It’s all about shifting the market, says Newkirk.

Question: How do you wean people off their reliance on animal products?

Ingrid Newkirk: It’s very easy, because although we have a campaign that says, “I’d rather go naked than wear fur,” if you don’t go wear fur, you don’t go naked. If you don’t eat meat and milk, you drink and eat something else. So the market simply shifts. It’s like the tobacco subsidies. The markets shift, you start growing new crops. You start doing things in a more ecologically sound, healthful, and kind way. But the market still exists. The fact is that it takes less land, and it pollutes less to go to non-animal agriculture.

Animal based agriculture is just ruining the country. And what it’s doing also is driving up all our healthcare costs. If you’re worried about the cost of the demise of the healthcare industry, then you might not wish to switch to a vegetarian diet or push anybody else to. But what we need is a care industry, not a huge, big pharmaceutical industry. So yes the big pharmaceuticals may be hurt. The big _________ businesses may be hurt, but it would be a return to the mom and pop store. It would be a return to the family farm.

It would be a return to respect for the land. It would be a return to thinking about animals not as commodities, not of making someone extraordinarily rich – because the divide between rich and poor is now enormous, and the divide between human recognition of what animals go through is now enormous – but it would be a more compatible, amicable relationship that we have with companies and with each other; and with our environment, which is fast becoming just a smog-filled mess.

Recorded on: November 12, 2007