May 12, 2022 • 36 mins
Loving and receiving love from an animal can be a healing act. When we choose to have respect for all living things and work to protect them, that can be revolutionary. In the final episode of this season, Alicia sits down with the president and founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, and Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics and the author of Animal Liberation. They share their personal journeys towards animal activism and reflect on the inspiring progress they've seen throughout their lives. Together, they consider the relationship between humans and other animals, the power of your purse to enact change, and the importance of empathy to face today's challenges. As you continue on your healing journey, carry love for yourself, your community, your planet, and all species.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
What is it really gonna take to heal ourselves, our communities,
and our planet. I'm Alicia Silverstone, and this is the
real heal. So far this season, we've talked about healing
in almost every way, healing our minds, our bodies, our communities,
(00:25):
our children. In this episode, I spoke to the president
and founder of Peter Ingrid new Kirk and Peter Singer,
professor of bioethics and author of Animal Liberation, about healing
the relationship between humans and other animals and why we
treat ourselves differently than how we treat other species. We
(00:45):
chat about how they came to consider the lives of animals,
the powerful effects of their activism, how factory farming contributes
to food deserts, and most importantly, how a renewed respect
for all species can help us to heal ourselves and
our planet. I'm so grateful to Ingrid and Peter for
chatting with me and helping me to close season one
(01:07):
of the podcast, and of course thank you for joining
me on this journey of healing. So without further ado,
let's get into the real hell. Ingrid and Peter, I
am so grateful to both of you to speak to
me today. You're both incredible and so important to me
(01:31):
and the journey that I've been on. So I want
to introduce you properly, Ingrid, would you like to start?
Ingrid new Kirk, Who are you? I asked myself as
every day. Um. I'm the founder and president of People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization that probably
wouldn't have existed if we hadn't if I hadn't read
(01:54):
Peter Singer's Animal Liberation book, which has been known as
the bible of the animal rights movement. We have about
nine million members. We're in nine countries, and we focus
on where the largest numbers of animals suffer the greatest,
which means for food, for clothing, in entertainment, pest control,
(02:16):
and of course in laboratories where they're suffering is almost immeasurable. Yes,
and Peter, would you like to Ingride just said who
you are, but you can say it as well. Sure,
As in Grid said, I'm the author of Animal Liberation,
which was first published back in and I'm currently working
(02:38):
on a new edition. Uh So there has been an
addition in between, but it needs updating. I'm also professor
of bioethics at Princeton University. My background is in philosophy,
specifically ethics. I'm Australian, as your people can probably here,
and I'm speaking to you now from Australia, lovely, So
(02:58):
I just wanted to ask you both and you can
decide who wants to go first. But how did you arrive?
What's the story the moment that you know, you really
realize that animals, you know, we're worthy of your attention
and something to care about. When was that sort of
click that it shifted for you? Peter had happened to
(03:20):
you first, So I think you should go first. Thank you, Ingrid. Okay,
So I can actually date this pretty closely to an
event that happened when I was a graduate student at
Oxford University in I'd fallen into a conversation after a
class with another graduate student, a Canadian called Richard Keshen,
(03:42):
and he invited me back to his college, Bailiol College,
for lunch. And when we uh went into the dining hall,
there was a choice to what you could eat was
spaghetti which had a kind of reddish brand source on
top of it, or a salad plate. And Richard asked
if there was meat in the spaghetti and when he
was told that there was, he took the salad plate.
(04:04):
I took the spaghetti, and we went on with our
conversation for a while. But when that had finished, I
asked him why why did he ask that question about meat?
And you have to realize this is I don't think
i'd ever met a vegetarian, or if I had, maybe
i'd met a person of Indian background. But Richard just
very straightforwardly said, I don't think it's right to treat
(04:27):
animals in the way that the animals that get turned
into meat treated. And I really didn't know anything about this.
I've never heard of factory farming at that time, and
I assumed that animals had nice lives outside in the farms.
Of course I knew they got truck to slaughter and killed.
But you know, although I was a philosophy student studying ethics,
(04:48):
I had never really thought about seriously about the ethics
of how we treat animals. I assumed, as many people do,
that somehow that can't be as an important issue as
the Vietnam War that was going on then, or or
racial questions. I just thought it was nothing very important.
But Richard challenged me to think about that more um
and I did. I read a book by Ruth Harrison
(05:10):
called Animal Machines, which talked about factory farming in England
as it was developing at the time, and pretty soon
my wife and I decided we were going to stop
eating meat, and we did very soon after that. Thank
you to Richard then, absolutely, And Richard is alive and
well and living in Nova Scotia, so I'm still in
touch with him. Oh well, please thank him for me,
(05:32):
because that encounter at Oxford set off a chain of
events that's had enormous repercussions. I also read Ruth Harrison's
Animal Factories when I was driving from England to Wales,
and well, not while I was actually driving, but during
that trip, and it was just stunning. It was simply
(05:54):
about factory farming and no one had heard how animals
were intensively raised. And I remember bawling my eyes out
in a hotel room and deciding I'm going vegetarian. Nobody
then ever had spoken the word vegan. And so I
arrived at my parents home. They were staying in there
(06:16):
temporarily and my mother kept badgering me and saying, oh,
come on, it doesn't make any difference, have a little
bit of this, have a little bit of that. You know,
you loved over soul, darling, And so that went out
the window because I was nineteen and I just didn't
know any vegetarians, and I believed, well, maybe it doesn't
(06:37):
make any difference. So that was the end of that.
I had grown up in a very caring family. My
mother's adage, if you will, was it doesn't matter who
is suffering, It matters that they're suffering and what you
can do about it. So I hadn't been shielded from
(06:58):
those thoughts. And we lived in India for a time.
My mother took in refugees from Tibet, from the streets,
unmarried women who had been thrown out of the house, animals,
you name it, and it was all about what you
could do. But we ate animals. I had a fur
hat from a wild cat caught in Cashmir that I
(07:19):
adored the hat, and always chose to take the tongas
the horse drawn carriages with these bone thin horses, because
I loved animals. So after I read Peter's book, suddenly
it all fit together for me and the inconsistencies fell away,
and I thought, well, I don't just believe in being
(07:41):
kind dogs and cats and horses maybe, or you know
a baby bird who's fallen from the nest. What difference
does it make if I'm familiar with these animals, this
kind of animal or not. What difference does it make?
What kind of package any living being comes in? I mean,
they all feel And so Peter had tied all this
(08:04):
up so carefully and presented it so beautifully that suddenly
everything was clear to me. And I thought, well, if
I'm this dense and I've been through my life hurting animals,
not knowingly but certainly doing it, but I cared for
animals and love animals, then what about all the other
(08:27):
people who are just like me? So I thought, got
to start a group then, and start showing people what's
going on behind the scenes they never visit, and got
to do the homework for them, to show them what
the options are so that they can make compassionate choices.
And that's how it all really came together for me.
(08:48):
I wonder in both of your cases, another person could
have read these books. Another person could have had that
conversation you had with Richard and sort of said, oh,
that doesn't sound nice and moved on do you know
what I mean? And not had it land inside them
in a way that you dedicated your lives to ending
(09:09):
this suffering and other other wonderful things as well. So
I just wonder if you know what it was about
inside of you that you know made you hear it
differently or let it land inside of you in a
way that really inspired you to make change. It's probably
actually different for each of us, because I didn't feel
(09:32):
I had a particularly close bond with animals at the
time that I met Richard. So for me, I think
it came much more from the fact that I was
a student studying philosophy and studying ethics, and Richard really
posed the challenge, and the challenge was something like, well,
we think that old humans have basic rights, or we
think that they're entitled to equal consideration. We don't think
(09:56):
that they should be used just as means to our ends.
But what is it that draws the boundary line between
humans and animals? It says, yes, if you're a remember
the species Homo sapien, then you have this special moral status.
But if you remember of some other species, even though
you're capable of feeling pain or enjoying your life, that
doesn't really matter, or at least it's completely subordinated to
(10:19):
our interests in whatever we want to get out of you. So,
and that was kind of an intellectual puzzle. Now, maybe
if i'd been religious, I might have said, well, God
gave us the animals, so that's the answer to that problem.
But I couldn't appeal to any such answer because I
wasn't a religious believer. So I thought about it, and
for a little while maybe I thought, well, you know,
(10:41):
there must be some something here that I'm missing. What
is the explanation everybody else thinks it's okay to treat
animals as means to our ends. Must be something that
I'm not getting. But then I started reading various works
of philosophy that purported to justify the fact that we
are special. You know that some of them did say that, well,
we have immortal souls or were made any image of God.
(11:03):
I didn't believe that. Can't said well, they're not self conscious,
so they're not so they're not ending themselves, and they
can be used as means to an end. But surely
you know why self consciousness the relevant thing, even if
you know whether or not they are the capacity to
suffer is what's important really, And so eventually I thought, well,
(11:23):
this is not as It's not that I'm missing something,
it's that there is something drastically wrong with the with
the situation and the way we're treating animals. Ulyssia, you're
raising a child as a vegan. Well he's no longer
a child. You've raised him all these ears to have
your values. And I do believe that what you say
about parents is that with the best of intentions. When
(11:46):
I decided I'd be vegetarian for ethical reasons, and my
mother kept saying, oh, you really do have to have
a bit, and it's it's going to be that parents
today have very little excuse for making those lines of
arguments that they used to think were for the benefit
of their children. And with men that you had to
(12:06):
toughen yourself. It was really vital that you had to
be the provider and the defender, and you know nature
was dangerous. You had to keep those animals out of
the house and from attacking your family. Those ideas have
gone away to a certain extent, to a large extent,
and now we have mothers like you, and that's a
(12:26):
wonderful thing. I love hearing all that you're saying, and
it made me think when you said that animals, you know,
maybe aren't self conscious. I'm not sure if I understand
the entire proper definition, but I would argue they are
because the way my dogs look at me when they do,
you know, if they do something like you know, they've
gone to the bathroom in the wrong place, the drama
(12:48):
that occurs inside of them, the emotional reaction, the shame
they feel them. And then at one time, I was
with an elephant in Africa and I you know, we
stumbled upon in the bush, and you know how when
you stumble upon an elephant you need to make a
lot of noise to scare them away. And he put
on such a show. This elephant looked at it was like,
(13:10):
you know, he stopped. We're doing all the noises, and
he looked at us and he just said, I'm not
going to do this today. It was sort of this
whole drama around. He had so much pride and he
was trying to show us that he was strong and tough,
but meanwhile he was just scared and wanted to go away.
So I think that represents a self consciousness on some level.
(13:31):
I don't know if that would be correct, But I'm
sure that there are many animals who are self conscious,
and you know, you mentioned elephants and dogs are probably
good candidates, but there may well be some others that
are not. We we don't know. But as I say,
if they can feel pain, if they can suffer, that
seems to me the critical thing, and the self consciousness,
you know, maybe add something to that for some species,
(13:53):
but perhaps not for all of them. Well, I will
say I find it's so annoying that on tickto park
and some parts of the internet you have people shaming
their animals, putting a sign around their next to say
I've been bad, or making them stand in the corner
facing the wall. You know, the shame is that you
don't understand your animals communication. They can't speak your language,
(14:18):
You haven't a clue what they're saying in theirs. You
speak not one word of dog or elephant, and you
expect them to fit into our world. And yet they're
emotional creatures, all of them, I believe. I mean, there
were just some articles I'm sure you saw them about
new ones, about insects and the fact that they can
feel shame, So you know, it's just size doesn't mean anything.
(14:42):
Brain size doesn't mean anything. But they are all emotional
beings and they feel lonely, they grieve, they love, they
feel joy, they cherish freedom, and they don't want to
be dominated any more than it we do. I mean, yes,
a wolf has an alpha wolf, but we aren't understanding
(15:02):
the very clever ways in which they try to communicate
with us. Even a cat going doing their business outside
the box, it's not a random act. It's a message
that I'm sick, my box isn't clean. You've got a
new mate who kicks me off the couch. There's something
going on there where they're very cleverly trying to impart
something to you. It's extraordinary what Peter has done. And
(15:42):
you know Peter has some can have a reputation at times,
and at the end of the day, you have accomplished
so much. You have the legislation that you've passed, the
stuff with laboratories and experimenting, you know, getting general motors,
you know, not to do these car crashes. Do you
want to talk a little bit about sort of the
highlights of your career as or your your mission as
(16:07):
an activist, what you have accomplished aside from having nine
million members and changing the lives of many many people.
Of course that's massive, but specifically for the animals, what
things are sort of highlighting the changes that you've made,
that you can say we've changed this, and I know
it's because of the work I've done. Well. We can
be really annoying and we can be somewhat embarrassing, and
(16:29):
people will want to distance themselves from us, but there's
always a method behind the madness. We're not here to
win a popularity contest. Our feeling is if you tell
people what they already know and agree with, what's the point.
So we're here to push the envelope. And at first
even it's hard to think back now when we first
(16:50):
brought up for in and did a massive mailing showing
steel traps of raccoons and foxes and so on caught
in them. Nobody knew there was anything wrong with fur.
I mean, it's amazing to think of now, and people
mocked us as we were outside first doors, crawling along
the ground with fake blood and what have you, jumping
(17:11):
onto runways. We were detested for that. But today fur
really is dead. It has gone. The same was true
with for forty years, almost thirty some years, we stood
outside circuses, Ringling Brothers, Barnamin Bailey Circus, the Greatest, which
I think was the cruelest show on earth, with their
chained elephants and their bullhooks and their training, and people said,
(17:35):
don't you dare stand here with my children coming in?
Don't you ruin my children's evening or afternoon, and they
would be vile to us. We suffered all sorts of abuse,
but we really didn't care because we knew that we
were right and that the animals couldn't stand there, and
so we did. And of course we bought other actions.
(17:57):
As you say, we litigated, went to the federal government.
We did undercover investigations until we had enough that they
cried uncle. They realized people aren't coming to the shows anymore.
They don't want to deal with the demonstrators, or they
understand the cruelty, and we've been fined and so on.
So they folded their tents and went away. Funny enough,
(18:20):
they're coming back now, but it's without any animals whatsoever.
It will be the new Ringling shirt. That's amazing. So
when we first started talking about vegan and I remember
cooking the first vegan hot dogs on the National Mall
in a plug in walk and people would come by
and they would say, what are these and we would say, oh,
their plant base. They're they're made with plants, and they
(18:42):
would go oh, and they would go next door to
the pork hot dogs. But now, of course everybody knows vegan, vegan, vegan.
It's everywhere, and so I think you just have to
plug away. We were very excited to stop some of
the military's test soun animals, to stop, as you say,
(19:02):
the car companies all over the world, crashing pigs and
baboons into walls, when now we have mannequins. We've employed
many scientists. We have over nineteen scientists. I say over
because I think it's now twenty on stuff. And they
actively find ways to fund non animal alternatives to very
(19:25):
cruel animal experiments and get them adopted. Monoclonal antibodies, different
things for dip theory, of for a different lung model
instead of sticking mice into tubes. So basically, we just
try to reach as many people as possible, in as
many ways as possible, with as many different messages as possible.
(19:48):
Deathly serious, scientific shocking, funny. Whatever we can do, because
you never know what's going to touch somebody and make
them think, well, maybe I won't do that anymore. Oh well,
they have a point. So people do throw rocks at
us all the time. But that's fine, just in the
back of your mind. As advertising people say, you have
(20:10):
to hear a message seven times before it resonates. So
we're we're hard at it. Yeah. I think it was
Peter who said we all eat, we all dress ourselves,
or maybe this was you, Ingrid. I don't know what
you want to do. It was you'll have to claim it.
We all dress ourselves, shampoo our hair by things. When
(20:32):
we look at all those ways we spend money, we
have the power of the purse, and that's so important.
This sounds like Peter even something like you buy a
pair of leather shoes and you don't think twice about it.
And then I was just going to say that there
are so many great alternatives out there for all of
these things. But you're talking about the power of the purse.
(20:53):
The power each of us has is in the purchases
that we make. Well, we said that, but eat is
said everybody. There's something everybody can do, right, people, because
everyone eats three times a day, and that's some three
times a day. You can make a choice. But the
power of the purse is very important to understand because
(21:14):
somebody can feel magnanimous, and they are if they write
a check for ten dollars, hundred dollars, ten thou dollars
to a humane society or an animal rights organization. But
yet in the course of a year, how much do
they spend on things that are tested in animals eyes
and down their stomachs, On the slaughter industry for various reasons,
(21:37):
On anything that's done to take baby bears away from
their mothers and chain them to a wall and teach
them how to stand on their hind legs for entertainment.
I mean, all the things that we could just go
on and on. If you are not being a conscientious consumer,
then you're really negating. You're you're eliminating that good that
you're doing because you don't think about how powerful your passes. Yeah, exactly,
(22:02):
I think, And that's really all the support that the
animal industry needs. If they continue to get that revenue,
then they're powerful. Then they have enough money to lobby
congress people, to make donations to their campaigns and essentially
to block legislation that would stop the abuses that most
people really would like to see stopped but don't know
(22:24):
how to stop. So um trying to reduce the power
of that industry is the thing to do. And if
we can stop people purchasing their products, then you know
that's there's there's lots of things wrong about a capitalist system,
but one thing that's really right about it is that
if people stop buying stuff, then people will have to
stop producing it, because nobody produces when there's no market.
(22:47):
So that's really what we need to get people to do.
What I think connects all of this is when Ingrid
you also spoke about food deserts and how making the
choice to be not eating meat and not eating dairy
really affects these food desserts. And when I think about
the fact that nine million people die a year of
(23:09):
hunger when there's more than enough food on the planet
to feed each mouth, we just feed it to animals instead.
And so it's not an efficient use of resources because
you know, one burger requires the amount of all these
resources that could have made fed an entire village of people.
So the the act of making this choice to help
animals or to end hunger are quite connected. Can you
(23:33):
talk a little bit about the food deserts and how
meet and Dairy really specifically does aid in this problem. Yes,
it is all absolutely connected. Animal liberation is human liberation,
that's what it is. But people who have limited choices,
who live perhaps in neighborhoods where they may not have
transport to get to a big grocery store, and so
(23:57):
they're stuck with what is around them, and it is
around them is usually places where they stores where they
cannot get whole foods, grains, fruits, vegetables, fresh foods, and
so they've also they're surrounded by fast food outlets and
they prey on them. They're cheap food that is going
to give them the last thing that anybody who is
(24:19):
impoverished needs, and that's ill health. So they're economically deprived,
and then suddenly they've got diabetes, they've got various cancers,
they've got high blood pressure, um, they're obese, and they
have all the attendant health problems that come with obesity
from malnutrition. I mean it's there. It's not not getting
enough to eat, it's just getting chunk to eat. That
(24:41):
is clogging their arteries and making them a physical mess.
So we do have a program. It's quite small, but
it's going out to places such as Atlanta, and where
we hooked up with Pinky Coal, the so called Slutty Vegan,
who is a marvelous woman has the food ruck. And
we've hooked up with various reverends in the black religious
(25:04):
community in certain cities, and we are feeding groceries and
we are giving recipes, and we are trying to help
people campaign to have a diversion of funds from junk
food into wholesome food. My heart's desire is to really
(25:43):
help people to heal and the world to heal, and
for all creatures to heal and our planet to heal.
And in this conversation, we've been talking about how you know,
we can end the suffering of creatures and people who
are in need, and how that's all connected. And I
(26:03):
just wonder what both of you think is the broken
part of us that can be healed by respecting other species.
I think that one of the things that we just
had recently might be of use. We had a virtual
animal rights conference, and I thought much of what we
(26:23):
were saying could be applied to any movement or anything
that anyone was going through when they were trying to
achieve good, even in things that they were doing that
were outside the realm of a movement, And that was
a session called burn on, don't burn out, because I
think that so many of us are crushed by what
(26:46):
we see. I mean even crushed people are crushed by
the pandemic, that crushed by being having to be locked down,
and it might make them be helped by being having
them think more empathically about for example, a bird is
locked down for life if you put them in a cage.
(27:06):
A monkey in a laboratory is locked down for life.
And I think that they can help heal themselves by
thinking about how it fits into the whole. But also
to think that when you feel depressed, or you feel enraged,
or you feel just worn down, it's so useful as
a device to look back at how far society in
(27:30):
the world has come, the positive things that have come about,
all those things that have progressed, and then look forward
not with despair or thinking that things are hopeless and
there's nothing you can do, but the little things even
that you can do every day that will make you
(27:51):
feel better and will make you less despondent and we'll
bring about some positive change. Maybe that's too simple to
stick away, to put it, but there are so many
ways that you can lift yourself out of the kind
of malaise that comes from being in a pandemic, or
(28:12):
looking at the wars that are going on in the world,
or if you travel overseas and you see the slums
and the poverty and and so on, or if you
read the paper and you see it. There's so many
ways in which you can concentrate on the now and
the today and what you can do that that's where
our focus should be, and that is a very healing thing.
(28:33):
If I can add to that, I think it's really
important to know that we are part of this change,
and that involves bringing your values together with your actions
with your life. To me, that's been a really important
thing that recognizing where my food comes from and avoiding
(28:53):
food that is produced in ways that exploit animals and
ac cruel to animals has helped to bring my values
together with my with my actions. Because food is something
that we have every day. We make choices about what
to eat three times a day, perhaps, and so it's
a way of reaffirming that you're living a life that
is in accordance with your values. It's not the only
(29:16):
way of doing it, of course, there are other things
that we need to do as well, but it's a
really important one. And as we were saying earlier, you know,
we know that we're not supporting with our dollars the
industries that are exploiting animals. We also know that we
are reducing our impact on climate change, and that's another
(29:36):
thing that we need to talk about. The planet needs
healing from what we have been doing to it over
the last couple of centuries of industrialization and the increasing
amount of meat and animal products produced has had a
big impact on climate. It's responsible for huge quantities of
(29:57):
greenhouse gases, particularly potent meat, saying that is being released,
and we know that those who eat a plant based
diet significantly contributing to reducing their personal footprints carbon footprints,
and also they're withdrawing support from those industries that are
involved in this. So that's another way in which our
(30:19):
values can be displayed through our actions that we care
about the planet, we care about the future of the planet,
We care about the people who are going to suffer
most from climate change. And again that's the people who
are in poverty, who don't really have alternatives, who rely
on rainfall to grow the crops that they that they eat.
(30:40):
They're the ones who will suffer most, who will have
the least, the fewest options to go somewhere else. So
in all these ways, I think focusing on what we
eat and trying to not be complicit in the suffering
of animals, not be complicit in the pollution of the planet,
those are things that can heal ourselves at the same
(31:00):
time as we're healing the planet and healing the violent
relationships that we would otherwise be having with animals. There
are two things that you hear all the time, and
one is I feel like an automaton. I mean, I
just go through life, which is related to the other one,
which of course is what is the meaning of life?
(31:20):
And you may never know what the meaning of life is,
but maybe the meaning of life is that every single
day you try to change something a little bit, You
try to bring a positive force to bear, you try
to do some good. And most important I think is yes,
what we eat is vital because as you say, three
times a day and snacks in between, is that that
(31:44):
can be a vegan life where it can be exploitive,
but it's also feeding others. I think anyone who's listening
to this has the ability to cook or buy or
prepare or something a meal for someone else, not for
another vegan, but for some dy who is eating animals
or eating things that animals produce, like eggs and milk
(32:05):
and honey and so on. Is show them because often
people will not explore this themselves. They're stuck in their traditions,
they're stuck in their old ways. But if you go
next door, you go to work with a meal, or
you pay it back to the person in the drive
in that has a vegan burger, and you pay it
back so the person behind you gets a free one,
(32:27):
you are introducing them to something that might stick. And
of course, especially with children and the parents of children,
as you know more than I is, those are the
great influences and those children have, hopefully, if we don't
just mess up the whole thing, decades and decades and
decades of life ahead of them, and so they are
(32:49):
worth investing the time in educating them. And they are
always invariably receptive. They don't want to hurt animals it's
only when they grow up they've become a nurde that
they really start to think it's it's sissy to care
or something like that. It's not when the kids they
want animals to be friends, not food. I just wanted
(33:11):
to echo a little bit of what both of you said.
But um, go back to the child in us. We
are all little wounded children. And I mean, hopefully some
of us aren't, but there are a lot of wounded children.
And when you think about a child, if you put
a child in a room with a cow or a
pig or a chicken, the last thing they're gonna do
(33:32):
is come out having eaten or tried to eat that animal.
They're going to snuggle with it, play with it, and
connect with it. Once you go to an animal sanctuary
and play with cows and play with pigs, and hold
a turkey in your arms and have them sit on
you like a cat, you just start to feel connected
to yourself and to the purity and their deep souls.
(33:54):
And it's the most beautiful, beautiful thing. And I think
it's just connecting back to our child and ourselves and
allowing ourselves to live our truths. And I'm so grateful
to have had this conversation with both of you. Is
there anything else you want to say? Thank you, Alicia,
You've said that beautifully and I mean a privilege to
be proud of this conversation. I don't need to say
(34:15):
any more than that, I believe. Thank you, Lucia very
very much for everything you do for Peter, for the animals,
for humanity, for your son, and if anybody needs anything
that Peter can provide that and that's the p e
t A one to help them in their exploration of
(34:36):
how to live peacefully on the planet. Please get in
touch with us here we are Peter dot Org. I
couldn't be more proud and proud of you both, and
just proud of having this conversation with you and knowing
that you're in the world doing what you're doing. So
thank you for all the good and kindness that you're
putting in the world. It's really, really, really beautiful and
(35:00):
we need more of you. So thank you, thank you,
thank you, Thank you Alyssia very much. To dig deeper
into this episode's topic and resources, visit The kind Life
dot com. The Real Hell is an I Heart radio
production made in partnership with Frequency Media I'm your host.
(35:23):
Alicia Silverstone from I Heart Radio. Are managing producer is
Lindsay Hoffman from Frequency Media. Michelle Corey is our executive producer,
Jordan Rizzieri is our producer, and Moni Leonard and Laura
Boyman are our associate producers. Sydney Evans is our dialogue
editor and Claire bit Of Gary Curtis is our mixer
(35:45):
and sound designer. This podcast is available on the I
Heart Radio app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever
podcasts are found. Dat
What is it really gonna take to heal ourselves, our communities,
and our planet. I'm Alicia Silverstone, and this is the
real heal. So far this season, we've talked about healing
in almost every way, healing our minds, our bodies, our communities,
(00:25):
our children. In this episode, I spoke to the president
and founder of Peter Ingrid new Kirk and Peter Singer,
professor of bioethics and author of Animal Liberation, about healing
the relationship between humans and other animals and why we
treat ourselves differently than how we treat other species. We
(00:45):
chat about how they came to consider the lives of animals,
the powerful effects of their activism, how factory farming contributes
to food deserts, and most importantly, how a renewed respect
for all species can help us to heal ourselves and
our planet. I'm so grateful to Ingrid and Peter for
chatting with me and helping me to close season one
(01:07):
of the podcast, and of course thank you for joining
me on this journey of healing. So without further ado,
let's get into the real hell. Ingrid and Peter, I
am so grateful to both of you to speak to
me today. You're both incredible and so important to me
(01:31):
and the journey that I've been on. So I want
to introduce you properly, Ingrid, would you like to start?
Ingrid new Kirk, Who are you? I asked myself as
every day. Um. I'm the founder and president of People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization that probably
wouldn't have existed if we hadn't if I hadn't read
(01:54):
Peter Singer's Animal Liberation book, which has been known as
the bible of the animal rights movement. We have about
nine million members. We're in nine countries, and we focus
on where the largest numbers of animals suffer the greatest,
which means for food, for clothing, in entertainment, pest control,
(02:16):
and of course in laboratories where they're suffering is almost immeasurable. Yes,
and Peter, would you like to Ingride just said who
you are, but you can say it as well. Sure,
As in Grid said, I'm the author of Animal Liberation,
which was first published back in and I'm currently working
(02:38):
on a new edition. Uh So there has been an
addition in between, but it needs updating. I'm also professor
of bioethics at Princeton University. My background is in philosophy,
specifically ethics. I'm Australian, as your people can probably here,
and I'm speaking to you now from Australia, lovely, So
(02:58):
I just wanted to ask you both and you can
decide who wants to go first. But how did you arrive?
What's the story the moment that you know, you really
realize that animals, you know, we're worthy of your attention
and something to care about. When was that sort of
click that it shifted for you? Peter had happened to
(03:20):
you first, So I think you should go first. Thank you, Ingrid. Okay,
So I can actually date this pretty closely to an
event that happened when I was a graduate student at
Oxford University in I'd fallen into a conversation after a
class with another graduate student, a Canadian called Richard Keshen,
(03:42):
and he invited me back to his college, Bailiol College,
for lunch. And when we uh went into the dining hall,
there was a choice to what you could eat was
spaghetti which had a kind of reddish brand source on
top of it, or a salad plate. And Richard asked
if there was meat in the spaghetti and when he
was told that there was, he took the salad plate.
(04:04):
I took the spaghetti, and we went on with our
conversation for a while. But when that had finished, I
asked him why why did he ask that question about meat?
And you have to realize this is I don't think
i'd ever met a vegetarian, or if I had, maybe
i'd met a person of Indian background. But Richard just
very straightforwardly said, I don't think it's right to treat
(04:27):
animals in the way that the animals that get turned
into meat treated. And I really didn't know anything about this.
I've never heard of factory farming at that time, and
I assumed that animals had nice lives outside in the farms.
Of course I knew they got truck to slaughter and killed.
But you know, although I was a philosophy student studying ethics,
(04:48):
I had never really thought about seriously about the ethics
of how we treat animals. I assumed, as many people do,
that somehow that can't be as an important issue as
the Vietnam War that was going on then, or or
racial questions. I just thought it was nothing very important.
But Richard challenged me to think about that more um
and I did. I read a book by Ruth Harrison
(05:10):
called Animal Machines, which talked about factory farming in England
as it was developing at the time, and pretty soon
my wife and I decided we were going to stop
eating meat, and we did very soon after that. Thank
you to Richard then, absolutely, And Richard is alive and
well and living in Nova Scotia, so I'm still in
touch with him. Oh well, please thank him for me,
(05:32):
because that encounter at Oxford set off a chain of
events that's had enormous repercussions. I also read Ruth Harrison's
Animal Factories when I was driving from England to Wales,
and well, not while I was actually driving, but during
that trip, and it was just stunning. It was simply
(05:54):
about factory farming and no one had heard how animals
were intensively raised. And I remember bawling my eyes out
in a hotel room and deciding I'm going vegetarian. Nobody
then ever had spoken the word vegan. And so I
arrived at my parents home. They were staying in there
(06:16):
temporarily and my mother kept badgering me and saying, oh,
come on, it doesn't make any difference, have a little
bit of this, have a little bit of that. You know,
you loved over soul, darling, And so that went out
the window because I was nineteen and I just didn't
know any vegetarians, and I believed, well, maybe it doesn't
(06:37):
make any difference. So that was the end of that.
I had grown up in a very caring family. My
mother's adage, if you will, was it doesn't matter who
is suffering, It matters that they're suffering and what you
can do about it. So I hadn't been shielded from
(06:58):
those thoughts. And we lived in India for a time.
My mother took in refugees from Tibet, from the streets,
unmarried women who had been thrown out of the house, animals,
you name it, and it was all about what you
could do. But we ate animals. I had a fur
hat from a wild cat caught in Cashmir that I
(07:19):
adored the hat, and always chose to take the tongas
the horse drawn carriages with these bone thin horses, because
I loved animals. So after I read Peter's book, suddenly
it all fit together for me and the inconsistencies fell away,
and I thought, well, I don't just believe in being
(07:41):
kind dogs and cats and horses maybe, or you know
a baby bird who's fallen from the nest. What difference
does it make if I'm familiar with these animals, this
kind of animal or not. What difference does it make?
What kind of package any living being comes in? I mean,
they all feel And so Peter had tied all this
(08:04):
up so carefully and presented it so beautifully that suddenly
everything was clear to me. And I thought, well, if
I'm this dense and I've been through my life hurting animals,
not knowingly but certainly doing it, but I cared for
animals and love animals, then what about all the other
(08:27):
people who are just like me? So I thought, got
to start a group then, and start showing people what's
going on behind the scenes they never visit, and got
to do the homework for them, to show them what
the options are so that they can make compassionate choices.
And that's how it all really came together for me.
(08:48):
I wonder in both of your cases, another person could
have read these books. Another person could have had that
conversation you had with Richard and sort of said, oh,
that doesn't sound nice and moved on do you know
what I mean? And not had it land inside them
in a way that you dedicated your lives to ending
(09:09):
this suffering and other other wonderful things as well. So
I just wonder if you know what it was about
inside of you that you know made you hear it
differently or let it land inside of you in a
way that really inspired you to make change. It's probably
actually different for each of us, because I didn't feel
(09:32):
I had a particularly close bond with animals at the
time that I met Richard. So for me, I think
it came much more from the fact that I was
a student studying philosophy and studying ethics, and Richard really
posed the challenge, and the challenge was something like, well,
we think that old humans have basic rights, or we
think that they're entitled to equal consideration. We don't think
(09:56):
that they should be used just as means to our ends.
But what is it that draws the boundary line between
humans and animals? It says, yes, if you're a remember
the species Homo sapien, then you have this special moral status.
But if you remember of some other species, even though
you're capable of feeling pain or enjoying your life, that
doesn't really matter, or at least it's completely subordinated to
(10:19):
our interests in whatever we want to get out of you. So,
and that was kind of an intellectual puzzle. Now, maybe
if i'd been religious, I might have said, well, God
gave us the animals, so that's the answer to that problem.
But I couldn't appeal to any such answer because I
wasn't a religious believer. So I thought about it, and
for a little while maybe I thought, well, you know,
(10:41):
there must be some something here that I'm missing. What
is the explanation everybody else thinks it's okay to treat
animals as means to our ends. Must be something that
I'm not getting. But then I started reading various works
of philosophy that purported to justify the fact that we
are special. You know that some of them did say that, well,
we have immortal souls or were made any image of God.
(11:03):
I didn't believe that. Can't said well, they're not self conscious,
so they're not so they're not ending themselves, and they
can be used as means to an end. But surely
you know why self consciousness the relevant thing, even if
you know whether or not they are the capacity to
suffer is what's important really, And so eventually I thought, well,
(11:23):
this is not as It's not that I'm missing something,
it's that there is something drastically wrong with the with
the situation and the way we're treating animals. Ulyssia, you're
raising a child as a vegan. Well he's no longer
a child. You've raised him all these ears to have
your values. And I do believe that what you say
about parents is that with the best of intentions. When
(11:46):
I decided I'd be vegetarian for ethical reasons, and my
mother kept saying, oh, you really do have to have
a bit, and it's it's going to be that parents
today have very little excuse for making those lines of
arguments that they used to think were for the benefit
of their children. And with men that you had to
(12:06):
toughen yourself. It was really vital that you had to
be the provider and the defender, and you know nature
was dangerous. You had to keep those animals out of
the house and from attacking your family. Those ideas have
gone away to a certain extent, to a large extent,
and now we have mothers like you, and that's a
(12:26):
wonderful thing. I love hearing all that you're saying, and
it made me think when you said that animals, you know,
maybe aren't self conscious. I'm not sure if I understand
the entire proper definition, but I would argue they are
because the way my dogs look at me when they do,
you know, if they do something like you know, they've
gone to the bathroom in the wrong place, the drama
(12:48):
that occurs inside of them, the emotional reaction, the shame
they feel them. And then at one time, I was
with an elephant in Africa and I you know, we
stumbled upon in the bush, and you know how when
you stumble upon an elephant you need to make a
lot of noise to scare them away. And he put
on such a show. This elephant looked at it was like,
(13:10):
you know, he stopped. We're doing all the noises, and
he looked at us and he just said, I'm not
going to do this today. It was sort of this
whole drama around. He had so much pride and he
was trying to show us that he was strong and tough,
but meanwhile he was just scared and wanted to go away.
So I think that represents a self consciousness on some level.
(13:31):
I don't know if that would be correct, But I'm
sure that there are many animals who are self conscious,
and you know, you mentioned elephants and dogs are probably
good candidates, but there may well be some others that
are not. We we don't know. But as I say,
if they can feel pain, if they can suffer, that
seems to me the critical thing, and the self consciousness,
you know, maybe add something to that for some species,
(13:53):
but perhaps not for all of them. Well, I will
say I find it's so annoying that on tickto park
and some parts of the internet you have people shaming
their animals, putting a sign around their next to say
I've been bad, or making them stand in the corner
facing the wall. You know, the shame is that you
don't understand your animals communication. They can't speak your language,
(14:18):
You haven't a clue what they're saying in theirs. You
speak not one word of dog or elephant, and you
expect them to fit into our world. And yet they're
emotional creatures, all of them, I believe. I mean, there
were just some articles I'm sure you saw them about
new ones, about insects and the fact that they can
feel shame, So you know, it's just size doesn't mean anything.
(14:42):
Brain size doesn't mean anything. But they are all emotional
beings and they feel lonely, they grieve, they love, they
feel joy, they cherish freedom, and they don't want to
be dominated any more than it we do. I mean, yes,
a wolf has an alpha wolf, but we aren't understanding
(15:02):
the very clever ways in which they try to communicate
with us. Even a cat going doing their business outside
the box, it's not a random act. It's a message
that I'm sick, my box isn't clean. You've got a
new mate who kicks me off the couch. There's something
going on there where they're very cleverly trying to impart
something to you. It's extraordinary what Peter has done. And
(15:42):
you know Peter has some can have a reputation at times,
and at the end of the day, you have accomplished
so much. You have the legislation that you've passed, the
stuff with laboratories and experimenting, you know, getting general motors,
you know, not to do these car crashes. Do you
want to talk a little bit about sort of the
highlights of your career as or your your mission as
(16:07):
an activist, what you have accomplished aside from having nine
million members and changing the lives of many many people.
Of course that's massive, but specifically for the animals, what
things are sort of highlighting the changes that you've made,
that you can say we've changed this, and I know
it's because of the work I've done. Well. We can
be really annoying and we can be somewhat embarrassing, and
(16:29):
people will want to distance themselves from us, but there's
always a method behind the madness. We're not here to
win a popularity contest. Our feeling is if you tell
people what they already know and agree with, what's the point.
So we're here to push the envelope. And at first
even it's hard to think back now when we first
(16:50):
brought up for in and did a massive mailing showing
steel traps of raccoons and foxes and so on caught
in them. Nobody knew there was anything wrong with fur.
I mean, it's amazing to think of now, and people
mocked us as we were outside first doors, crawling along
the ground with fake blood and what have you, jumping
(17:11):
onto runways. We were detested for that. But today fur
really is dead. It has gone. The same was true
with for forty years, almost thirty some years, we stood
outside circuses, Ringling Brothers, Barnamin Bailey Circus, the Greatest, which
I think was the cruelest show on earth, with their
chained elephants and their bullhooks and their training, and people said,
(17:35):
don't you dare stand here with my children coming in?
Don't you ruin my children's evening or afternoon, and they
would be vile to us. We suffered all sorts of abuse,
but we really didn't care because we knew that we
were right and that the animals couldn't stand there, and
so we did. And of course we bought other actions.
(17:57):
As you say, we litigated, went to the federal government.
We did undercover investigations until we had enough that they
cried uncle. They realized people aren't coming to the shows anymore.
They don't want to deal with the demonstrators, or they
understand the cruelty, and we've been fined and so on.
So they folded their tents and went away. Funny enough,
(18:20):
they're coming back now, but it's without any animals whatsoever.
It will be the new Ringling shirt. That's amazing. So
when we first started talking about vegan and I remember
cooking the first vegan hot dogs on the National Mall
in a plug in walk and people would come by
and they would say, what are these and we would say, oh,
their plant base. They're they're made with plants, and they
(18:42):
would go oh, and they would go next door to
the pork hot dogs. But now, of course everybody knows vegan, vegan, vegan.
It's everywhere, and so I think you just have to
plug away. We were very excited to stop some of
the military's test soun animals, to stop, as you say,
(19:02):
the car companies all over the world, crashing pigs and
baboons into walls, when now we have mannequins. We've employed
many scientists. We have over nineteen scientists. I say over
because I think it's now twenty on stuff. And they
actively find ways to fund non animal alternatives to very
(19:25):
cruel animal experiments and get them adopted. Monoclonal antibodies, different
things for dip theory, of for a different lung model
instead of sticking mice into tubes. So basically, we just
try to reach as many people as possible, in as
many ways as possible, with as many different messages as possible.
(19:48):
Deathly serious, scientific shocking, funny. Whatever we can do, because
you never know what's going to touch somebody and make
them think, well, maybe I won't do that anymore. Oh well,
they have a point. So people do throw rocks at
us all the time. But that's fine, just in the
back of your mind. As advertising people say, you have
(20:10):
to hear a message seven times before it resonates. So
we're we're hard at it. Yeah. I think it was
Peter who said we all eat, we all dress ourselves,
or maybe this was you, Ingrid. I don't know what
you want to do. It was you'll have to claim it.
We all dress ourselves, shampoo our hair by things. When
(20:32):
we look at all those ways we spend money, we
have the power of the purse, and that's so important.
This sounds like Peter even something like you buy a
pair of leather shoes and you don't think twice about it.
And then I was just going to say that there
are so many great alternatives out there for all of
these things. But you're talking about the power of the purse.
(20:53):
The power each of us has is in the purchases
that we make. Well, we said that, but eat is
said everybody. There's something everybody can do, right, people, because
everyone eats three times a day, and that's some three
times a day. You can make a choice. But the
power of the purse is very important to understand because
(21:14):
somebody can feel magnanimous, and they are if they write
a check for ten dollars, hundred dollars, ten thou dollars
to a humane society or an animal rights organization. But
yet in the course of a year, how much do
they spend on things that are tested in animals eyes
and down their stomachs, On the slaughter industry for various reasons,
(21:37):
On anything that's done to take baby bears away from
their mothers and chain them to a wall and teach
them how to stand on their hind legs for entertainment.
I mean, all the things that we could just go
on and on. If you are not being a conscientious consumer,
then you're really negating. You're you're eliminating that good that
you're doing because you don't think about how powerful your passes. Yeah, exactly,
(22:02):
I think, And that's really all the support that the
animal industry needs. If they continue to get that revenue,
then they're powerful. Then they have enough money to lobby
congress people, to make donations to their campaigns and essentially
to block legislation that would stop the abuses that most
people really would like to see stopped but don't know
(22:24):
how to stop. So um trying to reduce the power
of that industry is the thing to do. And if
we can stop people purchasing their products, then you know
that's there's there's lots of things wrong about a capitalist system,
but one thing that's really right about it is that
if people stop buying stuff, then people will have to
stop producing it, because nobody produces when there's no market.
(22:47):
So that's really what we need to get people to do.
What I think connects all of this is when Ingrid
you also spoke about food deserts and how making the
choice to be not eating meat and not eating dairy
really affects these food desserts. And when I think about
the fact that nine million people die a year of
(23:09):
hunger when there's more than enough food on the planet
to feed each mouth, we just feed it to animals instead.
And so it's not an efficient use of resources because
you know, one burger requires the amount of all these
resources that could have made fed an entire village of people.
So the the act of making this choice to help
animals or to end hunger are quite connected. Can you
(23:33):
talk a little bit about the food deserts and how
meet and Dairy really specifically does aid in this problem. Yes,
it is all absolutely connected. Animal liberation is human liberation,
that's what it is. But people who have limited choices,
who live perhaps in neighborhoods where they may not have
transport to get to a big grocery store, and so
(23:57):
they're stuck with what is around them, and it is
around them is usually places where they stores where they
cannot get whole foods, grains, fruits, vegetables, fresh foods, and
so they've also they're surrounded by fast food outlets and
they prey on them. They're cheap food that is going
to give them the last thing that anybody who is
(24:19):
impoverished needs, and that's ill health. So they're economically deprived,
and then suddenly they've got diabetes, they've got various cancers,
they've got high blood pressure, um, they're obese, and they
have all the attendant health problems that come with obesity
from malnutrition. I mean it's there. It's not not getting
enough to eat, it's just getting chunk to eat. That
(24:41):
is clogging their arteries and making them a physical mess.
So we do have a program. It's quite small, but
it's going out to places such as Atlanta, and where
we hooked up with Pinky Coal, the so called Slutty Vegan,
who is a marvelous woman has the food ruck. And
we've hooked up with various reverends in the black religious
(25:04):
community in certain cities, and we are feeding groceries and
we are giving recipes, and we are trying to help
people campaign to have a diversion of funds from junk
food into wholesome food. My heart's desire is to really
(25:43):
help people to heal and the world to heal, and
for all creatures to heal and our planet to heal.
And in this conversation, we've been talking about how you know,
we can end the suffering of creatures and people who
are in need, and how that's all connected. And I
(26:03):
just wonder what both of you think is the broken
part of us that can be healed by respecting other species.
I think that one of the things that we just
had recently might be of use. We had a virtual
animal rights conference, and I thought much of what we
(26:23):
were saying could be applied to any movement or anything
that anyone was going through when they were trying to
achieve good, even in things that they were doing that
were outside the realm of a movement, And that was
a session called burn on, don't burn out, because I
think that so many of us are crushed by what
(26:46):
we see. I mean even crushed people are crushed by
the pandemic, that crushed by being having to be locked down,
and it might make them be helped by being having
them think more empathically about for example, a bird is
locked down for life if you put them in a cage.
(27:06):
A monkey in a laboratory is locked down for life.
And I think that they can help heal themselves by
thinking about how it fits into the whole. But also
to think that when you feel depressed, or you feel enraged,
or you feel just worn down, it's so useful as
a device to look back at how far society in
(27:30):
the world has come, the positive things that have come about,
all those things that have progressed, and then look forward
not with despair or thinking that things are hopeless and
there's nothing you can do, but the little things even
that you can do every day that will make you
(27:51):
feel better and will make you less despondent and we'll
bring about some positive change. Maybe that's too simple to
stick away, to put it, but there are so many
ways that you can lift yourself out of the kind
of malaise that comes from being in a pandemic, or
(28:12):
looking at the wars that are going on in the world,
or if you travel overseas and you see the slums
and the poverty and and so on, or if you
read the paper and you see it. There's so many
ways in which you can concentrate on the now and
the today and what you can do that that's where
our focus should be, and that is a very healing thing.
(28:33):
If I can add to that, I think it's really
important to know that we are part of this change,
and that involves bringing your values together with your actions
with your life. To me, that's been a really important
thing that recognizing where my food comes from and avoiding
(28:53):
food that is produced in ways that exploit animals and
ac cruel to animals has helped to bring my values
together with my with my actions. Because food is something
that we have every day. We make choices about what
to eat three times a day, perhaps, and so it's
a way of reaffirming that you're living a life that
is in accordance with your values. It's not the only
(29:16):
way of doing it, of course, there are other things
that we need to do as well, but it's a
really important one. And as we were saying earlier, you know,
we know that we're not supporting with our dollars the
industries that are exploiting animals. We also know that we
are reducing our impact on climate change, and that's another
(29:36):
thing that we need to talk about. The planet needs
healing from what we have been doing to it over
the last couple of centuries of industrialization and the increasing
amount of meat and animal products produced has had a
big impact on climate. It's responsible for huge quantities of
(29:57):
greenhouse gases, particularly potent meat, saying that is being released,
and we know that those who eat a plant based
diet significantly contributing to reducing their personal footprints carbon footprints,
and also they're withdrawing support from those industries that are
involved in this. So that's another way in which our
(30:19):
values can be displayed through our actions that we care
about the planet, we care about the future of the planet,
We care about the people who are going to suffer
most from climate change. And again that's the people who
are in poverty, who don't really have alternatives, who rely
on rainfall to grow the crops that they that they eat.
(30:40):
They're the ones who will suffer most, who will have
the least, the fewest options to go somewhere else. So
in all these ways, I think focusing on what we
eat and trying to not be complicit in the suffering
of animals, not be complicit in the pollution of the planet,
those are things that can heal ourselves at the same
(31:00):
time as we're healing the planet and healing the violent
relationships that we would otherwise be having with animals. There
are two things that you hear all the time, and
one is I feel like an automaton. I mean, I
just go through life, which is related to the other one,
which of course is what is the meaning of life?
(31:20):
And you may never know what the meaning of life is,
but maybe the meaning of life is that every single
day you try to change something a little bit, You
try to bring a positive force to bear, you try
to do some good. And most important I think is yes,
what we eat is vital because as you say, three
times a day and snacks in between, is that that
(31:44):
can be a vegan life where it can be exploitive,
but it's also feeding others. I think anyone who's listening
to this has the ability to cook or buy or
prepare or something a meal for someone else, not for
another vegan, but for some dy who is eating animals
or eating things that animals produce, like eggs and milk
(32:05):
and honey and so on. Is show them because often
people will not explore this themselves. They're stuck in their traditions,
they're stuck in their old ways. But if you go
next door, you go to work with a meal, or
you pay it back to the person in the drive
in that has a vegan burger, and you pay it
back so the person behind you gets a free one,
(32:27):
you are introducing them to something that might stick. And
of course, especially with children and the parents of children,
as you know more than I is, those are the
great influences and those children have, hopefully, if we don't
just mess up the whole thing, decades and decades and
decades of life ahead of them, and so they are
(32:49):
worth investing the time in educating them. And they are
always invariably receptive. They don't want to hurt animals it's
only when they grow up they've become a nurde that
they really start to think it's it's sissy to care
or something like that. It's not when the kids they
want animals to be friends, not food. I just wanted
(33:11):
to echo a little bit of what both of you said.
But um, go back to the child in us. We
are all little wounded children. And I mean, hopefully some
of us aren't, but there are a lot of wounded children.
And when you think about a child, if you put
a child in a room with a cow or a
pig or a chicken, the last thing they're gonna do
(33:32):
is come out having eaten or tried to eat that animal.
They're going to snuggle with it, play with it, and
connect with it. Once you go to an animal sanctuary
and play with cows and play with pigs, and hold
a turkey in your arms and have them sit on
you like a cat, you just start to feel connected
to yourself and to the purity and their deep souls.
(33:54):
And it's the most beautiful, beautiful thing. And I think
it's just connecting back to our child and ourselves and
allowing ourselves to live our truths. And I'm so grateful
to have had this conversation with both of you. Is
there anything else you want to say? Thank you, Alicia,
You've said that beautifully and I mean a privilege to
be proud of this conversation. I don't need to say
(34:15):
any more than that, I believe. Thank you, Lucia very
very much for everything you do for Peter, for the animals,
for humanity, for your son, and if anybody needs anything
that Peter can provide that and that's the p e
t A one to help them in their exploration of
(34:36):
how to live peacefully on the planet. Please get in
touch with us here we are Peter dot Org. I
couldn't be more proud and proud of you both, and
just proud of having this conversation with you and knowing
that you're in the world doing what you're doing. So
thank you for all the good and kindness that you're
putting in the world. It's really, really, really beautiful and
(35:00):
we need more of you. So thank you, thank you,
thank you, Thank you Alyssia very much. To dig deeper
into this episode's topic and resources, visit The kind Life
dot com. The Real Hell is an I Heart radio
production made in partnership with Frequency Media I'm your host.
(35:23):
Alicia Silverstone from I Heart Radio. Are managing producer is
Lindsay Hoffman from Frequency Media. Michelle Corey is our executive producer,
Jordan Rizzieri is our producer, and Moni Leonard and Laura
Boyman are our associate producers. Sydney Evans is our dialogue
editor and Claire bit Of Gary Curtis is our mixer
(35:45):
and sound designer. This podcast is available on the I
Heart Radio app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever
podcasts are found. Dat
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