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:
“... were all America like this fair city, and all, no, only a small proportion of its population like the friends we left there, I should say, that the land was the fairest in the world.”
—Frances Trollope (1780–1863)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)