Ingrid Newkirk

Ingrid Elizabeth Newkirk is an English-American animal-rights activist born on June 11, 1949, in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England. The only child of an engineer father and a volunteer-worker mother, she spent part of her childhood in New Delhi, India, where her mother helped Mother Teresa's mission and Newkirk first encountered systemic animal suffering on the city's streets.

The family later moved to the United States, and Newkirk initially trained as a stockbroker before redirecting her energies. After discovering abandoned kittens in a neighbor's vacated house in Maryland, she went to work for the local animal shelter, eventually becoming the first female poundmaster of Washington, D.C., and helping pass the District's first anti-cruelty laws.

In 1980 she co-founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) with Alex Pacheco, and she has served as the organization's president from its founding to the present, building it into the largest animal-rights group in the world. She led the 1981 investigation of the Silver Spring monkeys laboratory in Maryland, the first U.S. police raid on a research lab, which produced the first criminal conviction of an experimenter for animal cruelty and inspired the 1985 amendment to the federal Animal Welfare Act.

Newkirk has authored books including Free the Animals, Making Kind Choices, One Can Make a Difference, and Animalkind. Her published will instructs that her body be used after death for animal-rights advocacy. She continues to direct PETA campaigns from its Norfolk, Virginia, headquarters.

Ingrid is a feminine name of Old Norse origin combining the god name Ing with fríðr meaning fair or beautiful, taken to mean fair Ing or beautiful Ing. She has carried the feminine name throughout her life.