you respond to people who claim PETA cares about animals at the expense of caring about humans?

I'd like them to give us one example. A group is set up to care about homeless people -- it would be like accusing them of caring more about homeless people than orphans. That's their mandate. Our mandate is to care about and make heard the voice of the largest group of victims in the history of the world, encompassing 9 billion animals killed a year just for food in this country -- not counting all the animals in entertainment, the elephants chained behind circuses, the animals with electrodes in their heads in the laboratories.

Our perspective is that if anyone says that, they can't point to a single incident in which we care more about one animal, human or other. Secondly, vegetarianism is a diet that stops people from getting heart disease, cancer and stroke. Veganism is a diet that stops children from getting ear infections and colic. Vivisection is wasting money that could go to a birth defects registry instead of to addicting monkey mothers to cocaine. There isn't anything we do that doesn't benefit us as human beings -- we simply have to shift the marketplace to a compassionate lifestyle from a callous lifestyle.

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