How Much Would You Pay Ingrid Newkirk?

Ingrid is the president and co-founder of PETA. She’s been going non-stop for 30 years…and I mean literally non-stop. Day after day, she’s first in and last out. Sometimes I send her an e-mail at 10 pm (1 in the morning for her), thinking she’ll answer the next day, but I get a response in minutes. It’s impossible to impress her by working late, no matter how hard I try. :)

She doesn’t drink much coffee and she doesn’t even take energy gels! If we could bottle and sell Ingrid Newkirk Energy, we might actually come close to animal abusers in terms of budgets.


So she started the most effective animal group in the world, and made PETA a household name in less than 30 years. She’s brought entire industries to their knees…Coca-Cola and Pepsi, agreeing to end animal testing. KFC’s in Canada, agreeing to completely overhaul their slaughterhouses and offer a vegan sandwich. All the big designers (Tommy Hilfiger, for example), giving up fur.

How much do you think she should get paid for all this work? Personally, I’d say it was worth millions. But PETA is a non-profit so let’s not get ridiculous…we wouldn’t anything over $200,000, right?

Ingrid took home a whopping $34,000 in fiscal year 2007.

The head of HSUS makes $200,000. The head of ASPCA earns $400,000! Ingrid, living as simply as she can, flying coach, wearing second-hand clothing…earns 32k. And 45% of PETA’s staff earns less than $30,000.

Why am I telling you this? Because you are raising money for PETA, so you have the right to know! You can find all sorts of financial information here. And you can ask me for more details.

As you can see…money is not wasted at PETA. We’re lean, we’re mean, and we don’t stop until we win. We can’t afford to drive BMW’s, but we can get 80,000 people to watch Meet Your Meat in one week, and thus change their lives forever…and more importantly, change animal’s lives forever.

As you’re gearing up to write your holiday fundraising requests for your PETA Pack page, please don’t hesitate to ask me for any sort of PETA information you think your friends and family would like.

You can tell folks how frugal we are, and you can even tell people how much our work costs. It’s all an open book for you, so ask away! Here are some examples of our costs (guess how much an anesthesia machine runs us).

Thank you!

Alex