2010 Events Are A Success!
Fur Free Friday has a decades-long reputation for taking the animal rights message to the streets, and Fur Free Friday 2010 delivered in a big way, with thousands of grassroots advocates around the world raising their voices for fur-bearing animals. IDA played a major role in organizing actions both large and small, and advocates for animals in more than 100 cities marked this iconic holiday shopping day, the day after Thanksgiving, with a strong message of compassion.
As a triumphant highlight of the global day of action, 500 protestors in Tel Aviv drew attention to groundbreaking legislation that may make Israel the first nation to ban fur! IDA-hosted events in Beverly Hills, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon also had massive turnouts, with hundreds of activists coming out to march past stores that sell fur. But smaller events also had a big impact, like in Dallas, Texas where thirty dedicated volunteers of Animal Connection of Texas educated holiday shoppers in front of Neiman Marcus. One activist reported, "The chanting got so loud that Neiman's actually turned their music up! A lot of people stopped to watch the video (Chinese Fur Farm) and were horrified and even brought to tears by what they saw. A few asked for more leaflets to give to their friends." Even events that drew less than a dozen people paid off, opening minds and hearts to the plight of animals.
Fur Free Friday 2010 made news from Beverly Hills to New York City and around the globe, covered by mainstream media, independent news sources and diverse voices throughout the blogosphere. It is always difficult to get a mention of Fur Free Friday from media outlets more focused on reporting "Black Friday" sales than compassionate consumer choices, but together we succeeded!
Creative activists in front of Macys in downtown Manhattan opportunistically took over a live CNN broadcast where shoppers were being interviewed about "Black Friday." Watch the clip and note the nice shot of IDA's fox sign reading "Real fur is never worth the price."
That same IDA sign made it into another front page story in Colorado, with a woman wearing fur in the background looking on. Readers of the Summit Daily News, in Frisco, Colorado were reminded "what a lousy idea it is to kill critters just for their fur" and viewers of Ohio's NBC affiliate, Toledo On The Move, Channel 24, heard about the "barbaric practices of the fur industry" and how demonstrators "want all shoppers to go fur free this holiday to save an animal's life."
Budding 8-year-old animal rights spokesperson Levi Veleanu, on the corner of 11th and Market Streets in Philadelphia, might have said it best when he told a CBS affiliate reporter that he really likes animals and wants to save them. He said some people just don't understand the animal cruelty involved in the fur trade. "If people wouldn't skin their dog or cat, I don't know why they would support skinning other animals."
Fur Free Friday marks the beginning, not the end, of the season to educate the public about the senseless cruelty of fur. Click here for more information on IDA's campaign to end fur sales at Nordstrom. Please contact IDA's Director of Outreach, Hope Bohanec at Hope@idausa.org, for ideas about how to keep the compassionate message alive in your community.
Videos - click on image to see video
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