Norfolk-based PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - enters a new era of leadership with its longtime campaigns chief Tracy Reiman becoming president.
Reiman succeeds PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk after 45 years.
Reiman told WHRO the organization will work to gain younger supporters, and the infamous edge to its message will remain.
A PETA veteran since 1991, Reiman vows to “push, persuade, and provoke” to end animal exploitation.
Read Remain’s interview with WHRO’s Doug Boynton below.
This interview has been lightly edited for time and clarity.
Doug Boynton: You have outlined some major priorities for PETA’s next chapter. What is the first specific campaign or initiative you plan to launch?
Tracy Reiman: Well, PETA will continue full steam ahead with our ever-groundbreaking work, but I will bring my experience in youth marketing and social media to the forefront to help create generations of kind consumers and make PETA as technologically advanced as we can be.
And specifically, I'm setting my sights on replacing wool in fashion with non-animal materials, getting birds out of cages, stopping the humane washing of meat, dairy and eggs, modernizing science education with cutting-edge alternatives to dissection and getting all animals out of laboratories.
D.B: PETA is known to be somewhat controversial and edgy. Will that edge continue under your leadership?
T.R: We do what we have to do in order to get attention and to keep the animal message in the forefront of people's minds every day, and sometimes it takes doing more interesting and edgy things in order to capture the public's attention. So we'll continue to do the things that we've always done, but I will say that, you know, despite the suffering that animals endure every day, we are finding that people are now more open to these issues, and so we're not having to do some of the quirkier stunts, or performing … civil disobedience, or any of those things like we used to.
You know, one time, a reporter from a national paper told us, many years ago, if you're not scaling a building or setting something on fire, don't bother calling and that was the mentality that kind of led us to start doing these things. But I think we've been working so closely with companies, and the public (has) become so much more informed that we're spending more of our time now feeding people vegan food. We have just launched our ice cream truck in Virginia Beach yesterday (Aug. 7), where we're going to be traveling around the country, encouraging kids to scream for vegan ice cream, and then they get to try it, maybe for the first time ever, a lactose-free, dairy-free, cruelty-free product. So we know that people, when they try vegan cheeses, they try vegan chicken, they try vegan products … it really opens their mind to considering this change.
D.B: What do you say to people who are well-meaning, who still believe that free range or cage-free means cruelty-free?
T.R: This is one of the issues that I really want to and have been focusing on. The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as humane meat. There's no such thing as cage-free, cruelty-free eggs. Chickens, who are no longer caged for eggs, are simply put in a giant warehouse with tens of thousands of other birds where they do not have any ability to express their basic needs and instincts, and then they're all sent to the same slaughterhouses and killed in the same ways and ground up for meat. So I know that this is a marketing ploy by the meat industry to try and convince kind people who want to do the right thing to keep eating meat. So we're really working hard to expose this.
We've done numerous undercover investigations that show that turkeys, pigs and other animals who are considered, quote, unquote, Certified Humane, to be living in horrific conditions where they are beaten, they are kicked, they are thrown, and all sorts of other cruelties, and there's just no such thing as humane meat
D.B: To circle back to wool. Do you expect resistance from the wool industry?
T.R: We've done 15 undercover investigations in four continents into the wool industry, and we have found the exact same abuse, and every single one where sheep who are gentle, terrified animals who are kicked, beaten, their heads are twisted, they're thrown they're literally cut to shreds in the shearing sheds by these shearers, and then they literally just sew up their wounds with the needle and thread right there with no pain relief.
We've seen this from continents around the world. This is what happens to sheep who are on these farms. It's not just a haircut. It's not something that they have to do in order to let them live a happy life. They are suffering every single time they are sheared. And I think people are starting to wake up to that. Companies are starting to move away from using wool to other materials that are more sustainable, that don't involve the suffering. I think all the industries that we target will fight back, but we have right on our side, and people see this cruelty now on social media and on TV, and they don't like it, and there are so many alternatives now that it's easy for them to to choose something else, as long as they just know about it. And that's our job to educate people about that.
D.B: What have I forgotten to ask? What were you ready to answer that I didn't ask?
T.R: There are a million things that people can do to be kind. They can join our action team and learn about protests and events in their area. They can pass out leaflets. They can show videos to their family. They can bring vegan food to shared meals. They can talk to store managers about not selling leather. They can talk to ice cream shop owners about having vegan ice cream. They can share on their social media. So we encourage people to join us and get active for animals. As one of my colleagues once said, this is not your practice life. Make it count. Do something. Don't just watch, sit by and watch. Get active for animals.
