PETA President Tracy Reiman Tackles Your Tough Questions and Tricky Situations

I break my New Year’s resolutions every year, so what magic can
you offer for easy things I’ll stick to that’ll actually help animals?

Why easy? Doing something a bit difficult will make you proud to have stepped up! Once, I was arrested for spray-painting “SHAME” on the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. From the back of the squad car, I talked to the police officers about who pigs are and how they suffer, and to my astonishment, they let me go and actually drove me back to the PETA protest! And now, Oscar Mayer offers vegan hot dogs, progress I feel part of.

That’s pretty wild, but here’s one simple resolution – never miss an opportunity to educate. It’s as easy as tofu cream pie! For example, order our free vegan starter kits and never leave home without them. When you go shopping, pop them into food magazines (people will love the bonus mag); always give one to your Uber or Lyft driver (the guy who picked me up last week said he had diabetes and so was excited to get one); leave them at the gym, in waiting rooms, everywhere.

And pay it forward, because a taste is often the key to changing someone’s idea of vegan food. Buy a veggie burger, a Just Egg sandwich, or some other vegan goodie for the person in line behind you at the take-out counter, grocery store, or drive-through. You never know what you might accomplish – remember Oscar Mayer – so carpe diem!

With so many problems in society – like poverty and war – shouldn’t we focus on humans first? We are, after all, the intelligent species.

Hmm … if we’re so smart, how come we haven’t solved those problems? When people measure other animals’ intelligence, it’s done from a human point of view: Can an animal read or write, drive a car, do algebra? This human-centric view doesn’t really mean much. Does a fish need to drive a car? How would it help a cat to do algebra? And which species has despoiled the forests, polluted the streams, and built nuclear arsenals?

We are animals, too, but look at it from another animal’s perspective. Can a human mother pick her baby out of a group by scent alone? Cows can. Can we hear at ultrasonic levels? Mice can. Can humans take in a 360-degree panoramic view without moving, like crabs do, or survive in nature without grocery stores, running water, or the internet?

Even if the “superior intelligence” myth were true, it wouldn’t entitle us to harm others. Nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote, “The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?” And we know that other animals suffer and feel pain … just as they experience happiness and love. First task: Liberate yourself from supremacist bias and recognize we’re all in this together.