Alex Pacheco (activist) - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Pacheco was born in Joliet, Illinois, but moved to Mexico with his family when he was very young, where he and his two siblings were raised near the ocean by his Mexican father, a physician, and his mother, an American nurse. Kathy Snow Guillermo writes in Monkey Business (1993) that Pacheco's early life was filled with animals; bats lived in the rubber trees in his front yard, snakes slept behind nearby rocks, and fishermen regularly dragged dolphins out of the water onto the beach. Instead of animals being killed for food in slaughterhouses, pigs, oxen, chickens, and turkeys were frequently killed in front of him.

The family left Mexico when Pacheco was in junior high, and moved between Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. His interest in animals continued. He bought turtles and birds from pet stores, and a baby crab-eating macaque, whom he called Chi Chi and who would perch on his shoulder as he walked around the house.

He attended Catholic university in Ohio, intending to enter the priesthood, but while in Canada in his first year at university, he visited a friend who worked at a meat-packing plant. Guillermo writes that he was shocked by the sight of two men throwing a newborn calf, cut from the uterus of its slaughtered mother, into a dumpster. Later in the week, a friend gave him a copy of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, and he returned to Ohio as a vegetarian. His heart was no longer in becoming a priest, and he decided to attend Ohio State University instead to devote himself to helping what he called "other-than-human beings."