Dissecting Ingrid Newkirk

"I am not a morose person, but I would rather not be here. I don't have any reverence for life, only for the entities themselves. I would rather see a blank space where I am. This will sound like fruitcake stuff again but at least I wouldn't be harming anything." - Ingrid Newkirk in The Washington Post

What is sociopathy? Sociopathy or Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) is a mental illness that effects the personality. Symptoms include (but not limited to) charming personality, selfishness, feeling no guilt, cruelty, impulsiveness, and anxiety. Sociopaths typically keep to themselves or belong to groups that posses their own rules and regulations.

They have immensely charming personalities; they typically don't act like there is anything wrong with them, although inside their own mind is a completely different story. Many have killed animals just to satiate the desire to be "in control" or to "dominate" another life (cats and dogs are typically targets), they simply have no regard for life.

Ingrid Newkirk seems as if she is the textbook definition of a sociopath. As the quote above states, she has no reverence for life. Why should animals (or anything else) matter to her when she openly admits she only sees the shell of the entity, not the being as a whole? She doesn't even care if she herself is living, why anything else? In this article I will tell you a bit about this woman, her life, and patterns of behavior that will help illustrate my points. Many former PeTA employees have called PeTA the "cult of Newkirk", which fits in with the sociopath personality and the way they relate to society. The need for control, the charming personality, etc. would be needed to exert the power over the people who look to her as "the answer". Within the animal rights community she is looked at as a person of great wisdom and considered highly charismatic. She has managed to get people to look beyond her past, to look beyond the deeds she manages to still commit, to see them all as the "right thing to do". (The people in Waco Texas also thought it was the "right thing to do".)

Ingrid's background reads like a case study in mental illness, from early morning euthinization sessions, to an outright abandonment of basic human decency. In the 1970's Ingrid worked for the District of Columbia as an animal protection officer. She later worked as a pound master in 1978. Unfortunately, this is where the niceties end. While she worked at the pound she has admitted to (and outright bragged about) going in early in the morning before any of the other employees had arrived and putting down numerous cats and dogs, as with now many were adoptable. She has shown a disturbing pattern of action. (PeTA puts down about 85% of the animals it takes in, most of, which are perfectly adoptable.) For instance there have been cases of PeTA employees taking a mother cat and her kittens (perfectly adoptable) from a veterinarian office and putting them down. Much of the organization's actions are strikingly similar to Ingrid's earlier actions during this time span.

Although a co-founder Ingrid has most of the say when it comes to the way the organization is run. Many of the advertising campaigns reflect a disturbing lack of morality and conscience. One that comes to mind immediately is a case that happened a few years ago. A man was arrested and found to have the bodies of women on his pig farm, PeTA took much notice. They, soon after posted up banners, passed out leaflets, and more using one of the victim's picture (without permission) comparing her to a pig, without any regard to the victim's family. The "Holocaust on your plate" campain, comparing chickens to holocaust victims which shows such a disgraceful lack of judgment it's sickening.