The Albino Squirrel Preservation Society (ASPS) is an international collegiate organization dedicated to "fostering compassion and goodwill" toward albino squirrels. The ASPS has approximately 700 members in eight chapters across the United States, Canada and England.
Founded in April 2001 by Gary Chang and Dustin Ballard at the University of Texas at Austin, the first ASPS chapter was created to celebrate a longstanding legend on campus, which states that seeing an albino squirrel before a test is good luck (although none of the white squirrels on campus were technically albino). In less than a year, the UT Austin chapter became one of the largest official student organizations in the University's history.
After widespread popularity at UT Austin, the society's second and third chapters formed at the University of North Texas and University of Pennsylvania, respectively. In the following years, ASPS chapters were formed at the University of Western Ontario, Cambridge University, Texas A&M University, Illinois State University, the Juilliard School of Music, and Concord High School in Concord, California.
The ASPS has gained nationwide popularity through a number of media appearances, most notably with the University of North Texas chapter's appearance on Animal Planet. Club activities include pro-squirrel rallies, campouts and t-shirt sales.
Famous quotes containing the words squirrel, preservation and/or society:
“A squirrel leaping from bough to bough, and making the wood but one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion,—is beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is my hope to be able to prove that television is the greatest step forward we have yet made in the preservation of humanity. It will make of this Earth the paradise we have all envisioned, but have never seen.”
—Joseph O’Donnell. Clifford Sanforth. Professor James Houghland, Murder by Television, just before he demonstrates his new television device (1935)
“... she was a woman. She had been taught from her earliest childhood to make use of this talent which God had endowed her, would be an outrage against society; so she lived for a few years, going through the routine of breakfasts and dinners, journeys and parties, that society demanded of her, and at last sank into her grave, after having been of little use to the world or herself.”
—Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898)