Dear Friends,
We at PETA are so lucky that most of us left New York a day before the terrorist attacks, after hosting our 21st Anniversary and Humanitarian Awards Party at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. So many lives have been tragically cut short, including those of several PETA supporters whose kindness the world will sorely miss. Our hearts go out to the victims’ friends and families.

PETA staffer and mother Liz Welsh was horrified by pictures of Palestinian kids rejoicing in America’s grief. “I wonder what lessons these children have been taught to make them celebrate suffering?” she said. Then came stories of attacks on peaceful Muslim Americans in the U.S., and Liz asked, “What messages are we sending our own kids about compassion?”

Experts agree that young people who hurt and kill animals without being taught that it’s wrong are on a dangerous path. America has witnessed the consequences of a failure to teach empathy. Kids involved in school shootings in recent years first “practiced” on animals. Psychiatrists, FBI profilers, and law-enforcement officials have repeatedly documented that when children are cruel to animals and those acts go uncorrected, they are likely to be more violent in the future. Serial killers sitting on death row share cruelty to animals as a common trait.

Civil rights activist Dick Gregory wrote, “Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel, and brutal taking of life.”

Sadly, people tend to forget animals in times of human crisis, which will make our work even harder. People don’t remember that animals in slaughterhouses and laboratories experience such horror and pain every day. Please help us, now more than ever, incorporate kindness into daily life and strive to gain respect and protection for even the smallest and most despised among us.

We don’t have to feel powerless; we can reduce the violence in the world.
Contact us for a free “Raising Kind Kids” brochure. And, please, practice nonviolence at the dinner table by going vegetarian.


Ingrid E. Newkirk
President