Activity report of Animal Rights Day: Lecture and Outreach activities in 3 locations nationwide

On Dec.10th, 2022, International Animal Rights Day, we conducted street outreach activities on 3 spots, i.e. Shibuya (Tokyo), Iwate and Shiga, to appeal promotion of animal welfare and protection of animal rights. In Shibuya, a seminar on “animal welfare and rights” was also given.

Dec.10th falls on “Human Rights Day.” Every person has the right to live one’s own life as a human being. In the same way, animals have the right to live their own lives. We believe the issue of animal rights is also the issue of animal welfare, just as the issue of human rights is also the issue of human being’s welfare.

In the seminar, Ms. Okada, CEO of Animal Rights Center Japan (ARCJ), Ms. Kitaho, manager of ARCJ in charge of negotiation with companies, and Ms. Imaizumi, director of ARCJ, gave lectures on relationship between animal welfare and animal rights.

Among various activities for animal rights, they especially emphasized why it is important for us to focus on activities for animal welfare, why animal welfare is an indispensable issue for alleviating suffering of animals, on which they explained comparing the issue of human rights and emancipation movements for women and slaves. In the last part of the seminar, we had discussions with the participants.

After the seminar, we went out to outreach on a street close to Shibuya station to appeal miserable conditions of animals exploited for various purposes such as experiments, fur industries and food industries. Note that such animals’ suffering is an order of magnitude severer than others.

As the day was a holiday, there were so many people walking on the street of Shibuya that we could show our campaign placards to them and hand out leaflets.

Just around the same time, similar awareness-raising activities were conducted also on the streets by ARC Iwate and ARC Shiga.