Ingrid Newkirk of PETA: 'Barbecue my flesh'
PETA president discusses her grizzly post-mortem plans for her will that she announced Monday.
Note: This article contains graphic language.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) President Ingrid Newkirk said she updated her will to include a request for her flesh to be cooked, and for her body parts to be transformed into activist messages post-mortem.
"I am deathly serious," Newkirk said in an interview with Fox News Digital about her post-mortem plans put into her will, which were announced on Monday. She explained that she wanted her flesh to be cooked with specifically onions in a "human barbeque" after she dies in order to raise the point that "flesh is flesh," and how she believed no one should be eating animals.
"You can barbecue my flesh and you'll smell it cooking with those onions, and you'll think, ‘Oh, I want some of that.’ But it will make you think," she said.
PETA began with humble beginnings with a handful of activists in the 1980s before amassing global influence. It now has more than 9 million members and an annual budget exceeding $80 million, according to its 2022 tax filing. Newkirk, a co-founder of the organization, has been dubbed by the New Yorker, "The woman behind the most successful radical group in America."
The logo of the international non-governmental animal rights organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is pictured in Stuttgart, southern Germany, on May 13, 2022. (YANN SCHREIBER/AFP via Getty Images)
Fundamentally, PETA opposes what it calls "speciesism" or "a human-supremacist worldview."
To drive home this message after her death, Newkirk plans to have her skin peeled off and used to make leather goods, such as a belt and purse, according to her will. The PETA leader also planned to have her eye shipped to the National Institutes of Health for funding experiments on animals, and for her foot to be made into an umbrella stand as is done for elephants.
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The PETA president said she has already arranged a pathologist in place who will be tasked with dividing her body parts for the post-mortem activism.
"I have an executor, I have a lawyer, and I have a pathologist. And then it will be up to PETA… to use the body parts as they see fit to try to get people to behave in a more civilized and kind way towards animals," she said. "[T]he thought of carving up human flesh for steaks might be just the thing to jolt diners into kindness."
Peta president Ingrid Newkirk updates her will to distribute her body parts for animal rights awareness. (Fox News Digital )
The animal rights activist said she doesn't expect her flesh to be eaten, but said it would make a statement.
"I don't think anybody will consume it. And we wouldn't encourage them to do so, only because, I mean, we don't think that it would be good for them to do that. They would feel very sick," she said. "All flesh is flesh, and please don't eat any flesh."
PETA, the world's largest animal rights organization, said, "the will ensures that even after her demise, Newkirk will continue to help animals and honors her commitment that ‘my body be used in a manner that draws attention to needless animal suffering and exploitation.’"
PETA Ingrid Newkirk (Getty | Adobe Stock)
"Newkirk’s bodily bequests will inspire animal advocates while also encouraging everyone still slumbering in speciesism to wake up," PETA continued.
Some tactics used by activists affiliated with PETA have been considered by some controversial.
To the criticism, PETA responded on its website stating, that it is not radical to do what it takes to drive home its mission.
"Is PETA extreme for pointing out that more than 29 million cows suffer and die in the meat and dairy industries every year? Or for noting that in the U.S. alone, approximately 9 billion chickens are killed for their flesh and 305 million hens are used for their eggs each year? Did you know that more fish are killed for food each year than all other animals combined, as tens of billions of fish and shellfish are slaughtered annually?"
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Newkirk called industrial farming an "abomination."
"We have done investigations in all manner of slaughterhouses… and we have found animal cruelty absolutely wretched," she said.
When pressed on whether comparing humans to animals was "dehumanizing," she said, "Well, we are animals… I am an animal. I'm flesh and blood. I'm a primate."