Brian Davies (activist)

Brian Davies is an animal welfare activist who was one of the founders of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in 1969; IFAW has become one of the world’s largest animal welfare organisations. Davies retired from IFAW in 2003 but remains active in animal welfare through two organisations he founded, Network for Animals and the Political Animal Lobby.

Davies was born in 1935 in the Welsh mining village of Tonyrefail. Much of his early childhood was spent with his grandparents while his parents served in the war effort. His father was a rear gunner in the Royal Air Force (RAF), posted to India, and his mother worked in a munitions factory, returning home only on weekends. At the end of the war, when Davies was 11, the family moved to England. He left school at 14, because of ill health, and worked at various manual jobs throughout his youth., Davies met his first wife, Joan, in 1955. The couple emigrated to Canada where they had two children, Nicholas and Toni. When Davies joined the Canadian army in the following year, the family relocated to the town of Oromocto in the province of New Brunswick.

Davies’ interest in animal welfare began in 1958, when a car struck a dog outside the family’s home. Because there was no local vet, Davies contacted the Fredericton SPCA and took the dog to the Fredericton Animal Hospital. This incident resulted in Davies becoming the Oromocto representative for the SPCA on an unofficial and unpaid basis. Upon being offered the job of Field Secretary for the New Brunswick SPCA (NB SPCA) in 1961, Davies resigned from the military. From 1964-1969, Davies served as executive secretary for the NB SPCA, which was considered by some of its prominent members to be lacking in influence and drive, according to the society’s minutes. Over the period of Davies’ tenure, he oversaw the group’s transformation from one focused primarily on humane education for school children and the inspection of cases of animal cruelty, to an organisation that sought to address animal welfare issues at multiple societal levels. It was through his involvement with the NB SPCA that Davies learned of the commercial seal hunting industry in North East Canada.

Davies’ first visit to the Canadian harp seal hunt, accompanied by Jacques Vallée, the general manager of the Canadian SPCA, was on 12 March 1965 – a year which saw a total of 182,758 seals killed for their pelts and fat On returning to his base in Prince Edward Island, Davies found two live seal pups on the shoreline that had been taken there by sealers. He took them to his home in Oromocto where they were raised by the Davies family. A local paper ran a story on their efforts to save the seals, resulting in national media attention and an influx of funding with which the Davies would run the “Save the Seals” campaign.

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Wikipedia