"Your feet as umbrella stands?"
"Yeah, I grew up in India where we had elephant feet as umbrella stands," replies Ingrid Newkirk with studious sobriety. "Mine will make very tiny ones," she adds, laughing lightly.
The 59-year-old co-founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in Toronto to promote her new book One Can Make a Difference, fills the silence that follows with a wide, beatific smile.
In 2003, after a frightening plane ride through a storm, during which all passengers were convinced they would die, Ms. Newkirk devised a will, which she has posted on the PETA website. She will donate her body to PETA and has instructed that her skin be turned into wallets, her feet into umbrella stands, and her flesh into "Newkirk nuggets" to be grilled on a barbecue.
"Some people would say the move is shameless hucksterism," I point out.
She offers a look of moderate surprise. "Really?" She composes an earnest expression, as though she is concerned that I or anyone would think such a thing. "Why is it shameless?" she asks innocently.
"Because you are pushing the boundary of public taste."
"It is a dead body," she instructs stiffly. "And it is mine. So, rather than have it mouldering in the grave or burned, then surely it makes more sense to use it. I would be repelled by someone not choosing to use their body they no longer need as a political instrument to get some good done in the world.
"I do understand that some people wish for burial or cremation or ceremony when they die, and some people are deeply religious about that. I am not."
"I got my mother's permission," she adds as an afterthought, as if to counter any suggestion she was acting without regard for how others might feel.
She didn't mind?
"Of course not," she says calmly. "She is a very practical person."
Dressed in a pink sweater over a white, collared blouse and checkered skirt - all made of synthetics, she insists - Ms. Newkirk is a school teacher in appearance and manner. Her youthful face is thin and pinched behind a fringe of blonde hair, and she clearly delights in upending the beliefs of others, finding a mild amusement in the shocked reactions to her deliberate provocations.
They are practised, of course; all part of her planned curriculum for keeping PETA as the largest animal-rights organization in the world. Its campaigns to draw attention to its cause are highly successful.
There are nude women who espouse the slogan, "I would rather go naked than wear fur." In 2002, four PETA members infiltrated the popular Victoria's Secret fashion show to leap on the catwalk and unfurl banners that read "Gisele: Fur Scum" when Gisele Bundchen, the Brazilian model who had promoted Blackglama fur, appeared. Representatives routinely use blood-red paint to splatter people who wear fur in public. They once created 60-foot-square panels with juxtaposing images of Holocaust concentration camp victims and caged animals.
Doesn't she worry that people might develop fatigue over PETA's predictable shock tactics and ignore the message?
"If you look at what the news covers, we have to use them or our issue wouldn't get any ink," she says in a mildly scolding tone. "We wouldn't get anything. You wouldn't be sitting here."
"True," I reply.
"Thank you," she rejoins primly.
The world is Ms. Newkirk's classroom, and she seems to be annoyed at all the people in it, including the journalists she assiduously courts.
There seems to be a distinctly anti-human theme to her comments. At 22, she chose to be sterilized.
