Friends of Animals to Launch Major Anti-Fur Advertising Campaign

November 14, 2008

Darien, Conn., US — The international animal-rights organization Friends of Animals has launched a holiday season anti-fur advertising blitz. The centerpiece of the campaign will be some 75 New York City buses displaying ads that show fur-bearing animals wearing brightly colored wigs with the tag line: “You look just as stupid wearing theirs.” The ad, which appears on Nov. 24 and will run through the holiday season, was created by Atlanta, Ga.,-based Tedco Worldwide.

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Friends of Animals Fund Chimpanzee Refuge in West Africa

November 07, 2008

In a landmark agreement with the Gambian government, Friends of Animals will help fund and support the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Project, an island sanctuary located in the River Gambia National Park. It is home to some 80 chimpanzees, who live in relative freedom—without bars or cages—on three of the national park’s five islands.

Primatologist Janis Carter, who has worked with the national park’s chimpanzees for three decades, has been appointed the director, and will maintain the 1,500-acre, open-air sanctuary, while also working to protect the region’s habitat, provide local environmental education, and foster community development.

Many of the refuge’s chimpanzees were confiscated as orphans of parents killed by hunters for bushmeat or for zoos, the entertainment industry, or other forms of exploitation. Some were voluntarily relinquished by people who had unwisely tried to make them into pets.

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New Political Times, Breathing Space for Animal Rights

November 05, 2008

Dear Friends of Animals,

We welcome hopeful news today. The 20th of January 2009 marks the closure of George W. Bush’s assaults on the environment — that’s the other animals’ home.

Friends of Animals, as a tax-deductible organization, cannot endorse particular candidates. And yet, we can, and do, tell the world about our public figures’ attitudes to animals.

We can express our priorities. While we promote agriculture without animals, we also insist that free animals get to thrive. That, after all, is what animal rights means.

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Submission to the Bureau of Land Management's Meeting of National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, to be held 17 Nov. 2008 in Reno, Nevada.[1]

November 03, 2008

The Bureau of Land Management is charged with protecting some 60,000 free-roaming horses and burros on rangelands in 10 Western states. Yet, at the taxpayers’ expense, it routinely rounds them up with the intent to pass them to private ownership. This policy has resulted in the accumulation of horses in the possession and care of the BLM and the question of what to do with them.

For example, the BLM recently sent out helicopters and chased roughly half the western herd of mustangs (about 30,000) into a corral, and is considering killing several thousand of them. To justify this proposal, officials complain of expenses. Yet this same BLM allows ranchers to enjoy leases to the rangelands at below-market prices.

Ranchers, allowed to graze more than 5 million cows, buffalo, sheep and goats on public lands,² find horses and burros inconvenient. Environmental responsibility and government integrity should not mean augmenting the influence of profit-seekers over laws and agencies.

The West’s free-roaming horses today number 60,000 or less. About 200 years ago, 3 million wild horses roamed most of the North American continent, in evident harmony with the rest of the biocommunity.³ At the beginning of the 20th century, 2 million mustangs roamed free.⁴ It is absurd to claim the small community of horses left today threatens the environment, and to behave as though the owners of several million domesticated animals do not.

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