On this day in vegan history · June 19, 1927
Henry Spira Is Born
A high school English teacher with no money and no staff talked Revlon into funding an end to blinding rabbits, and proved a single determined person could out-negotiate a cosmetics giant.
The facts
- Born
- June 19, 1927, Antwerp, Belgium
- First campaign win
- American Museum of Natural History cat research halted, 1977
- Revlon ad
- Full-page New York Times ad, April 15, 1980
- Result
- Revlon donated $750,000 to fund testing alternatives within a year
Henry Spira was born on June 19, 1927, in Antwerp, Belgium. He spent decades as a merchant seaman, factory worker, and union man before he ever organized around animals, and he did not start until he was in his forties. In 1976 he led the first campaign ever to succeed in stopping an active animal experiment, pressuring the American Museum of Natural History to end 20 years of research mutilating cats to study their sex lives; the museum halted the work in 1977. In 1980 he ran a full-page New York Times ad against the Draize eye-irritancy test, showing a rabbit with bandaged eyes above a blunt question about Revlon. Within a year Revlon had put up $750,000 to fund alternatives, and other cosmetics companies followed, money that helped create the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?
Caption on Henry Spira's 1980 full-page New York Times ad against the Draize test
Source: Wikipedia -
I began to wonder about the appropriateness of cuddling one animal while sticking a knife and fork into another.
Henry Spira, describing how he came to animal rights
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Spira showed that a company will move once the ask is specific and the pressure is public, a template that outlived him in every corporate cage-free and testing campaign since. The alternatives fund his ad forced into existence became the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, still working on replacing animals in labs today.
Sources
This history is still being written.
Every morning the brief covers what moved veganism forward, and every day one more verified piece of that story joins this almanac. Free, and tomorrow’s lands in your inbox.
Free, every morning. No guilt. No preaching.