now on bbc news — hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. we humans have a complicated relationship with animals. some we pet, some we skin, some we eat. we destroy their wild habitats while we agonise about the loss of species diversity. it is not an equal relationship, it's exploitative, but will it ever change? and if so, how? my guest is determined that it should. ingrid newkirk is president and co—founder of the campaign group people for the ethical treatment of animals.

is she the human ally animals need? ingrid newkirk, welcome to hardtalk. thanks very much, stephen. it's a great pleasure to have you in the studio. let me start by trying to establish a core principle. is it your belief that animals should enjoy equal rights, the same rights as humans? well, not the same rights, because, of course, they don't need the right to do some of the things we wish to do, like drive a car or vote, although they might do better than we've done sometimes.

but they do need the right to be respected. i think they're living beings just like us, and so they should be understood as much as we possibly can understand them. we shouldn't inflict needless pain on them, and we should curb some of our habits that cause them a lot of suffering. peta, your organisation, people for the ethical treatment of animals, opposes what it calls speciesism and a, quote, "human supremacist worldview. " can you sort of explain what that actually means? well, i think we have to get over ourselves as a species, as a human species. we've sort of set ourselves up as gods, and we regard anyone that doesn't fit into the human species as sort of trash. i mean, as you said earlier, we might pet them, we might skin them. we decide. and yet animals are not like us, they are us. if we took elementary biology, we learned that we are

one animal among many. it's a great, if you will... ..somebody said an orchestra of life, we each play a different instrument. that's rather romantic, but we all have feelings, we all have interest in staying alive. none of us wishes to feel being burned with a cigarette or being carved up for a dinner. sure, but animals don't have consciousness... 0h, they do indeed... ..as we know it. ..have consciousness. i think we're very pompous about that. you don't know that a baby can feel anything, but you do know in your heart, in your head that they do. we've had innumerable studies now — as if you needed a study, which i don't think you do — that shows that, of course, they are conscious, they can think of the future, they can plan, they listen to you, they listen to others, they have their own forms of communication. we don't understand them, but they understand more human language, if they're living in your home, than you understand of theirs.

they're very canny. animals have their own way, their own culture. you know, they have their own way of doing everything, and we need to be more observant and respectful and treat them decently. many people watching this, listening to you, will also love animals, but very few human beings devote their entire lives to fighting for animal rights in the way you have. just explain to me why you decided to make this pretty extraordinary commitment. i would have been an awful football player! so, what i did, i was drawn to animals. from the time i was a child, i couldn't bear... i grew up a part of my life in india, and there you see animals on the street, you see bulls and ponies and so on, pulling heavy loads and people beating them. so that was in front of me, and it offended me. i was angry at it. when i came back to the west, to england and to other countries,

all that is hidden away. you know, we have — and i discovered by visiting them — we have slaughterhouses, we have factory farms, we have factory farms where we raise rabbits for angora, for example, and other animals for different things. i went behind the scenes at the circus, and i realised that the average person was like my family growing up — we loved animals, but we ate them, we wore them, we bought things that were tested on them. i went to the circus and enjoyed it, because i didn't have a clue that i was actually contributing to the suffering of animals. i was oblivious and i thought, i need to start a group, because i've inspected laboratories, i've been on factory farms, and show people what it is that they're buying when they buy something that comes from an animal — the animal wasn't a volunteer, they didn't want to be part of that — and that there are options. peta, the group you founded —

co—founded — was formed, i believe, in around 1980. yes. you made a commitment very early on to direct action, direct interventions. how far have you been prepared to go? well, i think as far as we go, is, in the old days, we would lie down in front of a fur store, for example, or a laboratory, so that we could get people's attention to the fact that there were awful things going on inside, or that the products came from awful practices. would you use violence? oh, gosh, no. no. i mean, we're nonviolent, and what we're trying to do is create a world in which people are aware of how much violence they actually are responsible for if they buy a cut of meat or a fur coat or leather shoes or whatever, and this is expanding. people did not understand when we started that there was anything wrong with fur. i think we've crossed that barrier and now we've gone on to, well,

leather is just hairless fur, and we've been on the sheep—shearing farms and we've seen the men on amphetamines beat the sheep, gentle sheep, in the face with their clippers and we know that's the norm. most people don't know that, and so we have to show them. yes, you express deep distaste for violence, but you have used all sorts of tactics which, frankly, contravene the law. i mean, you invade people's properties, you throw paint at their items of clothing, you use subterfuge and lies to infiltrate laboratories. never. never, ever, ever. we're very careful. we have excellent legal advice and we never tell a fib. if we're going in, we may leave something out that says we're peta members or we're peta staff. that's not deception, isn't it? well, it could be, but what they're doing and what we unearth is illegal activities happening in the laboratories.

so we rip the lid off this myth that it's just a few animals being treated decently for some urgent purpose, and we show that the animals are treated worse than dirt and that nobody cares about them at all. and in fact, they're mocked. and we bring out videotape showing people doing atrocities for fun to animals in these places. i just wonder if you've moderated somewhat over the course of years. here's a quote from you some years ago. "violence to life would be a problem, but i wouldn't mind "razing a building if it was used as a terrible place "to torture living beings. "that wouldn't bother me at all." it actually is a little bit of a quote. what i said was... i was asked about the animal liberation front, and i said, "it doesn't bother me if they destroy a place "where animals are suffering and are killed. "it's a piece of property, and if people are making a profit "from hurting animals, it doesn't bother me

"that they destroy that building." but violence is not something that we involve ourselves in at all. there was a time when the fbi suspected you, because they went public with it, of, quote, "providing material, "support and resources to known domestic terrorist organisations." did you ever? they did. i wrote a book about the whole thing called free the animals, and it is the history of the animal liberation front in america. it does start in britain, because there were various groups here. but what we would do is we set up a confidential line and a confidential means of communication whereby the animal liberation front could send us videotapes or documentation from places where animals were suffering, and we would go public, have a news conference and show that to the world. and of course, not being able to find the alf, the fbi was able to find us, because we said, "here we are."

yeah. but just to be clear about this, then, we know that activists working with groups like the animal liberation front have targeted specific scientists. they've used things like letter bombs and incendiary devices. they have, frankly. oh, yes, they have, but it's the sort of thing that people will pick up on rather than — i think the focus is in the wrong place — is why would they focus on that, to say, "leave them alone," when what is being revealed is that with, often, our tax money, we're showing that experimenters... in the united kingdom, i think it was 2.6 million animals they used last year, yet we don't have a cure for the common cold. they're dropping them into vats of water and seeing how long they can swim without drowning. they're putting electrodes in their heads, taking their children away from them. they're causing them all sorts of physical and psychological distress. sure, but let's just talk a little bit about medical research. if in the pursuit of the collective

public human good, that is, for example, trying to find a new vaccine to, you know, as it was just a couple of years ago, conquer the covid virus, if medical researchers feel they need to run some of these experiments on animals for the collective good, are you adamantly and entirely against it? i think there is a moral imperative to see others as we would see ourselves. if i wouldn't do it to my neighbour's children, then i shouldn't do it to some animal. and when it comes to that kind of collective good medical research, do you think you take the public with you? well, yes. there was just a poll that showed that two thirds of the british public are opposed to the use of animals in experiments. but may i say... of course, it depends what kind of experiment. well, that was a broad—stroke opinion, but may i say that the number of animals that are used for medical experiments is very small, pales in comparison to the numbers used in psychological show and tell,

curiosity—driven experiments — enormous numbers. and what do we get for it? i mean, the experimenters love to say, "oh, well, look, "we might save somebody with a vaccine." but if you look at the whole spectrum of what's going on, everybody would say, "well, all right, keep that 5%, "but get rid of the 95." and we have a plan, a concrete plan that shows how you can get rid of that. it's called the research modernisation deal. i want to stick, if i may, with this idea of taking the public with you. your organisation has become well known around the world for pretty extraordinary, sometimes sensational stunts. do you think stunts are an effective means of activism and campaigning? unfortunately, i think so. and the reason, of course, is that you can'tjust have the facts any more. your show is one of the few...

let's be clear to our audience what i'm talking about. let's take one, for example. you got activists to break into an event where anna wintour, who was then — is still, i think — the senior figure in vogue magazine. she was lunching at a posh hotel. a dead raccoon was thrown onto her plate. what on earth was the point and the use of that? i think it was to get her attention as letters hadn't, formal complaints hadn't. and she was still using coyotes, wolves, i don't know, all sorts of big cat fur in vogue. other vogues in other countries had stopped actually promoting fur, and she was hard at it. and so i think this activist decided they would go and make a scene, and that's what they did. but for us, always we go straight to the person who is doing something that's abominable, we show them what we have and we ask them, "please, here is the alternative.

"will you switch?" there's always that overture and then we'll escalate, of course. well, ijust wonder — you know, it's an interesting word, "escalate" — whether you, on reflection, feel you've escalated too far and actually abandoned decency and human morality in your pursuit of your own agenda, for example, the degree to which you've used the female body, the naked female body, in your sensational stunts. i mean, many feminists actually have a real problem with the degree to which you've used sexualised imagery in your campaigning. well, there are many degrees, there are many versions of feminism, and i'm of the old school. i mean, look, i'm 75 and i've gone naked. don't tell me that's some sexual, provocative thing. and we don't use... but when you use models and actors like pamela anderson in yourcampaign... we don't "use" them — they're all volunteers. and i think it's very powerful. we don't live in afghanistan.

no man is going to tell me that i have to dress up, that i can't show my shins or my chin. i mean, whatever it is, we're not ruled, hopefully, by the taliban. i mean, we can do what we want and state a political position with our bodies. that campaign where you... it was tagged, "my boyfriend went vegan," and a woman is depicted in a neck brace, and the message seems to be that when the boyfriend went vegan, he became so physically powerful that he bashed up his girlfriend. she laughs. you have to see it. you're laughing. many people listening to this will find that repulsive. well, it wasn't like that. that's how some people are characterising it. i mean, the bottom line here is that we're picking up on the most extreme things and then making them even more extreme when, actually, i mean, we litigate, we legislate, we are behind the scenes talking to corporations, but the press is just hellbent on taking something

that is gimmicky and using it. and that's why we use gimmicks, because otherwise silence is a social cause�*s worst enemy. sure, but you didn't... never mind not taking the public with you on some of these campaigns — you clearly didn't take some of your own colleagues with you. i'm looking at the words of gary francione, who worked closely with you in peta. in 2011, he said this of your own use of sexual and, as he would see it, misogynist images in your campaigning — he said, "the notion of using sex and sexism to sell the animal "rights issue started to emerge, and it made no sense. "as long as we commodify women through sexism, we will continue "to commodify non—humans." he was saying, you know, it simply doesn't... gary's a man, and he likes to say things, and he's quite hateful to some people! but i'm a woman, and if i want to take off my clothes, i absolutely will. and any other woman should have the right to do that, especially to make a serious point. and it's notjust done frivolously.

a reporter from the times said to me, "you take "off your clothes all the time. "let me have the photographer take your picture naked, "standing on your office desk." and i said, "it doesn't work that way. it's for a cause. "i'll go down..." — and i did — "..to smithfield market, and i'll "hang naked with the pigs, and you can see that our "flesh looks the same. "i'm about the same size, and i wouldn't have wanted to die "in a bad way any more than them." and that's what we did. it's not for titillation, it's not exploitative. it is people saying, "please listen to us. "animals are suffering and we need to stop it, "and we'll show you how easy it is not to buy into "this way of life." do you ever feel you've gone too far? for example, using holocaust imagery and putting images of people who had emerged from the death camps side by side with animals in, for example, slaughterhouses. leading jewish figures described that campaign as, quote,

"outrageous, deeply offensive." another one that really upset civil—rights campaigners in the black community was an exhibition photograph that peta used, which put a seal being bludgeoned side by side with a civil—rights protester being beaten at a lunch counter in the united states. i don't think we did that one. we certainly did holocaust on your plate, which a jewish member of our organisation, peta, funded and asked us to do. and we set up a camp and we said, you know, "victims are victims. "it's all wrong." and we actually said, "were we in existence "back during that time, i hope that we would have been "the people trying to do something to stop anti—semitism, "to stop the extermination." maybe we wouldn't have had the nerve, like most people didn't have the nerve, to speak up. they were afraid. but we were saying it's a parallel. that was yesterday. be upset today with the horrors that are happening in today's factory

farms, which are concentration camps where the animals are being exterminated for nothing more than a ham sandwich. honestly, do you think most people around the world see an equivalence, as you've just described it, between the nazi extermination of millions and millions of people, six millionjews, and the factory farming of chickens and pigs? no. and that's why it's such a hard job, is that we have to get people to get over themselves and stop thinking about only atrocities that happen to human beings. those are atrocities, and they shouldn't happen to human beings, but there are atrocities that are now happening to other sensitive, sentient beings that we are part of. when people make a choice, they pay with their money. they may give, you know, £100, £10 to a charity that helps protect animals, and yet they go to the marketplace

and they'll buy a coat, a pair of shoes, a briefcase, a sandwich, whatever it is, a cosmetic, that deliberately causes suffering to animals and theyjust don't know about it. let's talk about the positive relationships that human beings forge with animals, which you also seem to say are morally unacceptable, that is, human beings keeping pets, human beings using guide dogs — those who are blind use guide dogs — those who keep animals for sport, whether it be pigeon fanciers who race their birds, or horse lovers who race their horses. all of these different relationships between human and animal, which many would find positive, you find deeply problematic. not at all. i mean some, yes. pigeon racing, for example. we've tried to stop it across the channel. pigeons are afraid of the water, and they have to go over these often storm—ridden bodies of water. they can't see the other side. if they arrive late,

they have their necks wrung. it's not a cute little sport. horse racing — we know the use of drugs. we know they end up, many of them, in the slaughterhouses as horse meat. we know they break a leg and they're put down. so, yes, we have problems with those. and the basic pet? but, no, the basic pet — i've written a book about keeping dogs, a book about keeping cats. and i always say, if you have the time and the money for veterinary care, which is expensive these days, and the compassion, please go to the shelter. don't buy from a breeder. don't breed, because we have a pet overpopulation crisis. don't get one, get two, so they can keep each other company. and, briefly, on shelters. i must put this to you — you run your own shelters at peta. one. just one, in virginia. well, the one in virginia is now hugely controversial in itself because, as i understand it, in 2023 you received over 3,000 cats and dogs in the shelter. nearly 80% of them were exterminated. you in peta kill your animals.

they weren't exterminated. they were euthanised, which is very different. somebody held them in their arms and let them go, because... they were killed. yes, because they were in a world that didn't want them, and... your ratio of... wait. wait, wait, wait. no, you cannot leave it there. you cannot leave it there. our ratio of euthanasia is high because we are the only shelter in that entire low—income area that allows people to bring animals who are ridden with cancer, who are aggressive, who have been out, have heartworm that they can't cure, and come to us, and free of charge we will take them in and we will euthanise their animals, because they cannot afford transportation, let alone veterinary care. and all the other shelters around us are no—kill, which sounds so marvellous, but they send the animals who have to be euthanised to us to do what they consider the dirty work. and we will always do that.

and we open our doors to anyone, and come and watch it and see who these poor animals are. i think in the course of our conversation, i have truly felt your passion, your passionate care for animals. i want to end by really considering your attitude to human beings. she chuckles. in the course of your very long career in this cause, have you come to have more or less faith in us humans and our ability to change in the way you want us to change in terms of our relationship with animals? i think people are people all over the world and we have changed. i mean, we've changed in many, many social issues, notjust in animal protection, of course. we've had to wake up to the fact that our bias, our prejudice, our discrimination was causing misery, and we had to come to grips with that and change. so i've seen so much change in the a0 years that peta has been in existence. i know we're going to continue. have you? because you say things like, "i am ashamed of humanity." do you still have

that sense of shame? i am. we're very slow learners. it takes a lot to get through to us, to get us to change old, dirty habits. i grew up eating meat, wearing fur when i was 19, and it didn't dawn on me, even though i cared about animals. so i do think we're slow to learn. i'm very frustrated at the pace of understanding, but i do see enormous change, and i know enormous change is coming, more of it. ingrid newkirk, we have to end there. i thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you. my pleasure. thank you.

hello there. well, it's now the end of the month, and it's been a very wet one across the southern half of the uk. some spots here have seen more than three or four times their average september rainfall. and there's more wet weather to come too, notably for the start of the week and then through the middle of the week, things will settle down, it will turn drier, there will be some sunshine, so things looking up and temperatures will return to the seasonal average too. but in the meantime, this is the rainfall accumulation chart for the next couple of days. so more wet weather, especially in the south. and there could be some more flooding over the midlands with more heavy downpours here on the ground already saturated. and it's all because this deep area of low pressure is rolling in from the southwest through the rest of the night, bringing heavy, persistent outbreaks of rain, especially over the higher ground. strong, gusty winds, especially on the southern flank there. a few showers further north, but generally here it is drier, and it's a milder start across the board than we saw over the weekend. and that low continues to push further northwards and eastwards as we head through monday.

bumps into the area of high pressure out towards the east. so it is going to stall, and that is not good news where we've seen the recent flooding, because there'll be more heavy rain falling more heavy rain falling on the saturated ground. on the saturated ground. some of the heaviest some of the heaviest of the downpours of rain on monday of the downpours of rain on monday could be across the liverpool bay could be across the liverpool bay area stretching across the midlands. area stretching across the midlands. north midlands in particular down north midlands in particular down from southeast yorkshire from southeast yorkshire through into northern areas of east through into northern areas of east anglia. anglia. towards the south, it towards the south, it will dry out and the winds will dry out and the winds will gradually ease down. will gradually ease down. and towards the north, and towards the north, we'll see a few showers scattered we'll see a few showers scattered across parts of scotland, across parts of scotland, northern ireland, but northern ireland, but generally a lot drier here. generally a lot drier here. but it will turn drier, but it will turn drier, particularly out towards the west, particularly out towards the west, southeast england, a brisk as we head through monday night as we head through monday night into tuesday as that low rolls into tuesday as that low rolls off into the north sea. off into the north sea. so some clear spells starting so some clear spells starting to appear and a slightly chillier to appear and a slightly chillier start for western areas we'll be start for western areas we'll be seeing on monday morning. seeing on monday morning. but underneath the cloud and but underneath the cloud and the rain of course still very mild. the rain of course still very mild. and then on tuesday, well, and then on tuesday, well, our low pushes into the north sea. our low pushes into the north sea. high pressure starts to build high pressure starts to build into the north and the west. into the north and the west. we'll be seeing that a bit later we'll be seeing that a bit later on through the week. on through the week. but we're starting off tuesday but we're starting off tuesday

with still outbreaks of rain with still outbreaks of rain across parts of east anglia, across parts of east anglia, southeast england, a brisk north—easterly wind blowing for the north sea—facing coasts, but towards the north and the west, there'll be some brightness

welcome to newsday. reporting live from singapore, i'm steve lai. the headlines. israel widens its offensive with air strikes on yemen, hitting power plants and a sea port, in response to missile attacks on israel by the iranian—backed houthis. in the last hour, there's been another israeli strike on the lebanese capital, beirut. these are the latest pictures from the scene. more than 50 people were killed on sunday.

but among those caught up in the violence are children and families — we report from a hospital in the bekaa valley. well, within the last few seconds, we have had a strike. we heard the plane in the air. then we felt the impact. the windows here shook, they rattled. and it's an indication of how nowhere here is safe. kemi badenoch walks into a row over maternity pay, as the tory leadership contenders vie for support at the party conference in birmingham. austria's far—right freedom party is holding its lead as votes are counted in sunday's general election. the american country singer, song writer and actor, kris kristofferson

has died aged 88.