Transcripts For CSPAN2 Ingrid Newkirk Animalkind 20240713 :

Good evening. Im tony clark from the Carter Library. Cant tell you how excited i am to see you all for the audience, watching this. It has rained all day long, and it is raining very hard right now. And to see you all turn out tonight, i think is a tribute to ingrid and her organization and the book. So thank you all very much. I appreciate it. If you have not been to our Author Program before, i would encourage you to good on to the judgmenty Carter Library website. We have two to three authors, sometimes four, every week, and they are just fascinating. Later this week we have a book called wilmingtons lie about the rise of white nationalists and wilmington, North Carolina, back in the 1880s. We have judge douglas ginsburg, talk us about his book, voices of the republic, a tiein with a pbs series on thursday. We have a whole bunch of wonderful authors so i encourage you to take a look there and come back see is again. Im delighted for tonights program. Inning grids newkirk was born in sure surery, england and lived in europe until she was seven years old and then her parents she and her parents moved to new dehli. She stuffed toys for orphans, feeding stray animals, creating her view that anyone in need, including nails animals is worthy of concern. She found peta and since that time its grown into the Worlds Largest Animal Rights organization. Her passion and dedication to making the world a better place for all living beings has inspired countless others and it is the subject of tonights book animalkind. How we should treat animals. Meese join in the in becoming ingrid newkirk. [applause] thank you very much, everybody, fork coming out. Think you are the Atlanta Braves who came through all that incredible deluge out there. Its a privilege to be here at the jimmy carter president ial library. I have several anecdotes about president carter because i was humane Law Enforcement officer in washington, dc when he was president. And there was a time, for example, when the wild turkey Bourbon Company decided to toss a real wild turkey of the white house rails, and he landed in a tree, and my job was to good out and persuade the secret service that he was no threat to the president. President didnt have to worry about this bird and they should leave him in peace and not shoot him. And so about two days later, the bird flew off across the potomac and went to live happily ever after on roosevelt island. The mow reality temperature concerned president carters middle east peace initiative. One christmas, a long time ago, i traveled to bethlehem in palestine where jimmy carters envoy and i were both giving talks at the International Conference on nonviolence. So the very first night there was a banquet, and there were representatives from all over the world who were there to talk about respect for others, understanding peace and nonviolence. On the way to the dinner we passed through the market square, and there was the butcher who was slaughtering these bleeding goats and sheep and the market square. We saw it all. And we arrived at the banquet hall and we sat down, and there was it was christmas and there was a very large picture of Jesus Holding one of this gentle lambs, and then dinner was served and each of us was given a lamb shank. And i thought, back then, no one was connecting the dots. And somebody needed to say something, and of course, several of us made the case that this was not the time to serve a violent meal at a nonviolence conference. The very next day, i was sitting in the hall and listening to the speakers, and they one by one would come up and talk how they had been imprisoned injustly, they had had their homes bulldozed, their olive groves seized and so on. And each speaker basically ended by saying these words, please respect us. We are human beings. And i sat there and i thought and i was the only speaker at the time to address the plight of the animal nations and the animal individuals, and so i made the case that the identity of victims of violence is not important. What is important is that there is needless violence. So, i found myself at the end of my speech saying, one day, i hope to come here and i hope that we will be able to say, please respect us, because we are living beings. Doesnt matter if were human or not. And then that night, we were all staying in a monastery it and was a monastery hotel, even had a bar. And i went back to the hotel and i heard the woman at the reception talking about how excited she was there was a Christmas Market, and she was going to be buying these sweaters at the Christmas Market, and then she spotted me and she said, oh, i heard you talk today. I just like to know how you can talk about animals when little children are being shot. And i didnt say to her, well i dont know how you can talk then about sweaters and the Christmas Market when little children are being shot, but instead, i just said to her, surely our hearts are big enough to care about little children and animals because theyre all victims of violence so. So last nation millions of people were watching the oscars, and they were reminding of this disconnection, this disconnect. They were asked to connect the dots. They were asked to consider that we are linked, not ranked, and joaquin fines says whetherrer where talk become set racial or indigenous rights or animal right were talking but injustice. Were talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species, has the right to dominate, control, abuse, and exploit another with impunity. He said, i think we have become very disconnected from the natural world, and many of us, what were get of is an ego centric, human humano centric v. We feel entitledded to artificially inseminate a cow win she gives birth and then we steal her baby. And even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable, and they are, and then we take the milk thats intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee, and our cereal. So, i love Joaquin Phoenix for pushing that envelope for makening people think and sticking up or the animals who are often forgotten. Recently he made the Golden Globes vegan and then after that another one ask then after that the when he asked them, could you please not serve animals the way i did in bethlehem could you please not serve animals in a nonviolent place, he said please dont serve them at a celebration. They said, well, we can make it almost vegan but we need to sever a little fish. And serve a little fish, he became vegan when he saw a fish gutted on the deck of a ship. So he said, no, you cant do that. And so they said, all right, well make the whole thing vegan. So, he is the person of the year and were very proud of him. [applause] so we should get to the book. When we were children, many of us red books and saw films and what have you of mythical animals with wonderous powers, pegasus the flying hours, dragons, unicorns, you name it. And what james stone and i have set out to do in animalkind is show that animals who are all around us, every single day, not mythical at all, do have what you might call super powers but people badly underestimate the other animals. Even those who care deeply about them sometimes. You may be showing love for an animal by calling them your fur baby but often theyre not babies at all. Theyre absolutely whole and theyre complete and their thinking and theyre feeling individuals, and they have interests that need to be taken into account. Experimenters often call other animals, nonhuman, and if i werent 0 so sad i would find that amusing beau thats sort of like calling me a nonhamster. It makes so little sense. Theyre not non anything. Theyre whole begs with enormous and often thoroughly unrecognized intelligence. They have emotions, love, fear, pain, joy. They like to be free. Often totally ignored. And thats what joaquin whereas talking about with a mothers love for her calf. Its not even considered a factor if somebody wants a cheese topping on their pizza. Not a thought for that cow. So im going to give you ten examples of animals real life super powers. I wont give you nye more than that because you wont buy a big. We cant survived for ten minutesser in their ice about the western painted turtle can hold this breath under the ice for eve 100 days over 100 days. If you go to airport these days, which i do almost every day, its not an airport anymore. Its a maize of restaurants, fastfood places, place where you eat and then get on the plane and they give you a snack and then they try to sell you food, apparently they think that human beings cant go for 100 miles or so unless they can theyre eating. But the tiny god width, a bird from new zealand, guys 7,000 miles flies seven thousand miles without stop for food or water. No human being can come close to that. A squirrel buriys their nuts by the position of the stars. Just imagine that. And if they know that another squirrel is watching, or a human being is watching, they use sleight of hand and pretend to bury the nut here but they bury it somewhere else. We use a gps. We use maps and satellites but pigeons use low frequency radio waves, among other things to navigate. A time when human beings didnt even know there were radio with as. Pigeons knew it all along, and pregnant you have seen investigative footage that peta has taken of pigeon racing which sounds absolutely harmless. What could be more harmless than pigeon racing. It is. A lot of races take place over open water. Boats offload the birds in mid of 0 the sea, or they fly the birds from, say, from back to spain or germany to scott land the birds have to cross immense body of water, and birds, i pigeons are petrified of crossing those bodies of water, especially when they cant see land on the other side. But you know how its fun . Pigeons of course know about crosscurrents and all these other reasons to be afraid. The reason they fly, and very few make it, statistics are absolutely shocking, is because the pigeon racers know, pigeons mates for life, theyre wonderful mothers and fathers. Both the father and the mother pigeon make milk in the crops so if you see a pigeon with their beak down another pigeon, it could be kissing because they do that, too, but they may by also feeding their baby. And they pigeon racers keep the mate or the eggs or the baby back in the attic in the nest when they take the other one away. And that is why they risk theyre their very lives and many lose their lives to get home. This is taiwan. Something like 95 of thousands upon thousands of birds, beautiful, gentle little birds, perish. Mountaineers use oxygen masks around 23,000 feet. And they have to use special suits to keep warm. But the barheadded goose can fly without any of that at 26,000 feet. Tiny garden snails taken a few miles from therapy home im not recommending anybody do this theyll find their way back because its their home. Theyll spend two years if they need to and yet . At the speed of. 029 miles an hour, and snake does the same thing. So, elephants. I learn a lot about elephants in writing this book. Things i didnt know how the use their trunks to snorkel when they good swimming and can pick up a person clip the use you use your thumb and for finger burt we used to think the rumbling sound they made was indigestion. Wasnt anything such thing. It was subsonic communications. Its now called silent thunder. And they send messages to herds of elephants that are far, far away, maybe its a drought and they found a water hole and they tell those elephants who are long way away, you can come here and get something to drink, or today the chinese are capturing baby elephants from places and taking them to National Parks and if the babies are being captured, places in africa, the wardens report that you can find another herd, all the way at the end of the park, up against the fence, trembling, because they have heard from these elephants our babies are being taken. The little mouse, ultrasound vibrations, a mechanism only sunshine our idea engines, we cant hear it but their friend can. Chimpanzees can outsmart College Students in memory tests. You put a smarty pants College Student there and a young chimpanzee next to them, put symbols or numbers on a board and then take they were away quickly. The chimpanzee will be able to say, put them back in the right place far quicker than the College Student. They have almost photographic memories, which means you must never, ever show them your atm pin number. I had a years ago, at the university of washington who taught washoe, american sign language, and washoe taught her son a special name and they would invent words leak water bird and water fruit if they saw something and didnt know the name. Well, he had one of his Research Students walking a juvenile chimpanzee through the grounds, both of them getting some exercise, and the juvenile chimpanzee decided decided to by and went up the tree and the College Student was thinking, ive got to get back to class. So pulled the leash it was around the chimpanzees next and the chimpanzee just pulled the College Student right up into the tree. Eels are part taser. They carry electrical charges that are Strong Enough to sun a human being in a split sect. Our military as tried to replicate spider silks that it is ten times tougher than kevlar, and forget spiderman because the gecko has these electron infuses suction cups on his feet and can go up the side of a wall and absolutely be upsidedown above you without any problem. And as for dogs, i have learn so much about dogs. I already knew their noses are vastly, vastly superior to ours, their spence of smell. I didnt know this. They are now being used by Law Enforcement officers to catch child progressers pornographies because they pup the picture odd a thumb drive and the dog can smell the thumb dry inside ale metal box inside a cabinet. No human officer can do that. Also means because their knows are so acute, that you can never hurry them along on their walk. Because they are reading the numbers thats their internet out there. Theyre not out there to just do their business so you can go on and do whatever you want to do. That is their excursion. Thats their big moment. They dont want to be sitting in the house with their legs crossed looking at the wall. You have to let them have their time. It is their walk. Its also the reason those noses you can never, ever eat in front of them because they smell it so keenly they want it more than you do. And theres much, much more. Do you know, dogs somebodyford out how to give an mri to dogs without stressing them. And what theyve discovered is a very same part of their brain, the dogs brain, lights up when you give. The treat as a businessmans brain lights if you give him a raise. Im just not commenting, just telling you. So the search for intelligent life forms in the paper, the news every week. People going out looking for signs of intelligent life on other planets but intellent life forms are already around us. A crow, just a few months of age, without being taught, has figured oat how to drop rocks into that water so that the food floats to the top, so that he can take it out. Show me a human baby who can do that. Cows and horses can open complicated, multiple problem get a locks and cows have taught themselves to operate water pumps when theyre thirsty. Its absolutely extraordinary. They all watch, they all have to Pay Attention to what humans are doing and then learn from that. There is a pig in the philippine s who is made fun of because he looks like that. Heels the filipino watery pig, and people might write him off but his a smart little fellow, and what the filipino warty pig has been seen doing is where there are electrified fences that theyre not always on, the pigs will take walks and push them with their snouts up against the fence, and if the fence guess ping, ping, ping, they know its electrified and dont go near it. Er is nicer no sound they 0 good routh through. We have seen the video 0 dogs who wait until their humans have gone out, and then everything is quiet, and they do this and they push the chair. Take white they need and my favorite videos are where they put the chair back. I did a lot of research into monkey intelligent stories but one of my favorite stories is a ataught a monkey how to pick flowers and im not in favor of having servant monkeys. In fact in a little bit were going to be showing an expo say of how a lot of coconut products come into the United States from places like thailand where they are pucked by monkeys who are picked by monkeys who are kept on chains to a small hut and their entire life is being trained brutally to go up the tree, come down and then they go mad in their little huts for the rest of their lives. This botanyist who trained the monkey and they were in asia and walking along the top of what was a precipice, a sheer drop of thousands of feet, and the about tonnist saw there was an ore orchid. And he told the monkey go get the orchid, and the monkey looked at him, looked at the precipice, and didnt budge. And the botanist lost his temper with me monk can he and ordered him, you go down and get the orchid. And the monkey looked at him, looked back at the precipice, went over to the side, found a vine, hand over hand, pulled it out, picked the orchid and gave it to the botanist. Who was the clevererrer of the two. And then there are the singular undervalued i little animal fish. Im going to mention one fish called the rath. This is also called the teeth cleaning fish. There is there is a thing called the Gold Standard of animal intelligence. Its the mirror test. And if you show tribal people the mirror for the first time they think theyre being attacked and throw something at it, break it. The chimpanzees pass the mirror test. Recently the little rath, here she is, looking at herself in the mirror. She has figured out thats me. And what she does actually is not only look at herself but she starts preening like kim kardashian. [laughter] then there are dolphins. Everybody loves dolphins and dolphins have unique whistle names for each other. Each dolphin is given a name, a whistle name, when theyre born, and they keep it for the rest or their lives and this is amazing because i