What is PFA ?

People for Animals campaigns for animal rights. It spearheads a popular movement for respecting all life on this earth and is a small but crucial part of India's growing environmental awareness. Started in 1994 in Mumbai, the movement has spread all over India. So have People for Animals. By the end of 1998, it expects to have a half a million active members campaigning for a change in attitudes towards animals.

What is the situation ?

Ahimsa may be central to our world view, yet millions of animals are battered, blinded, force-fed steroids, dissected, mutilated and eventually killed every year, often for no reason at all. Many more are condemned to a lifetime of backbreaking slavery and then, in our old age, sent off to slaughterhouses or thrown out on the streets.

Millions are killed in legal and illegal abattoirs or hunted down as easy game. Superstition and religious rituals take an equally large number of lives. As do myopic development projects. Few noticed because animals cannot protest. They cannot protest when they are maimed, tortured, killed, used for experiments and entertainment. Murdered for aphrodisiacs and fake remedies. Forced out of their natural habitats. Sacrificed to appease the gods.

Hunters, poachers, movie makers, pet shops, circus owners, drugs and cosmetic companies, fast food multinationals, dealers in furs and ivory and leather goods, exporters of live animals and meat have people to back them. Animals do not. Even laws framed to protect animals against cruelty are openly flouted. Poaching goes on defiantly in our game sanctuaries. Over 2,50,000 illegal slaughterhouses flourish. More are coming up every day. Mainly funded by NRIs to export meat, at a phenomenal cost to India. Even the illegal abattoirs, run on huge Government deficits paid out of our taxes, are so filthy and unhygienic that they violate at least a hundred laws a day.

"It is not that no one protests"                     

What has been done ?

Gandhians have offered Satyagraha for decades outside the Deonar abattoir in Mumbai. Jain munis have tried to stop the Al Kabeer slaughterhouse in Hyderabad. Maneka Gandhi succeeded in persuading the courts to stop the ugly killings in the Idgah slaughterhouse, which were poisoning Delhi's water supply and proving to be a major health hazard.

PFA has been successfully in Mumbai in stopping the entry of camels, which were brutally misused for joy rides. Cosmetic testing on animals has been made optional instead of mandatory. In Goa, PFA has halted the barbaric sport of bull fighting. Hundreds of animal rights cases are in courts all over the country. But, much more needs to be done in a sustained manner.

What needs to be done ?

People for Animals believe that things can change. But they can only change when people from all communities, all faiths come together on a popular platform to try and overhaul attitudes, laws, lifestyles. The media must also be persuaded to see the direct nexus between animal's rights and public health.

This is the purpose behind People for Animals. Since animals cannot speak for themselves or fight back, they have only one ally. People who are sensitive to their plight.

How could you help ?

You can change the way animals are treated by making your protest heard. You can stop eating meat, to start with. If you knew how unhealthy dead meat is, it would be an easy decision to take. You can stop using animal products and choose better, more environment friendly, healthy alternatives.

In the process, you will reduce the violence in our lives and create a healthier, more humane society for your children. There is nothing to be embarrassed about. People worldwide are doing this. Why should you be?

Join the Movement for a more humane world and campaign against cruelty towards all of those who share the earth with us.

"Join PEOPLE FOR ANIMALS"