People for animals

People for animals (PFA) formed in 1994 in Mumbai, campaigns for Animal Rights. PFA, a Charitable Trust, spearheads a popular movement for respecting all life on this earth and is a small but crucial part of India's growing environmental awareness.

People for animals is the largest Animal Welfare Organisation in India with over half a million members, volunteers and activists campaigning for the ethical treatment of animals and change the attitudes towards animals. The members of PFA rescue and rehabilitate animals, build and run shelters for them. They report and close down the illegal Bird markets and slaughterhouses, check overloading of animals in trucks, protect against circuses and other form of animal abuse.

Today the movement has spread all over India with chapters in every major city and more coming up all over. PFA Mumbai has built a shelter for strays; it has stopped camel rides on the beech and has set up "Artists for animals" with film stars pleading not to work in movies that abuse animals. PFA Delhi has set up the largest Goushala housing over 10000 sick and stray cattle, has banned traveling zoos, has filed a case to stop dissection in schools and holds first aid camps. PFA Chennai and Kolkatta have taken over municipal dog pounds and do dog sterilization and vaccination. PFA Kolkatta runs a mobile clinic for sick animals, a cattier and an ambulance and has horse and cattle treatment weekly. PFA Gwalior has animal first aid camps, runs an ambulance and makes pamphlets about the laws in the local language and distributes them to police stations. PFA Mysore is campaigning against the practice of ritual sacrifice of animals and educates people to give up this practice. There are members of unites all over India who were taught laws and to apply them to rescue animals wherever they come across the cruelty to them. But much more needs to be done in a sustained manner.

Millions of animals are killed in legal and illegal abattoirs and rituals take an equally large number of lives. Animals cannot protest when they are maimed, tortured, killed, used for experiments and entertainment, murdered for aphrodisiacs and take remedies. Forced out of their natural habitats. Sacrificed to appease the God. Millions of animals are battered, blinded, force-fed steroids, dissected, mutilated and eventually killed every year, often for no reason at all. Many more are condemned to a lifetime of backbreaking slavery and then, in their old age sent off to slaughterhouses or thrown out on the streets.

Hunters, poachers, moviemakers, pet shops, circus owners, drugs and cosmetic companies, fast food multinationals, dealers in furs, ivory and leather goods, exporters of live animals and meat have people to back them. Animal laws formed to protect animals against cruelty are openly floated. Over 250000 illegal slaughterhouses flourish and more are coming up everyday. Mainly funded by NRIs to export meat, at a phenomenal cost to India. Even the legal abattoirs, run on huge Government deficits, paid out of our taxes, are so filthy and unhygienic that they violate at least a 100 laws a day.

People for animals believes that things can be changed when people from all communities, all faiths come together on a popular platform to try and overhaul attitudes, laws and life styles. The media must also be persuaded to see the direct nexus between animal rights and public health. This is the purpose behind "People for Animals". Since animal cannot speak for themselves or fight back, they have only one ally, people who are sensitive to their plight.

You can be one among them:

You can change the way animal are treated by making your protest heard. You can stop eating meat to start with. If you knew how unhealthy dead meat is, it would be an easy decision to take. You can stop using animal product, stop visiting pet shops, stop going to circus and movies in which animals are misused. By healthy alternatives to leather and ivory, which is more environmental friendly. Refuse to participate in ghastly religious rituals, in which helpless animals are brutally slaughtered. In the process you will reduce the violence in our lives and create a healthier, more human society for your children.

Join the movement for a more human world and campaign against cruelty towards all those who shared the earth with us.

To be continued….

Mrs. Geetha Manja, Mysore.