‘Too far? I don’t think we’ve gone far enough!’ The founder of Peta on gruesome stunts and her bloody fight for animal rights

After 45 years as chief fake blood thrower, Ingrid Newkirk is still waging war on everything from leather to cashmere. Is she still relevant?

Ingrid Newkirk was 54 when she thought she was going to die in a plane crash. It was late summer and the founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) was flying from Minneapolis in the US to the company HQ in Norfolk, Virginia when her plane encountered strong wind shear. The pilot attempted an emergency landing, but failed; back up they went.

On the third attempt, with “a teaspoon of fuel” in the tank, he finally got the plane down safely. During those moments, Newkirk, now 76, scribbled a will on a napkin. She has tweaked it over the years, but it still reads like a horror movie prop list: her liver is to be sent to France to be made into foie gras, her skin to Hermès to create a handbag and her lips to whichever US president is in power, to shame them for granting a “patronising” pardon to a turkey each Thanksgiving. As wills go, it’s straight out of the Peta playbook: an audacious stunt of the kind that has made them the world’s most well-known, successful and in some quarters reviled animal rights organisation. “I know I’ll never be made a dame,” Newkirk says, laughing. “I’m too controversial.”