S8. E7: Ingrid Newkirk: Free the Animals
This episode is supported by:
“The fear factor is probably one of the worst. I mean, if you've ever been deeply afraid, or had a near accident or had somebody pursuing you, if you've ever been really afraid, that's their life 24 hours a day, except when they are able to sleep. And, how they are able to sleep on metal slats with nothing that's comforting, no ability to control the temperature ever, whether it's very hot to very cold, no freedom. And studies show that when the knob on the door turns in the room they're in or the door starts to open, their blood pressure goes through the roof, their hearts start pounding in their chests, their adrenaline soars. So, here's your research subject who is in a state of absolute catatonic fear,” - Ingrid Newkirk
Ingrid Newkirk co-founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). I don’t think there has been a single day in the past 40 years that she has not fought against injustice toward animals. She is a hero for animals, for people, and for showing all of us how to make change happen.
Ingrid came on the show to talk about her book, Free the Animals. She wrote it in 1992 and it was just re-released for its 30-year anniversary. It's about the beginnings of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in America and it’s about animal testing.
There is a chapter in the book that starts with a quote by Nicholas Chamfort, “Do you think that revolutions are made with rosewater?”
That quote makes me think about everything that Ingrid and PETA and the ALF have accomplished in the past 40 years. It also makes me think about what's happening in this country right now. The fight against injustice toward animals only becomes more difficult as people in this country lose more rights. It’s all connected. We’re all connected. How we treat animals is very much connected to how we treat humans, and at the moment, we’re not treating anyone very well.
So, please listen, share and then go start a revolution.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
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Transcript:
Ingrid: [00:00:15] The fear factor is probably one of the worst. I mean, if you've ever been deeply afraid of many things or had a near accident or had somebody pursuing you. If you've ever been really afraid, that's their life 24 hours a day, except when they are able to sleep and how they are able to sleep on metal slats with nothing that's comforting, no ability to control the temperature ever, whether it's very hot or very cold, no freedom. Studies show that when the knob on the door turns in the room they're in or the door starts to open, their blood pressure goes through the roof, their heart starts pounding in their chests, their adrenaline soars. So here's your research subject who is in a state of absolute catatonic fear.
Elizabeth: [00:01:20] Hi. I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. Today's episode is sponsored by Lush, Lush Advocates for people, animals and the planet. Through their ethically sourced ingredients and grants programs, they give back locally and around the world. Lush aims to drive positive, long term and systemic change. This conversation is with Ingrid Newkirk. Ingrid co-founded PETA in 1980 and has not stopped fighting for animals, I don't think for a single day since then. She came on the show to talk about her book, Free the Animals. It was originally written in 1992 and has just been rereleased for its 30 year anniversary. It's about the beginnings of the Animal Liberation Front in America, and it's about animal testing. There’s a chapter in the book that starts with a quote by Nicholas Chamfort. The quote is, Do you think that revolutions are made with Rose Water? It makes me think about Ingrid, about PETA, about the ALF and all they have done in the past 40 years and it also makes me think about what's happening in this country right now.
Elizabeth: [00:02:50] Ingrid, thank you so much for being on today.
Ingrid: [00:02:53] Thanks for doing it.
Elizabeth: [00:02:54] So I want to talk about a lot of things, but mostly about Free the Animals. So for people who haven't yet read this book, it came out in 1992 and it was just rereleased. Will you give a little background on what it is?
Ingrid: [00:03:10] Yes, it's an absolutely factual account. Everything in it is real. The animals are real, the raids are real, the details, the close escapes they have. Well, everything that goes on when the Animal Liberation Front is formed in America. I had to change the names of people because, believe it or not, the statute of limitations, while it's run for misdemeanors in some states, is open ended. So those people who are still working in the animal rights movement or are still alive, they could be in trouble. So the names are changed. But everything else is real. All the adventures and all the happy endings where the animals come out of the labs. It's the story of a woman I call Valerie, who was a police officer, and she was involved in the Silver Spring Monkey raid, which was the very first raid PETA carried out, the very first one in US history, in 1981 on a little basement laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland. There were 17 macaque monkeys there, as you know, who were used in what was called deafferentation experiments. This psychologist, Edward Taub, with no medical training, no veterinary training, would open up the monkeys backs, impair the nerves to their arms, then lock them in a little refrigerator he had converted and give them electric shocks until they were forced to use those damaged limbs to pick up raisins from a tray. He purported to be studying human stroke, but I have yet to see any stroke patient that has been artificially induced in that way and his electric shock to be able to use their arm and it was complete bunk. So what happened was after Peter went to the police and the police removed the monkeys with a search warrant again, another first, had never happened before. The research community descended on the prosecutor and intimidated him and said, This is science. You don't know what you're talking about. Vivisection came from all over the country, from prestigious institutions. They never even heard of this experiment. They said, oh, yes, a cockroach infestation that's ambient protein for the monkeys. And yes, it would be filthy because monkeys are nothing but defecating machines. I mean, it was appalling. So the court had decided that they would have to return the monkeys and the vivisector, Dr.Taub, a psychologist, said that he would perform a second surgery on the monkeys and kill them within ten days. So people have been holding candlelight vigils outside the lab and they've been writing to the papers and they had done all sorts of things. They knew these monkeys as individuals. There was little Billy who had lost all the fingers on both hands. There was Augustus who had terrible back pain from the botched surgery and would sway back and forth and you'd have to rub his back with a hairbrush and he was so grateful. So, a certain group of these candlelight vigil people got together when they heard the monkeys were going back and they said, we can't let it happen. So they went to Valerie, the police officer, and they said, we're taking them out. They took a terrible risk in doing this, but they had seen that she had become fond of them, too. They said, Please, will you just park your police cruiser outside the building that night, the coming night, and we will get a truck and we will move them and we will take them away. But if anyone comes by, they see your cruiser parked there, they'll think it's a legitimate move. She was just outraged. She thought, I'm going to have to turn you in. This is my career. I'm an officer. But she had a pang of conscious conscience. She thought, I'm in this because I care about justice and the courts have let these animals down. Everybody's let them down and we cannot. What if they were human children and they were going back to be killed to be. So she decided to do it. It was an extraordinary thing. She parked her cruiser. They moved the monkeys out in the dead of night, went on a big truck. They took them down to Florida and there are photographs of them in their big crates there in a yard with Spanish moss and they're sitting, looking around and they, you know, a wonderful thing has happened to them because they've never been out of that basement lab since they were captured in the Philippines years and years earlier. So she decides after this, there's no turning back. She's crossed the line and she knows from what she's reading now that there are animals in many other labs who are in the same sort of situation in a hellhole, suffering from pain with no end but death. So she decides to learn the ropes of how to pick locks and how to get into buildings and do all the things that she's supposed to be prosecuting other people for doing at this time because she cares about animals and she's going to get the animals out and she forms the Animal Liberation Front in America. This book, Free the Animals, is all about the various raids they carried out to save animals.
Elizabeth: [00:08:59] I think this book does so many things, especially when you think about people who aren't really thinking about this stuff so much. Organizations like the ALF, do they get a bad rap, right? People still think of them as like domestic terrorists and all this crazy nonsense. What you do in this book, aside from really explaining what it is that they do, you humanize them. I mean, how can you not be in love with Valerie and who's a real person but all these other people.
Ingrid: [00:09:28] Yeah, I mean, everybody is just an ordinary person doing extraordinary things. They risk their careers, they risk their relationships, they risk all sorts of things because their eyes had been opened and they had seen inside the labs and they wanted to do something because nobody knew. I mean, there's a single mother who's raising two sons who becomes a vegan and she starts to feed them vegan hot dogs and they don't know they're vegan. They bring all their friends over from the baseball game and they're all eating them, not knowing. I mean, this was back then. It was pretty hard to do that. There's a Navy officer, I think you may remember in the book, there's a chapter about Vanguard, who is a little dog at the Bethesda Naval Research Center, it's now called Walter Reed. But it's the place where all the presidents go. Everybody knows it, because if a president has an annual physical, that's where they go. What people don't know is that there's this huge basement laboratory there where animals are being cut out and hurt all the time. Well, the ALF, well this naval officer is one of those extraordinary ordinary people, and he risks his career because he falls in love with one of the little dogs who's about that week to be put into this tank of water and decompressed and sent in a simulated dive and his spine will be crushed. This naval officer just can't take it. He goes down to the National Mall where PETA has a booth and he just hands a piece of paper saying, Can anyone help me? This dog is going to be killed and a phone number. So Valerie gets in touch with him and he helps, he leaves the backdoor of the lab ajar. He tells them, you know, this is the time when everyone goes to lunch. They all go at the same time. Then there's this raid where it's two women dressed as nurses, in they're naval nurse uniforms who drive through the secure gate and go down into the basement lab and they load little Vanguard into a laundry basket, cover him with towels, bring him upstairs, wave to the guards and leave with him and save him from that. That exposes these decompression dive experiments, although I wish I could say none of them are going on today. But we just found out that here, 30 years later, that the Navy is now diving sheep in that same laboratory and decompression experiments for the bends and may I say, they've been doing it 40 years before I wrote about it in 1992. This is another 30 years, and there has been no change in the treatment for the bends. So that's what taxpayers pay for.
Elizabeth: [00:12:32] But isn't that most experiments where they have been just doing the same thing over and over again for decade after decade on animal after animal with zero results?
Ingrid: [00:12:42] Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely the case. Nobody taps on their shoulder. I mean, they're not doing it in public. It's not you know, you can go into a restaurant, sometimes they have a glass and you can see the cooks doing what they're doing. I mean, there's no such equivalent with laboratories. It's all there behind CCTV fingerprint and coded entrance, face recognition entrance. Only certain people are allowed in and they're just raking it in, $19 billion a year from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health alone. If anybody thinks this is a medical experiment, 90% of it is things like just down the road from me, at the NIH because I'm in Washington. Elizabeth Murray is an experimenter who has macaque monkeys, intelligent emotional beings, used to a high degree of social life, used to being in the trees and with their extended family stuck in a metal see through a box known as a cage. She puts a solid front on it, and then she opens the front and she frightens these monkeys with plastic spiders and rubber snakes. She has been doing that for decades.
Elizabeth: [00:14:01] And for what, right?
Ingrid: [00:14:04] Right. Year after year, she'll write her results down that he was frightened. Then she brain damages him and then she sees if that makes a difference, interferes with another part of his cerebral cortex, sees if that makes a difference. We know monkeys are afraid of snakes and spiders. Like, what are you doing? How can you go home at night to your luxury condo and go to bed? That's why we all have to do something to stop this.
Elizabeth: [00:14:33] Well, and we're paying for it. I think that's the other thing that people aren't put into two and two together, that they're actually funding this.
Ingrid: [00:14:40] We're funding all of it. The NIH has such an extraordinarily large budget, I think I said 19 billion a year. That's yes, that's what they have. University of Washington, may I say we have exposed them to all sorts of things, using diseased monkeys, shipping in monkeys when they shouldn't. Monkeys dying in cage washes, scolding to death. Monkeys dying because their watering devices broke. And nobody paid attention to the fact that day after day the monkey was dehydrating, and couldn't even care. I mean, and they live their lives in their small metal boxes, in their whitewashed, walled room year after year and they’ve just re-upped their entire funding, which is millions of dollars, despite the fact they've been found in violation over and over again, year after year after year. So there's no shame when you think of Fouchier. Think of Fouchier’s boss who was Dr. Francis Collins. He's now President Biden's adviser on science and we hope that he won't be there for long. But he has never met an animal he didn't want to experiment on. He's never met an animal experiment he didn't want to defend or fund.
Elizabeth: [00:15:58] PETA has been around 42 years, so you've been doing this for 42 years. I know that PETA especially has really had a lot of success in stopping certain experiments and shutting down certain programs. But overall, has it really changed? I mean, is there less?
Ingrid: [00:16:18] Well, yes and no. I think for every animal who's come out of a lab, whether they're from Free the Animals, the Animal Liberation Front or they're ones that we have got out at PETA legally. For them, it means everything in the world. I put myself in their place, each and every one of them. But no, the system has yet to change. What we have done in the last almost 12 months, we have come up with a thing called the research modernization deal. It's a booklet. It's a book-ish thing and it's a plan that sets out how you can exchange. So any member of Congress who wishes to lean on NIH can do this. You can change anything you're doing with animals for a more sophisticated, more efficient, more cost effective, and 100% cruelty free way of doing things. A state of the art way of conducting experiments that, of course, benefit human health totally. I mean, this is 2022, we've got organs on a chip, we've got human hearts which are the size of your fingers, high speed computers that you can program with human data, which is how we got the HIV cocktail that made the total breakthrough in people suffering from HIV. I mean, we need to say to NIH, take that money and use it for things that actually work, actually help, actually are useful, and stop for swimming animals to see if they swim faster and longer and don't drown quicker if you're on antidepressants, you know, stop scaring them with spiders. Stop doing all these things. Just stop it. You don't need alternatives to those things.
Elizabeth: [00:18:12] It's not just the tests, right? It's the fact that these animals live in little metal cages for their entire lives like that's it.
Ingrid: [00:18:22] The fear factor is probably one of the worst. I mean, if you've ever been deeply afraid of many things or had a near accident or had somebody pursuing you. If you've ever been really afraid, that's their life 24 hours a day, except when they are able to sleep and how they are able to sleep on metal slats with nothing that's comforting. No ability to control the temperature ever, whether it's very hard or very cold, no freedom. Studies show that when the knob on the door turns and the room they're in or the door starts to open, their blood pressure goes through the roof, their heart starts pounding in their chest, their adrenaline soars. So here's your research subject who is in a state of absolute catatonic fear. Then you take them. They know that you're going to do something nasty to them. Nothing good ever happens when someone comes into the room. They're going to take a biopsy or they're going to take blood or they're going to put an electrode in. If you watch our videos, you see the absolute disdain that the handlers, the researchers, and the principal investigators have because these animals are struggling. They don't want this to happen. They will bite you if they come. So they are treated, they're thrown against the cage bars, they're slammed into the plastic containers, and they're held down and their eyes are like sources. They are so afraid and screaming.
Elizabeth: [00:20:03] Will you tell one more story from the book? Because it's my favorite. Will you talk about Britches?
Ingrid: [00:20:09] Oh, little Britches. Yeah, Britches. I saw him, actually. I held him. I will never forget him. It happened at a University of California laboratory where experimenters decided to study blind children or blindness in human children. But the way they did it, because as they said in their protocol, children born blind were too far away from their lab up to a 30 minute drive, instead they decided to take baby monkeys away from their mothers and blind them by sewing their eyelids shut. One of the baby monkeys had already died. When we got a whistleblower call, there was another little baby monkey who'd only been there three weeks called Britches. He'd been taken away from his mother, put in a cage with a surrogate mother. What that means is a metal pole with a piece of carpeting around it and a fake nipple from which he could suck some liquid that would nourish them. They had sown his eyelids shut and they had put a sonar device on his head that made a screeching noise and he'd been there three weeks. The ALF broke into the lab at night. They took out hundreds of animals, possums with their eyes stuck shut, cats who were used in experiments, mice. But they also took out Britches and this little baby monkey had already become, I don't know if you want to call it psychotic, but he had fits. His whole body would shake and he would grab his feet and he didn't know what was happening. So they whisked him away. They took him to a veterinarian who took out the sutures and in the little video, I have the veterinarian talking while he does this and he's saying, look, the back of his head where this device was strapped is all infected. They've used this harsh, thick thread to sew his eyelids together and it's torn them. Anyway, he's babied, he's washed, he's treated, and he's given a bottle and he's nursed like a human baby. Then they pass him on to a monkey mother in a sanctuary who has lost her child and she adopts little Britches and there's a picture of him holding her, this video of her fussing over him. Finally he had his back with a mother monkey and she's got a monkey child and he was safe forever.
Elizabeth: [00:23:03] I think that is how one can endure the atrocities in the book. The stories like Britches, it like takes the pain away when you see that after you've just read, you know, what they just walked into and witnessed because you're really witnessing it with them in your book.
Ingrid: [00:23:25] Yeah. I think I should make it clear that every story has a happy ending, because it did. Every single story achieved so much. There's one story where they didn't take out any animals, and that's of the University of Pennsylvania. But they did take out, as you know, 70 hours of video tapes that the experimenters shot of themselves abusing animals, swearing at animals, laughing at these baboons who were in head injury tests and they've got brain damaged monkeys and they are mocking them. They actually say at one point, I hope the vivisection people don't get hold of this tape. And of course, the ALF gave it to PETA. We made a ten minute version and we showed it to the world. In the end, 101 of us went up into NIH, had a sit-in for four days and four nights. They couldn't get rid of us. They tried to freeze us out, starve us out, do everything they could. We were there. As a result of that, the head of Health and Human Services watched the tape and canceled the funding for that baboon experiment.
Elizabeth: [00:24:35] It's awesome. I didn't know, I just read this that PETA finally got Texas A&M to stop with the Golden Retrievers. I didn't know that it had ended. That's been going on forever, right?
Ingrid: [00:24:48] Yeah. Texas A&M really dug its heels in there. It's scurrilous. They still haven't released some of the dogs. They've stopped experimenting on them all. They've adopted out a lot of them. We've pushed and pushed and pushed. We have interrupted their commencement. We've interrupted their donor dinners. I mean, we've invaded the dean's office. We've done pretty much everything that you could. I mean, this is all aside from nicely talking to them about alternatives and nicely suggesting that we could help them get rid of this and all the good things that you do. When they dig their heels in, what can you do? Except either go away, which we never do. Or you raise a ruckus and keep raising it until in this case, they have stopped the experiments. They've lost the funding for this. It's a muscular dystrophy lab. Let me just say what they do in case anybody doesn't realize. They take these dogs who don't have muscular dystrophy, who aren't going to have muscular dystrophy, and they interfere with them in such a way that they have muscular dystrophy-like symptoms. One of the symptoms is they can't hold anything in their mouths. So you see these poor dogs dribbling. They drool just strings of drool all day long. They're miserable and then they try to eat something. They're one meal a day and they can't hold it in their mouths. It's slop, but they still can't hold it in their mouths. You see them poor at the bars. It's a barren cage, nothing. I mean, imagine taking your own dog and deciding you're going to live in a barren cage for the rest of your life and you're going to be miserable. That's what happened to these dogs. But they stopped the experiments. A couple of the dogs or a few of the dogs have been transferred to the vet school, and they shouldn't be there either.
Elizabeth: [00:26:41] How did it happen that you've got them finally? Was it just enough hits?
Ingrid: [00:26:46] Yeah, I think it was. There were so many people I'm deeply indebted to who wrote, who called and who got involved.
Elizabeth: [00:26:53] The one more thing I wanted to ask about is Envigo. For people who don't know, would you just talk about what it is and what's happened?
Ingrid: [00:26:59] Yeah, Envigo is this company in Cumberland, Virginia, and they had about 5000 beagles. We went undercover in their place. The din alone, the noise of 5000 beagles barking at the same time, is just awful. So the dogs never had any peace. They're kept on concrete. We were there for some months. In October of 2021 we came out, last October. With us we bought evidence, that just in the time we were there, 350 puppies had died. Puppies died in the drainage ditches that they would fall into and again, they would die because their waters wouldn't work. They refused to give proper food to mother dogs who were nursing. They would inject into the puppy's heads to try to take fluid out because a lot of them were inbred and they would have cerebral fluid and without any painkillers. So 350 died while we were there alone.
Elizabeth: [00:28:01] How long were you in there?
Ingrid: [00:28:03] Just a few months. We took all our evidence to the US Department of Agriculture, to the state prosecutor, to the Virginia Legislature, to the public. As a result, the USDA went in. They found over 70 violations in one visit and those are violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which is this minimum standard. I mean, you barely have to do anything to comply with that. Then they found more violations. USDA failed to do the one thing it should do, and that's suspend or revoke their license. That's pretty key. But the Department of Justice did something wonderful, they took them to court. We just got the court order last week that they are to close down their business. We had already got 800 beagles out of there, including this beautiful old man called Samson, who when we took him out, he had been eight years inside, used as a breeding beagle. He had totally rotted teeth, a urinary tract infection, all sorts of things. They just don't care. They can't keep up. They've got 5000 dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:29:18] Oh, my God.
Ingrid: [00:29:19] So what they're doing now, and we're asking everybody to get involved, is because they're closing down and all the other animals are out. They have about 500 beagles left and they want to sell them. If the USDA had taken their license away, they couldn't. But the USDA failed to do it. There's still time for them to do it if they hurry up. But we need to say, no, you cannot sell those dogs. They must be rehomed.
Elizabeth: [00:29:48] Right. Otherwise they're just going to end up in a bunch of labs.
Ingrid: [00:29:50] Yeah. And that's the thing, is that this is one skittle to fall. But as you say, you know, this is a major coup. It's the first time ever that a dog breeder of this size that provides animals to labs has been closed down. But there's Charles River, there's Covance, there's Huntingdon. There are all these others. Every time we have been inside one of them, same story.
Elizabeth: [00:30:15] Through the Department of Justice for what they did, is that a total shift for them? Is that something new?
Ingrid: [00:30:20] To my knowledge, the Department of Justice is really proving its worth these days because they've also taken down people like Doc Antle, the Tiger King Wildlife exhibitor and, you know, criminal in my mind and I'm sure he'll be found guilty. If he sues me for saying that prematurely, so be it. Because I think that I think it's going to happen. But he's indicted, he's in jail, and they don't do these things frivolously so I do believe that the Department of Justice is taking cruelty to animals cases seriously. The USDA was up to some shenanigans when they knew that Envigo, the dog beagle breeder, was in trouble. One of the top people from the USDA made a quiet visit to see them and I think pulled inspectors off. So whatever was going on was very political. I mean, there's a lot of money involved in all this stuff isn't there. There are the people who buy and sell the dogs, the people whose careers depend on continuing to use and abuse them, there are the cage manufacturers, the decapitated makers, you know, all these people, it’s big, big business, and they have trade associations. So I think that got in the way a bit.
Elizabeth: [00:31:39] I mean, that's pretty much the reason 90% of this still exists is money, right?
Ingrid: [00:31:44] Yeah. It's like big pharm, whichever way you spell it, fharm or pharm. Money to elect people, to tell them to be quiet and let things lie.
Elizabeth: [00:31:55] And there's some good people in Congress that are really appalled by all of this, right? What we're doing to animals.
Ingrid: [00:32:03] There really are, there are some wonderful, strong, ethical people. It's just that everybody has to get on board and of course, vying for their attention is difficult. They've got, you know, issues of the insurrection. They've got financing for God knows what I mean. They've got so much going on, foreign relations, the military. So you've got to really say this is important to me. This is something that means something to me please, and get all of them on board because the good ones need the fence sitters to join them or nothing will pass. Nothing will happen.
Elizabeth: [00:32:41] Well, and I think I do think people don't realize the power of a letter and that people think it's old fashioned or it doesn't work anymore, but it's kind of the only thing that works, right?
Ingrid: [00:32:52] Yeah, it works. A personal visit, which, of course, since the pandemic has been almost impossible, although some are starting up now. Lobbyists are going back to the Hill. But a personal visit to your representative, a letter, a phone call to their chief of staff. And of course, one can be very respectful because, as you say, some of them really do have a kind heart, they have an ethical perspective, and they may just not know.
Elizabeth: [00:33:18] One last thing about the book. I can't wait for it to become a movie, but my favorite scene in the movie might be when you become a race car driver and you cut off the press guy who's about to turn the ALF in. That is awesome.
Ingrid: [00:33:37] Well, what happened was, as you know, PETA often acted to help the ALF after a raid. We didn't know about it in advance, but afterwards we would get the press. I called the Washington Post and made an arrangement for a Washington Post reporter to meet up with some of the dogs who had had their legs broken and were coming out of a lab. I booked a room at a Holiday Inn Express, it was something else then, just around the corner from this lab, they didn't know whether the dogs were coming from and they sent a reporter. That was in the days when you could do that kind of thing and it was on the condition of confidentiality that they would get to see the dogs. They would get to see what happened. Anyway, after this Washington Post reporter had seen the dogs, had taken photographs, and had talked to the ALF people. I was in my car down in the garage, just parked there waiting to make sure everybody got away right. After the ALF had waited a long time because they didn't want anybody to look for them, they went down, got in their car and they were leaving and I saw that the Washington Post reporter had been parked on a different floor behind a post and he hadn't left. So as they pulled out with the dogs, he pulled out with his lights off. And I thought, no, you won't. He was going to bust them and he followed them out into the street and I zipped my car out, got between his car and their car, and we were just playing cat and mouse along Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda. He was angry and I was angry and I knew I was going to lose him if I didn't do it. So I just zipped my car around and he could have hit me. But I parked right in front of him and he had to slam on his brakes. So he jumped out of the car ranting and I jumped out of the car ranting at him. We're there in the middle of the night, in the middle of the road, screaming at each other. But the car with the dogs got away.
Elizabeth: [00:35:55] That is so good. I can't wait to see this on the screen. It's awesome and great. Ingrid you're a badass. You were back then and you still are, it hasn't changed. Thank you so much for this.
Ingrid: [00:36:06] Thank you so much for letting people know how they can help.
Elizabeth: [00:36:18] To learn more about Ingrid, about PETA, about the ALF and Free the Animals, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support Species Unite, we would greatly appreciate it, go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Carrie Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
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