On this day in vegan history · October 2, 1983
A Holocaust Survivor Starts a Day to Mourn Farmed Animals
Alex Hershaft picked Gandhi's birthday for the date and grief for the tone, and forty years later the vigils are still happening.
The facts
- Date founded
- October 2, 1983
- Founder
- Alex Hershaft, president of FARM (Farm Animal Rights Movement)
- Original name
- World Farm Animals Day
- Why October 2
- Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, an advocate of nonviolence and animal welfare
Alex Hershaft was a child when his family fled the Warsaw Ghetto on forged papers; his father and the rest of his extended family never made it out. By the early 1980s he was running FARM, the Farm Animal Rights Movement, a small Washington, D.C. group he had built after organizing the country's first national animal rights conference two years earlier. On October 2, 1983, he launched World Farm Animals Day, setting it on Mahatma Gandhi's birthday as a nod to nonviolence and asking people to mark it with a fast and a moment of mourning for the animals killed for food. It was a small, deliberate act: not a protest with demands, but a day of grief, aimed at getting people to notice what they usually don't.
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.
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the campaign was established to memorialize and mourn the millions of animals bred for animal slaughter
Wikipedia, describing the founding of World Farm Animals Day
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
It gave the animal rights movement its first recurring day of collective witness, a template later observances like World Vegan Day would follow, and it's still marked with fasts and vigils outside slaughterhouses every October.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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