A Message From Ingrid Newkirk

Here’s a true story: In 1998, Natascha Maria Kampusch was thrown into a van on her way to school. Her abductor locked her in a soundproof cell. He molested her and hit her if she annoyed him. Such cases are men’s obsession with possession. Lacking the discipline to smother their desire to “own” a girl or woman, they indulge in it, keeping her where she is always available, controlling her behavior, denying her any freedom to live her own life.

And here’s another awful thought: The hideous sexual abuse aside, how was Natascha’s ordeal different from that of birds or monkeys or lizards “normal” people buy and keep caged in their homes, denying them any chance to live with those they love, use their wings or limbs, enjoy their lives? Punishing them if they “misbehave” from stress or anger?

Natascha could understand her captor’s words. She was familiar with the world outside his house. The others do not share their captor’s language and are confined in an unfamiliar place. All captives try to escape. Eight years after Natascha’s kidnapping, bothered by the sound of her vacuuming, her captor stepped away to answer a phone call. Natascha kept the vacuum running, seized the moment, and fled.

No living beings belong in captivity. Natascha agrees. She recognizes that her ordeal was chillingly similar to that of monkeys, tigers, elephants, and other animals snatched from their homes and families only to be caged or chained for the rest of their lives and has joined PETA Germany’s campaign against it.

Let’s reject this obsession with possession. No being belongs to us.