Animal Rights Hall of Fame

The Animal Rights National Conference has been organized since 2000 by the Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM).

FARM was also responsible for an earlier series of annual conferences, named Action For Life, between 1981 and 1987, as well as two special conferences in 1991 and 1997. Between 1988 and 1996, the annual animal conferences were organized by the former National Alliance for Animal Rights.

In August 1975, Dr. Alex Hershaft became involved in the vegetarian movement after attending the World Vegetarian Congress in Orono, ME, and meeting Jay Dinshah. A year later, he founded the Vegetarian Information Service (VIS) to distribute information on the benefits of a vegetarian diet.

VIS also organized several conferences in DC and Pennsylvania on strategies for promoting vegetarianism. Some conference participants, influenced by Peter Singer’s 1975 treatise Animal Liberation, argued that the scope of these conferences should be expanded to include animal rights.

Accordingly, in the summer of 1981, Hershaft organized Action For Life, a national conference at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, that effectively launched the U.S. animal rights movement, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Farm Animal Reform Movement, and the since defunct Trans-Species Unlimited and Mobilization For Animals. Participants included such animal rights pioneers as Cleveland Amory, Ingrid Newkirk, Alex Pacheco, Peter Singer, Henry Spira, Gretchen Wyler, as well as radio host Thom Hartmann.

These conferences continued for seven more years in San Francisco (1982), Montclair, NJ (1983), Washington (1984), Los Angeles (1985), Chicago (1986), and Cambridge, MA (1987). In 1991, FARM organized A Decade of the Animals conference in Washington, DC, to commemorate the 1981 launch.

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