What brought Ingrid Newkirk to New York City recently? Her 70th birthday was just around the corner, but PETA’s president wasn’t at Plant Food + Wine—Matthew Kenney’s fab vegan restaurant in the East Village—for cards and gifts.
She was there to salute a trio of stand-up supporters for their efforts in behalf of animals, two of them for their business ventures.
Cynthia King was the recipient of the evening’s first Compassionate Business Award. She’s the force behind Cynthia King Dance Studio in Brooklyn, and she brings the same passion and commitment to helping animals that she does to inspiring her dancers.
She choreographed a dance about the plight of caged hens, and in her version of The Nutcracker, no one crosses swords with the Mouse King. Instead, a mouse is saved from a glue trap. Cynthia, who supports our work through the PETA Business Friends program, also makes vegan ballet slippers, sees that PETA leaflets are left on every seat before every performance, participates in animal rights marches, and tables at vegan festivals.
Talk about being en pointe.
So where was she when she found out that she’d be receiving the award? At a New York City Council meeting testifying for a citywide fur ban.
The second Compassionate Business Award went to designer Joshua Katcher, whose Brooklyn-based vegan menswear line, Brave GentleMan, is still turning heads. It’s been featured at New York Fashion Week and modeled by Oscar nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, one of PETA’s Most Beautiful Vegan Celebrities of 2018, in GQ magazine.
Joshua’s ethos is the foundation of his brand: “The handsomeness of an object should be matched by the handsomeness of how it was made.” To that end, he fashions 100% Italian-milled bamboo suits (with tagua nut buttons), footwear made from EU Ecolabel-certified Italian polyurethane, and a wide variety of vegan belts, bags, coats, and accessories.
This trailblazer is also making his mark in print: His new book, Fashion Animals, details how animals have been exploited by the fashion industry, including the shocking number of species driven to extinction for the sake of a trend.
Then Ingrid recognized another key supporter for rescuing animals. It’s been five years since a PETA fieldworker discovered Henry, a horse who had been used for racing, and his companion Caroline languishing in rural North Carolina. Thanks to Alysoun Mahoney and her late husband, Greg Reiter, they soon went from malnourished victims of chronic neglect to equine supermodels.
They aren’t the only animals to find a loving home in Northern Virginia. Alysoun and Greg adopted Itchy, a longtime client of PETA’s Community Animal Project, and after Greg died, Alysoun brought Charlie, another racehorse facing a grim future, into the fold. Christopher, who’d been locked in a pen for years and suffered from a respiratory infection and chronic skin disease, is the most recent addition to the family.
PETA couldn’t let the fifth anniversary of Henry and Caroline’s rescue pass without thanking Alysoun—a member of our groundbreaking Vanguard Society—for everything that she’s done for animals. Here’s hoping the wind chime that she received will always be music to her ears.
Ready to get involved? Consider attending a PETA event. First stop: PETA.org.
