Let’s Be Great Ahimsa Ambassadors By Ingrid Newkirk
Ingrid E. Newkirk is the founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the largest animal rights organization in the world. Ms. Newkirk speaks internationally on animal rights issues spreading the concepts of animal liberation to the public and teaching activists how to eliminate animal suffering in their own neighborhoods. She is the author of several books, including Animalkind and Free the Animals (30th Anniversary Edition, available May 2022), and has initiated many groundbreaking campaigns against animal abuse in slaughterhouses, circuses, and laboratories around the world. One of my favorite things to tell people about is this memory: When I was a child growing up in India, my classmates and I would talk about what we aspired to be. Some of the children said film stars or astronauts—I just wished to be a Jain. Imagine how much kinder our world would be if everyone, including Jains who forget the teachings of Jainism, follow Jain values. The true foundations and tenets of Jainism are the world’s key to peaceful coexistence and respect, and the practice of ahimsa is perhaps the simplest yet most transformative moral view. Even with so many competing demands on our time, our daily lives are filled with endless opportunities to make compassionate choices and so spread ahimsa. We can do this by being aware of exactly what we are supporting when we shop; by choosing a nonviolent diet, which means rejecting the separation of beloved calves from their mothers and the shoes and bags made of their skin; and by conducting day-to-day business with high ethics and a determination to avoid the infliction of suffering. We can make every day an example of Bhagwan Mahavir’s teachings of respect for life.
From Exploitation to Innovation The type of Jain I strive to be does not turn a blind eye to the suffering of animals in science education and in laboratories, of course. You may know that not long ago, pregnancy tests were performed by injecting a urine sample into a frog, rabbit, or mouse and waiting to see whether the animal died. That was when experimenters studying HIV seemed to think that injecting hundreds of super-smart chimpanzees with the virus could somehow lead to new AIDS treatments or that blowtorching squealing pigs could advance the study of burns. Horrible experiments on animals like these are still being done—often just to satisfy experimenters’ curiosity and only because not enough of us say, “Stop it!” But scientific and ethical advances have been made at the urging of PETA and others pushing for progress 10
and because decent people have objected to crude and cruel test methods. Forward-thinking scientists are now using in vitro techniques to grow and study human cells and even organs, including skin, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. We have organs-on-chips, which mimic the way the human body responds to genes, drugs, germs, and more. To speed up the development of vital vaccines for COVID-19, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health greenlit landmark human clinical vaccine trials without first requiring time-consuming— and often misleading—tests on animals. PETA members’ contributions have allowed us to fund many advancements in this area. We can all be part of the change. It’s easy to start by shopping cruelty-free. (Check out PETA’s Beauty Without Bunnies list at PETA.org for thousands of personal-care and household product brands that never test on animals.) If your favorite brands still test on animals, let them know that you won’t be buying their products again until they stop. Support only charities and colleges that never fund or conduct experiments on animals. If you’re not sure whether they do, ask—and never contribute until you’ve received a written assurance that animals aren’t being used. Oh, and if your child’s science class plans to dissect animals, ask the instructor to switch to SynFrog, a hyper-realistic synthetic frog that features removable and anatomically correct organs, is free of formaldehyde, and doesn’t involve killing.
Eating Right In India, images of happy cows are everywhere. The cows who wander the streets sometimes wear garlands, symbols of respect placed around their necks by Hindus or Jains, and people offer them fresh green grass on occasion. Despite their tremendous size, they are as gentle and tame as family dogs. One day, I saw a bullock standing at the entrance of a hut, his head inside the doorway, watching the family do their daily chores or listening to their conversations. Twenty minutes later when I returned down the same street, he was still there, blocking the entire entrance, enjoying the company of his people.
