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:
“What is commonly honored with the name of Friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all, love their Friends greatly. I do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their Friendship for one another. They are not often transfigured and translated by love in each other’s presence. I do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)