Every cause is an uphill battle.

Question: What is your outlook?

Ingrid Newkirk: Well I’m no Mary Poppins, I can tell you that. I have to look back and see how far we’ve come in all movements – all social movements. And every social movement faces this massive uphill battle of being laughed at, scorned, rejected. You can look back and just be amazed at the things humans have done to others in the past. So that is encouraging, but I look at the enormity of what’s ahead and that’s discouraging. But that doesn’t really matter, does it, because you never know.

You can’t get to that crystal ball. You’ll never know whether you’re going to succeed; or a meteorite is going to hit the earth and it won’t matter anyway. So all I feel that I can do is as much as I can in as finite amount of time I have . . . And as you get older time goes quicker, and you realize how little you have left. Not when you’re young. It just doesn’t seem to be that way. So in that small time I think you can do as much as you possible can think to do in case it’s going to make a big difference and have a big knock-on effect, which is your hope. It’s my hope.

Recorded on: November 12, 2007