Founder & President, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine; Advisory Board Member, EarthSave International; President, Foundation to Support Animal Protection (The PETA Foundation); former Contributing Editor, The Animals’ AgendaA psychiatrist by training, Neal Barnard has made a name for himself in animal-rights circles since 1985, when he founded the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an animal rights group dressed up as a medical association. From 1989 to 1991 he served as a Contributing Editor to The Animals’ Agenda magazine, writing frequent columns on animal-rights topics. In 2003, he was nominated for the “Animal Rights Hall of Fame.”

Barnard grew up in North Dakota in a family that included two doctors and four cattle ranchers. He actually worked at a local McDonald’s during high school. According to a now-defunct publication called the Animal Rights Reporter: “Barnard says that his involvement in animal rights results from a rescue of a lab rodent that became a pet and companion to him.”

Although he’s a psychiatrist by training, Barnard has written nearly a dozen books on the subject of nutrition. All of them condemn animal protein. One such book, Breaking the Food Seduction, argues that meat and dairy are, literally, addictive drugs.

Neal Barnard is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ medical advisor, and is president of the Foundation to Support Animal Protection (also known as “The PETA Foundation”) — a legal entity that owns most of PETA’s real estate, pays its largest salaries, and has funneled huge sums of money to PCRM.

In 1995 Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People News, wrote that Barnard and PETA president Ingrid Newkirk had “lived together for many years” and were “lovers.”