PETA Celebrates 25 Years of Victories

To celebrate 25 years of amazing work, PETA hosted its 25th Anniversary Gala and Humanitarian Awards Show in style at Paramount Studios’ “New York Street” back lot in Hollywood.

Hosted by comedian Fred Willard and long-time PETA pal Pamela Anderson, the gala paid tribute to outstanding activists and celebrities who have worked hard to promote animal rights through PETA campaigns. PETA gave Humanitarian Awards to Pandit Ravi Shankar (his award was accepted by his daughter Anoushka Shankar), Casey Affleck (his award was accepted by Joaquin Phoenix), Marc Bouwer, Heather Mills McCartney, Moby, Martina Navratilova, P!nk and Persia White. Special honourees Alec Baldwin and Morrissey received the Linda McCartney Memorial Award, which was established in 1999 in honour of Linda McCartney, who was a long-time animal rights activist and PETA supporter.

Also in attendance were PETA friends Gulshan Grover, Jamie Lee Curtis, Alyssa Milano, No Doubt’s Tony Kanal and Dennis Rodman.

Pamela Anderson

Dennis Rodman

Tony Kanal of No Doubt and guest

In 1980, the year in which PETA US was founded, its office consisted of a phone and a typewriter in a basement apartment. PETA’s first case was against a chicken abattoir. Then came the four-month undercover investigation that revealed the cruel treatment of monkeys at the Institute for Behavioral Research in Maryland, USA, which led to the first-ever criminal conviction of a US experimenter on cruelty-to-animals charges.

Two and a half decades and 850,000 members and supporters later, the name “PETA” is synonymous with animal rights. PETA’s street-theatre-style demonstrations, bold ads and hard-hitting undercover investigations have grabbed the public’s attention and got people thinking about the cruelty that animals endure for meat, leather, experimentation and so-called “entertainment”. PETA is revolutionising the way that the world views and treats animals.

In the past 25 years, PETA has achieved numerous groundbreaking successes for countless animals – the organisation convinced General Motors to end the use of live pigs and baboons in their car crash tests; encouraged Taiwan to pass its first-ever law against cruelty to animals after exposing the government-sanctioned abuse of stray dogs; listed more than 500 companies that do not test products on animals; convinced McDonald’s to agree to make improvements in the treatment of the animals raised and slaughtered by its suppliers; rescued 19 monkeys who had been abused at India’s National Institute of Virology and much more. Read more about PETA’s international victories and PETA India’s victories.

To learn more, please visit www.PETA25.com.

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