Move to cruelty-free alternatives, PETA founder tells businesses

From vegan leather to “taste alike” milk or meat to organ-on-a-chip, there’s a market for cruelty-free alternatives, says Ingrid Newkirk, Founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), on the opportunities for entrepreneurs.

“Even if people don’t care about animals, and they care about corporate financial well-being, then things like vegan leather is a massively growing industry and India is leading the way with everything from sugarcane leather, to cactus leather, to temple flower feathers, to all these innovative materials that are being bought in other parts of the world. And you’re seeing on fashion runways and in retail stores,” Newkirk told businessline. She was in India to mark Peta’s 25 years in the country.

Urging people and businesses to make kind and cruelty-free choices in eating, clothing, entertainment and testing, Newkirk said, technology was showing the way.

“The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), USEPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and USFDA (Food and Drug Administration) are making great strides, they’re embracing technology, and they’re embracing in vitro testing (in test-tubes etc, outside a living organism),” said Newkirk.

However there have been “set-backs”, she said, pointing to Xenotransplantation – where pig organs, in this case, are put in human beings in experimental surgery. “It’s really a terrible game that plays with two lives, the pig and the human,” she added.

In India, concerns include protection of the rhesus macaque that faces a threat from foreign animal experimenters, Peta had said over a year ago, in a letter to the Prime Minister seeking to protect this indigenous species by law. She also pointed to bullock fights and races, bird fights, dog-fights etc – calling to end such cruel sport.

Technology alternatives

Pointing to technology, she said, nobody wants to force feed a rabbit for testing, “when you have a high-speed computer programmed with human data. You can get drugs on the market faster.”

The whole human DNA is on the internet and there’s “organ- on-a-chip”, so why spend 10 years feeding monkeys and rats, keeping them in cages, with all the stench, pain and misery, every day, “when you can’t even compare the results to what happens when you give the drug to a human being,” she said. Alternatives are also being developed for snake and spider bite anti-venoms, she said, urging companies to move away from horse serum.

“Taste alikes”

In food, there’s almond and oat milk alternatives, for example, she said, dismissing objections from the dairy-industry (on calling them milk). Instead, she says, they should call their product “cow-milk”.

Europe’s “taste alike” shrimp, sausages, fish etc taste the same, but doesn’t cause “the water use, environmental destruction, or any slaughter. It’s 100 percent environmental and animal-friendly, and it’s good for your arteries,” she explains. The US, Germany, Denmark and Israel also have “in vitro meat” – real meat, that “doesn’t involve slaughterhouses, transport trucks, and factory farms. It comes from the cells of a real animal…. Vegan is a buzzword now,” she says.