Foreign Invader

Transcript: Foreign Invader
November 21, 2004
Reporter: Peter Overton
Producer: Lincon Howes, Julia Timms



PETER OVERTON: Out in the bush they're asking, "Who the heck does this woman think she is?" or words to that effect. Her name is Ingrid Newkirk. She's English, she lives in America and arguably, she's the most radical, most powerful animal rights activist in the world, the kind of campaigner who'll either have you cheering from your lounge chair or throwing heavy objects at the screen. Right now, this foreign invader has our sheep farmers firmly in her sights. To her, the way they treat their animals is cruel, crude, barbaric and has to be stopped. And she's hellbent on wrecking the industry if she doesn't get her way. Story

PETER OVERTON: When this group targets a company or a country, they go in hard. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is as radical as it is effective. Its leader is well aware of the power she wields.

INGRID NEWKIRK: We stopped NASA from sending monkeys into space. We stopped General Motors from crash testing on animals. We've stopped about 550 cosmetic companies from testing in rabbits' eyes. They all said we wouldn't succeed, but we're tenacious and we'll give it a go.

PETER OVERTON: Now Australia is in Ingrid Newkirk's sights.

INGRID NEWKIRK: You have got the wrong sheep in the wrong place...

PETER OVERTON: This English-born American is threatening to bring down our entire wool industry.

INGRID NEWKIRK: …and your solution is the cheapest, greediest solution there is, which is just to hack their rumps off.

SIMON CAMPBELL: I know that you are wrong and that you have come here to shut down an industry and its 100,000 people that are engaged in it.

PETER OVERTON: What is at stake here is a $4 billion a year industry. And the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Australian farmers are on the line.

INGRID NEWKIRK: There's no budging them unless they feel the pressure. You know, bleeding hearts don't affect them, bleeding lambs don't affect them, but contracting wallets will affect them.

PETER OVERTON: This is how PETA works. They target companies that use animal products and lobby to stop them. In this case, it was the leather industry in India. Convinced that Indian practices were barbaric, PETA went after the clothing companies that used the leather. One by one, chains like Gucci, Gap, and Marks & Spencer buckled under the pressure of public demonstrations and celebrity arrests. India's leather industry was brought to its knees.

INGRID NEWKIRK: In the first year they lost US$68 million and they noticed the impact in the first three or four months.

PETER OVERTON: Do you see that as a similar situation to the Australian wool industry?

INGRID NEWKIRK: In all probability, yes.

PETER OVERTON: You might be wondering just why Australia's multibillion-dollar wool industry feels so threatened by a relatively small environmental group. Well, when the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals set their sights on you, you'd better worry. If Ingrid Newkirk doesn't get her way, she says she won't only hurt the profits of the wool industry, she's determined, she truly believes it, that she'll shut it down forever.

SIMON CAMPBELL: I mean, this is a cult-like organisation not necessarily based on a rationale. It's really based on a set of very strongly held personal beliefs in a non-democratic organisation with a highly efficient high priestess.

PETER OVERTON: Simon Campbell is a third generation sheep farmer. Like his forefathers, he uses a process called mulesing to prevent his merino sheep being infected by blowflies. Using razor-sharp shears, farmers slice away the skin around the lamb's rump to create a bare patch.

SIMON CAMPBELL: Very, very quick. Usually an antiseptic powder onto it after that and away they go. It's only a short-term little discomfort for massive gains in terms of animal welfare.

PETER OVERTON: It's not pretty and it is painful. But so is the alternative, flystrike, where blowflies infest the rear end of a sheep. It's a terrible death as maggots literally eat the sheep alive. Farmers say if they didn't mules their lambs, three million a year would die.

SIMON CAMPBELL: It's about the same level of pain as you would get from more conventional treatments like tail docking and castration.

PETER OVERTON: But Ingrid Newkirk and many others believe it's a brutal, outdated practice.

INGRID NEWKIRK: I was absolutely horrified. I had never heard of it and I don't think very many people had — or even today have: turning the lambs upside down and slicing the flesh off their backsides. And you could just see the looks on their faces and you could see the damage this was doing without any painkiller or anything. It was the crudest, cruellest thing that I've seen. How on earth can you do these things, all these things, this litany of abuses to these sheep?

SIMON CAMPBELL: Can we just go through the partnership that the human has had with the sheep...

INGRID NEWKIRK: It's not a partnership. How can it be a partnership? That's like calling rape a partnership. They're not going to budge now, but we're going to show them that every day they don't budge, they stand to lose business, so they'd better budge.

PETER OVERTON: How long will it take you to really damage the Australian wool industry?

INGRID NEWKIRK: Their fate is in their hands. They can decide today. They can decide in three months. They did decide next year or they did decide in four years, but we'll have an impact. It's up to them how much impact, how long this war goes on.

PETER OVERTON: It's tough talk, but don't underestimate Ingrid Newkirk's power. US retail giant Abercrombie & Fitch, with over 300 stores across America, has just announced they won't buy Australian wool. It's reported PETA threatened a campaign branding them 'Abercruelty & Fitch'.
Are you actively targeting big companies now who use Australian wool?

INGRID NEWKIRK: We're very close to bringing at least two more on board as we have with Abercrombie & Fitch.

PETER OVERTON: How do you garner their interest? Do you go in and say, "We're going to make your life hell"?

INGRID NEWKIRK: We say, "We'd like to present you with the facts". And if they ignore us, we write again and say, "We urge you to consider what is happening here". And if they continue and continue to ignore us, then we have more people write to them and sometimes a celebrity call them. And then we tell them, "If you are going to ignore this, we have the right to be outside your stores" and then usually they come along.

PETER OVERTON: Blackmail?

INGRID NEWKIRK: Honesty.

PETER OVERTON: Some would see it as blackmail.

INGRID NEWKIRK: They might.

IAN MCLACHLAN: They were blackmailed by you.

INGRID NEWKIRK: No, they were told the truth.

IAN MCLACHLAN: They were blackmailed by you...

INGRID NEWKIRK: It doesn't matter.

IAN MCLACHLAN: It does matter...

INGRID NEWKIRK: They are on board.

IAN MCLACHLAN: It does matter, because that is what you are doing to the other retailers.

PETER OVERTON: Ian McLachlan, former defence minister and a wool farmer who speaks for the industry, is one who sees PETA's tactics as extortion.

INGRID NEWKIRK: I have a cat in my office called Ginger. She was abandoned in a car and she doesn't clean herself very well. I could take these shears and cut her backside off so that she'd be all right, but I don't. I practice good husbandry. I lift her tail up and I gently shave it and I monitor her. You can laugh...

IAN MCLACHLAN: So you're suggesting we go down to all our sheep and do the same?

INGRID NEWKIRK: Pardon me. No. Pardon me. Let me finish. If I may finish…

IAN MCLACHLAN: Yes, you may.

INGRID NEWKIRK: What I'm saying is that if you did to cats or dogs what you are doing to sheep — and if you did it to one dog or cat — you'd be in jail.

PETER OVERTON: How strong a threat is PETA to the industry?

IAN MCLACHLAN: Oh, they are a serious threat. There's no doubt about it, they're a serious threat. Because they are ruthless.

PETER OVERTON: Yet despite their almost righteous anger, even farmers admit mulesing is an ugly business.

SIMON CAMPBELL: Yeah, I hate doing it, I really do. But the only reason for doing it is the welfare of the animal and with a bit of involvement with the grower-funded R&D side of industry, I really do expect to see this phased out within some years.

PETER OVERTON: But then farmers have been saying that since the 1940s, when alternatives to mulesing were first discussed. It seems no coincidence that since pressure from Ingrid Newkirk and PETA, things have hurried along.
Why has it taken so long?

PROFESSOR PHIL HYND: It's a difficult task. It's not an easy thing to come up with an alternative to something that is as cheap and quick and easy as mulesing is. And effective.

PETER OVERTON: Professor Phil Hynd from the University of Adelaide says there is a solution, but it's still six years away.

PROFESSOR PHIL HYND: Well, what we've got is a naturally occurring protein that we discovered almost by accident and when we put it into the skin around this area, it seems to do exactly what mulesing does.

IAN MCLACHLAN: Now, you know as well as I know that we have now a new protein we're working on which will do this painlessly, we think, but we have to design an applicator which gets it around the breech of a sheep.

INGRID NEWKIRK: This is rubbish, Ian. You are a politician. You know you can research things until the ends of the earth. You can research for the rest of your natural life. That's why this promise that in the year 2010 you may adopt this system is meaningless. I've got a study here — let me tell you — where 600 sheep...

IAN MCLACHLAN: Is this a question or are you just going to keep on talking?

INGRID NEWKIRK: I'm telling you.

IAN MCLACHLAN: Because you're not going to talk all through the interview.

INGRID NEWKIRK: Let me tell you this, because you are hiding the facts from the public.

IAN MCLACHLAN: We are not.

INGRID NEWKIRK: Our job is to put the facts out...

IAN MCLACHLAN: We are not. The public know the facts. The public in Australia do know the facts.

INGRID NEWKIRK: No, they don't.

PETER OVERTON: Ingrid Newkirk wants mulesing to stop now. Her solution? Australian farmers should employ more help to individually monitor every animal. It's irrational. I cannot see for the life of me how that can happen overnight.

INGRID NEWKIRK: How is it irrational to say bad husbandry has to go? If you have 3000 sheep or 20,000 sheep today, you need to hire the help you need to get out during blowfly season and monitor your flock and treat them properly.

PETER OVERTON: That will be hundreds and hundreds of people, perhaps thousands of people.

INGRID NEWKIRK: No. It isn't. Most farms in Australia have about 2500 to 3500 sheep and then there are the mega-ultra-greedy farms, about 600 of them, with maybe 20,000 or 30,000 or more sheep. They don't live in poverty. These farmers are rich. They have money and they need to spend it on labour.

IAN MCLACHLAN: When you understand that these people are all vegans — they don't approve of eating meat, they don't approve of any of these livestock ventures, they don't approve of pets or anything else — then it is for people to make judgments about them. I mean, you just can't sit there and take it because they happen to have some view of life that most people on earth don't have.

PETER OVERTON: In Ingrid Newkirk's ideal world, all animals will live free. No-one will wear or eat an animal product, including milk or eggs. The list goes on.
Fishing?

INGRID NEWKIRK: Hunting in the water.

PETER OVERTON: Horse racing?

INGRID NEWKIRK: No. I'm not in favour of that.

PETER OVERTON: What about swatting a fly?

INGRID NEWKIRK: Well, the jury is perhaps out on insects.

PETER OVERTON: Ingrid even intends to continue her campaign from beyond the grave.
What do you want done with your body when you die?

INGRID NEWKIRK: Oh, I've made a will and I've divvyed it up and I've left different parts to different people. My liver is going to France for an exhibit to protest foie gras, which, of course, is produced by the force feeding of ducks and geese. And some of my flesh is going to be barbecued and I want people to go by and smell that barbie and say, "Oh, that's good" and someone will say, "No, it's that woman" and they'll go, "Oh, God" and then the point will be made that we're all flesh and blood. It's all the same and you shouldn't be attracted to the smell of it. Go and eat something healthy that isn't a corpse.

PETER OVERTON: People will say these views are crazy, extreme, views from a woman who wants to bring down the Australian wool industry.

INGRID NEWKIRK: Well, I think that I'm entitled to use my body, my voice, my ideas, to try to achieve something that is harmless. At the least it might be better than the idea of slaughtering animals for food, taking animals who are minding their own business and hanging them upside down and slitting their throats. Everything has to change as people open their eyes and their hearts and their minds.

IAN MCLACHLAN: You're not prepared to wait for a few years to see whether this thing works?

INGRID NEWKIRK: I wouldn't be sitting here and talking to you if I didn't think you had a solution that you could grasp at your fingertips. The only thing is you won't take it, so you'll bury your industry and that will be on your head, not mine.

IAN MCLACHLAN: Well, let me just finish. We won't be burying our industry in any way at all...

INGRID NEWKIRK: I've finished, because I don't need a lecture.

IAN MCLACHLAN: And we'll look forward to seeing you in some other places.

PETER OVERTON: But this wasn't the last word. As Ingrid Newkirk walked off, the wool industry pulled a stunt of its own...

MAN: An application in the Federal Court of Australia naming you as first respondent.

PETER OVERTON: ...serving her a writ against potential future damages.

INGRID NEWKIRK: Thank you.

PETER OVERTON: This will be a dirty, nasty war and there's no guarantee Australia's farmers will win.

INGRID NEWKIRK: Off you go, then.

IAN MCLACHLAN: As I said, we'll see you again.

INGRID NEWKIRK: Maybe.
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