National Animal Rights Day – an annual event that honors the billions of animals killed each year for human food, clothing and experimentation – returns to San Diego Sunday.
The ceremony, which follows last year’s inaugural event, starts at 3 p.m. Sunday at 698 El Prado, at the edge of Balboa Park.
Organized by the non-profit “Our Planet – Theirs Too,” the ceremony “is intended to show the public first-hand the results of our society’s brutal treatment of animals and to commemorate the 56 billion animals who are killed every year for food, their fur and skins, laboratory tests, and entertainment,” according to organizers.
NARD events have been held in Los Angeles since 2013. Past gatherings have included a solemn ceremony in which volunteers hold the bodies of dead animals, but for this year’s event they’ll stand in unified formation “showing posters of real animals who died as a result of human abuse and exploitation,” organizers said.
The ceremony – which will also include speeches, poetry, music and large-scale visual presentations – will be followed by a celebration in which participants and the public are invited to share what inspired them to become animal advocates. Plant-based drinks and snacks will be served.
According to NARD’s website, events will be held in nearly 150 cities around the world this year, including 11 in the U.S.
Aylam Orian, the Los Angeles actor who founded NARD in 2011, in previous interviews credited 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.
The goal, he has said, is to expand NARD’s profile enough that the effort becomes “the Memorial Day for animals in every city.”
– City News Service
