Friends of Animals (FoA) is an animal rights group based in Darien, Connecticut in the United States. It was founded by Alice Herrington in 1957 in Manhattan, New York, with an aim of reducing the number of stray cats and dogs by offering low cost spay and neutering, and went on to expand its activities to assist in the preservation and protection of wild animals, and to campaign in general for animal rights, as opposed to animal welfare.
Gary Francione writes that Herrington was one of the earliest members of the modern animal rights movement to recognize the difference between campaigning for rights and welfare. Herrington retired from FoA in 1986.
In 1981, FoA promoted, along with United Action for Animals, the introduction in Congress of the Research Modernization Act, a bill seeking to develop alternatives to animal testing in research, and for the development of a National Center for Alternatives Research. Francione writes that the measure was opposed by almost all institutional users of animals, because they believed it would require a diversion of funds from animal experiments, and the bill was ultimately defeated.
Famous quotes containing the words friends and/or animals:
“We can teach prevention. For little kids, the best protection is that they should not be alone in public places. All children should be conscious of strangers, and be discriminating and wary of them. This won’t make them grow up suspicious as long as they have adults around whom they know and can trust: relatives, friends of their parents, parents of friends.”
—“How Parents Can Talk to Their Kids,” Newsweek (January 10, 1994)
“The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory. We love to see animals fighting, not the victor raving over the vanquished.... It is the same in gambling, and the same in the search for truth.... We never seek things for themselves—what we seek is the very seeking of things.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)