Animal Aid is a British animal rights organisation, founded in 1977 by Jean Pink.
Animal Aid conducts undercover investigations,
Aims and objectives
Animal Aid was founded in January 1977 to work, by all peaceful means, for an end to animal cruelty. The organisation is a not-for-profit
limited company run by a volunteer council of management. It has not applied to be a charity so that it is able to use its funds for sometimes controversial campaigns.
Founding
Animal Aid was established by primary school teacher Jean Pink in 1977 after borrowing
Peter Singer book,
Animal Liberation, from her local library in
Tonbridge. Despite not having any experience of campaigning, Pink felt that she needed to do something and advertised for others who felt similarly. Soon a small group sympathetic to animal rights began to meet in Pink's kitchen. Initially, the group used a hand duplicator to create leaflets which they would distribute in
London.The organisation rapidly grew in size in its initial years, with Pink giving up teaching to focus on it.
In 1984 Pink left the organisation. Pink died on 8 February 2025.
Campaigns
Animal Aid campaigns
include:
-
Slaughter: Animal Aid uses hidden cameras to film in UK slaughterhouses. It has filmed inside sixteen British slaughterhouses, finding evidence of lawbreaking in most of them. Following Animal Aid's CCTV campaign, all the major supermarket chains agreed to insist that their suppliers fit CCTV cameras in their slaughterhouses.
-
Horse racing: This aims for an end to commercial horse racing, and as a first step, a ban on the use of the whip except for safety purposes. The investigation was featured in a 2021 BBC Panorama programme, The Dark Side of Horse Racing.
-
Game bird shooting: Animal Aid campaigns for an end to the production and shooting of animals for pleasure. Some 50 million pheasants and partridges are intensively farmed every year so that they can be released and shot for sport.
See also
External links
