PETA's Ingrid Newkirk

I interviewed artist Sue Coe once and she told me that she is much less forgiving in her renditions of lab workers than she is in depictions of slaughterhouse workers because slaughterhouse workers are usually immigrants, always poorly compensated and working in a field no one aspires to work in. Do you share her attitude?

I have a hard time condemning anyone who is cruel to animals because I think that if they could feel or understand what they were doing -- the way somebody who works for a humane society or an animal rights group does -- they wouldn't do it. We need to stop the activity and not focus on condemnation of the individual.

People from all walks of life and of all economic backgrounds can be kind or cruel. So it may be extra-irritating to me, personally, to have to deal with someone who has an advanced university degree who is swimming rats to death to test executive stress, and much more comfortable for me to try to explain to an underpaid slaughterhouse worker with carpal tunnel syndrome who lives in a shack that looks like South Africa, outside the Purdue plant in Salisbury, Md., that what he's doing isn't good for him or the animals. But really, either individual has an equal chance of being educable as to what he or she is doing to animals. And my personal feelings about their level of education don't play into it. Very poor people refuse to do things that are ugly to animals or people in times of great crisis, even at the risk of their own lives. Similarly, well-educated people do bastardly things to people and animals.

You've said that you would be glad if hoof-and-mouth disease were to take hold in America. Do you think moving the mass killing of animals into the public eye as has happened in England and elsewhere would result in a sustained increase in sensitivity to the plight of animals raised to be food?

You never know. But at least there's a shot at it. In Germany we actually gave away 43,000 vegetarian starter kits in six weeks after the hoof-and-mouth outbreak. What has happened in Germany, the U.K. and France is that people are exploring vegetarianism because of mad cow -- which is very frightening -- and which we have here, I have no doubt. The only reason we can say we haven't is because we only test -- I think last year it was 2,300 cows -- and we killed 36 million.

So I do believe seeing cows burning on the farms will wake a few people up who otherwise will never see their screaming deaths in the slaughterhouse. And it will save the cows the very ugly transport in all weather extremes to the most frightening places on earth. Having stood on the kill floors of slaughterhouses I can assure anyone that they certainly are the most frightening places on earth for the animals who, as the Washington Post has said, are often skinned while they're alive.

You walk an interesting line in your relationships with the captains of the meat industry -- on the one hand you publicly wish for their financial ruin and on the other you are able to nudge Burger King and McDonald's into taking small but significant steps in the way of improving the lives of animals. Is there any example you look to for guidance on how to negotiate victories with powerful interests whom you'd ultimately like to see out of business?

What I say to myself all the time is that we have our heads in the clouds looking for Utopia, but we have our feet firmly planted on the ground dealing with reality. We make no bones about the fact that we want an end to all cruelty to animals. But I think the meat industry and the leather industry and the experimenters understand, especially if we're fighting them, that we will back off if they move society and their industry a step forward. We're not going to stop everything overnight, so while we work for the ideal we certainly wish to provide the carrot-and-stick incentives to move along toward that goal.

Animals are going to die by the millions today in all sorts of ugly ways for all sorts of ridiculous, insupportable reasons. If one animal who is lying in a battery egg farm cage could have the extra room to stretch her wing today because of something you've done, I think she would choose to have that happen.

In the past 21 years PETA has outgrown its original location, the basement of your suburban D.C. home, and become a huge international nonprofit with 700,000 members. Did you ever imagine the group would become what it is today?

I'm very bad at this. I'm not a crystal-ball person. Funny enough, I don't really take much comfort in it because I just know the enormity of the work ahead. I never thought about it then and I don't really think about it now.

You just keep going.

Yes, every day in the Augean stables with my spoon.

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