Animal rights organizations will gather in San Diego this weekend for the annual National Animal Rights Day. This event honors the billions of animals killed by humans every year and advocates for the end of factory farming.
The San Diego event, one of more than 160 being held worldwide and organized by the non-profit Our Planet, Theirs Too will begin at 3 p.m. Sunday at Balboa Park.
As in past years, volunteers dressed in black will hold posters of dead animals as attendees observe moments of silence. Those animals serve to represent all non-humans killed for food, clothing, and medical experiments, organizers said.
The memorial will be followed by a vegan picnic and celebration featuring speakers who will give testimonials about the life experiences that led them to stop eating and wearing animals.
The annual ceremonies also include the reading and signing The Declaration of Animal Rights, which was drafted in 2011 and which NARD organizers would like to see turned into global law one day. The first of its nine tenets declares that non-human animals have a “right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of their Happiness.”
“As most animal suffering is at the hands of food, entertainment, and science companies, individuals can exercise the power of boycott and abstain from products that harm animals,” Parker Do, lead organizer for Sunday’s NARD event in Los Angeles, told City News Service, “Luckily, in 2024 there are a wealth of resources and impressive alternatives that can help people move away from animal products.”
NARD events will be held in more than 160 cities around the world on Sunday. The San Diego gathering and the one in Los Angeles are the only two West Coast NARD events among the 14 being held in the United States.
Aylam Orian, the Los Angeles actor who founded NARD in 2011, credits a 2010 trip to Madrid with inspiring him to form the NARD movement. He saw the group Animal Equality conducting a small, silent demonstration with laptops showing the deaths of animals at factory farms to passersby, and a light went off.
That prompted Orian — whose credits include “Stargate Origins,” and the CBS shows “NCIS: Los Angeles” and “Code Black” — to gather various animal rights groups in New York for a meeting, including PETA and Mercy for Animals, wondering “How can we join forces and create one big day like this, like in Spain, where we leave our differences aside (and) everybody harness their energy toward this one goal of representing animals?” he explained in a 2017 interview with the Green Party’s animal rights committee.
Asked in 2021 what he hopes non-vegans might take away from the gathering, Orian told CNS: “That all forms of mass-confining, abusing, and then mass killing of animals are detrimental to human health, to the planet, and of course, to the welfare of these trillions of animals. They have rights of their own, which are no different than the basic rights that humans claim to have.”
–City News Service