Henry Spira
Encyclopedia
Henry Spira is widely regarded as one of the most effective animal rights
activists of the 20th century.
Spira is credited with the idea in the animal protection movement of "reintegrative shaming," which involves encouraging opponents to change by working with them—often privately—rather than by publicly vilifying them. Sociologist Lyle Munro writes that Spira went to great lengths to avoid using publicity to shame companies, using it only as a last resort.
Working with Animal Rights International, a group he founded in 1974, Spira is particularly remembered for his successful campaign against animal testing
at the American Museum of Natural History
in 1976, where cats were being mutilated for sex research, and for his full-page advertisement in The New York Times in 1980, famously featuring a rabbit with sticking plaster over the eyes
, which asked, "How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?" Within a year, Revlon had donated $750,000 to a fund to investigate alternatives to animal testing, followed by substantial donations from Avon, Bristol Meyers, Estée Lauder, Max Factor, Chanel, and Mary Kay Cosmetics, donations that led to the creation of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing.
Spira's life was chronicled in 1998 by Peter Singer
in Ethics Into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement.
His father sent for them in 1938; he had opened a store selling cheap clothes and jewellery, mostly to sailors, and Germany was an increasingly unsafe place for Jews. Henry was sent to a Roman Catholic school run by nuns, where lessons were conducted in Spanish, but he strongly disliked the super-religious focus of the school, and was relieved when his father ran out of money and could no longer afford the fees. He spent the next year working in his father's store.
.
In 1943, while at Stuyvesant High School
, he became involved with Hashomer Hatzair
, a left-wing, non-religious, Zionist
group that helped to prepare young Jews to live on kibbutz
im in Palestine. There were summer camps, where they were taught how to farm, lots of hiking, and lessons about the equality of men and women. Peter Singer writes that the anti-materialism and independence of mind that Spira learned from his time with Hashomer Hatzair — where he adopted his Hebrew name, Noah — stayed with him for the rest of his life. He decided to leave home when he was sixteen, taking lodgings and an afternoon job in a machine shop, and attending school in the mornings.
, because of his involvement in left-wing politics; his presence on an American merchant vessel was "inimical to the security of the U.S. government," he was told. He later told Peter Singer, "I just figured it was part of the game: Fight the system and they get even with you."
He was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving in Berlin in 1953-54. Peter Singer writes that Spira was also involved in the civil rights movement
, and reported on Fidel Castro
's rise to power in Cuba for The Militant, a left-wing newspaper. After two years in the Army, he worked at the General Motors
factory in Linden, New Jersey on the assembly line. In 1958, he graduated as a mature student from Brooklyn College
in New York, and in 1966 began teaching English literature in a New York high school, teaching students from the ghettos.
One of the major influences on Spira was Peter Singer's 1975 work, Animal Liberation
. In 1974, he founded Animal Rights International (ARI) and in 1976, he led the ARI's campaign against vivisection
on cats by the American Museum of Natural History
, which was researching the impact of certain type of mutilation, including castration
, on the sex lives of cats. The museum halted the research in 1977, and Spira's campaign was hailed as the first ever to succeed in stopping animal experiments.
Another well-known campaign targeted cosmetics giant Revlon
's use of the Draize test
, which involves dripping substances into animals' eyes, usually rabbits, to determine whether they are toxic. On April 15, 1980, Spira and the ARI took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, with the header, How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake? As a result, Revlon began research into "cruelty free" alternatives.
Spira took a photograph of a primate who had been imprisoned for months in a Bethesda Naval Hospital chair to the Black Star Wire Service, which sent the picture around the world. It was shown to Indira Gandhi, India's PM, who cancelled monkey exports to the U.S., because the photograph suggested the U.S. Navy was violating a treaty with India that forbade military research on animals.
Other campaigns targeted the face branding of cattle, the poultry industry, and fast food giant KFC
(with an advert that combined a KFC bucket and a toilet). Nevertheless, Spira was an advocate of gradual change, negotiating with McDonald's
, for example, for better conditions in the slaughterhouse
s of its suppliers. He proved especially adept at leveraging the power of the larger animal welfare
organizations, such as the Humane Society of the United States
, to advance his campaigns.
Spira died of esophageal cancer
in 1998.
Animal rights
Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings...
activists of the 20th century.
Spira is credited with the idea in the animal protection movement of "reintegrative shaming," which involves encouraging opponents to change by working with them—often privately—rather than by publicly vilifying them. Sociologist Lyle Munro writes that Spira went to great lengths to avoid using publicity to shame companies, using it only as a last resort.
Working with Animal Rights International, a group he founded in 1974, Spira is particularly remembered for his successful campaign against animal testing
Animal testing
Animal testing, also known as animal experimentation, animal research, and in vivo testing, is the use of non-human animals in experiments. Worldwide it is estimated that the number of vertebrate animals—from zebrafish to non-human primates—ranges from the tens of millions to more than 100 million...
at the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
in 1976, where cats were being mutilated for sex research, and for his full-page advertisement in The New York Times in 1980, famously featuring a rabbit with sticking plaster over the eyes
Draize test
The Draize Test is an acute toxicity test devised in 1944 by Food and Drug Administration toxicologists John H. Draize and Jacob M. Spines...
, which asked, "How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?" Within a year, Revlon had donated $750,000 to a fund to investigate alternatives to animal testing, followed by substantial donations from Avon, Bristol Meyers, Estée Lauder, Max Factor, Chanel, and Mary Kay Cosmetics, donations that led to the creation of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing.
Spira's life was chronicled in 1998 by Peter Singer
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne...
in Ethics Into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement.
Early life
Spira was born in Antwerp, Belgium to Maurice Spira and Margit Spitzer Spira. Maurice's father had worked in the diamond trade in Hungary; his mother's father, also from Hungary, had risen to become chief rabbi of Hamburg. The family was comfortable financially; Henri had a nanny and was educated at a French-speaking lycée. When he was 10, his father went to Panama, and the rest of the family moved to Germany to live with Margit's family. Spira joined a Jewish youth group and began to learn Hebrew.His father sent for them in 1938; he had opened a store selling cheap clothes and jewellery, mostly to sailors, and Germany was an increasingly unsafe place for Jews. Henry was sent to a Roman Catholic school run by nuns, where lessons were conducted in Spanish, but he strongly disliked the super-religious focus of the school, and was relieved when his father ran out of money and could no longer afford the fees. He spent the next year working in his father's store.
New York and Hashomer Hatzair
When he was thirteen, in December 1940, the family set sail for New York via Havana on the SS Copiapo. His father took a job in the diamond industry, and rented an apartment on West 104th Street. Henry was sent to public school. He continued to study Hebrew — paying for lessons himself with vacation jobs — had his Bar Mitzvah ceremony, and began to wear a kippahKippah
A kippah or kipa , also known as a yarmulke , kapele , is a hemispherical or platter-shaped head cover, usually made of cloth, often worn by Orthodox Jewish men to fulfill the customary requirement that their head be covered at all times, and sometimes worn by both men and, less frequently, women...
.
In 1943, while at Stuyvesant High School
Stuyvesant High School
Stuyvesant High School , commonly referred to as Stuy , is a New York City public high school that specializes in mathematics and science. The school opened in 1904 on Manhattan's East Side and moved to a new building in Battery Park City in 1992. Stuyvesant is noted for its strong academic...
, he became involved with Hashomer Hatzair
Hashomer Hatzair
Hashomer Hatzair is a Socialist–Zionist youth movement founded in 1913 in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, and was also the name of the group's political party in the Yishuv in the pre-1948 British Mandate of Palestine...
, a left-wing, non-religious, Zionist
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
group that helped to prepare young Jews to live on kibbutz
Kibbutz
A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism...
im in Palestine. There were summer camps, where they were taught how to farm, lots of hiking, and lessons about the equality of men and women. Peter Singer writes that the anti-materialism and independence of mind that Spira learned from his time with Hashomer Hatzair — where he adopted his Hebrew name, Noah — stayed with him for the rest of his life. He decided to leave home when he was sixteen, taking lodgings and an afternoon job in a machine shop, and attending school in the mornings.
Merchant navy and army life
He left New York in 1945 to become a merchant seaman, but he was blacklisted as a security risk in March 1952, during the McCarthy eraMcCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
, because of his involvement in left-wing politics; his presence on an American merchant vessel was "inimical to the security of the U.S. government," he was told. He later told Peter Singer, "I just figured it was part of the game: Fight the system and they get even with you."
He was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving in Berlin in 1953-54. Peter Singer writes that Spira was also involved in the civil rights movement
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
, and reported on Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
's rise to power in Cuba for The Militant, a left-wing newspaper. After two years in the Army, he worked at the General Motors
General Motors
General Motors Company , commonly known as GM, formerly incorporated as General Motors Corporation, is an American multinational automotive corporation headquartered in Detroit, Michigan and the world's second-largest automaker in 2010...
factory in Linden, New Jersey on the assembly line. In 1958, he graduated as a mature student from Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
in New York, and in 1966 began teaching English literature in a New York high school, teaching students from the ghettos.
Activism
Spira told The New York Times that he first became interested in animal rights in the early 70s while looking after a girlfriend's cat: "I began to wonder about the appropriateness of cuddling one animal while sticking a knife and fork into another."One of the major influences on Spira was Peter Singer's 1975 work, Animal Liberation
Animal Liberation (book)
Animal Liberation is a book by Australian philosopher Peter Singer, published in 1975.The book is widely considered within the animal liberation movement to be the founding philosophical statement of its ideas...
. In 1974, he founded Animal Rights International (ARI) and in 1976, he led the ARI's campaign against vivisection
Vivisection
Vivisection is defined as surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure...
on cats by the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
, which was researching the impact of certain type of mutilation, including castration
Castration
Castration is any action, surgical, chemical, or otherwise, by which a male loses the functions of the testicles or a female loses the functions of the ovaries.-Humans:...
, on the sex lives of cats. The museum halted the research in 1977, and Spira's campaign was hailed as the first ever to succeed in stopping animal experiments.
Another well-known campaign targeted cosmetics giant Revlon
Revlon
Revlon is an American cosmetics, skin care, fragrance, and personal care company founded in 1932.-History:Revlon was founded in the midst of the Great Depression, 1932, by Charles Revson and his brother Joseph, along with a chemist, Charles Lachman, who contributed the "L" in the Revlon name...
's use of the Draize test
Draize test
The Draize Test is an acute toxicity test devised in 1944 by Food and Drug Administration toxicologists John H. Draize and Jacob M. Spines...
, which involves dripping substances into animals' eyes, usually rabbits, to determine whether they are toxic. On April 15, 1980, Spira and the ARI took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, with the header, How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake? As a result, Revlon began research into "cruelty free" alternatives.
Spira took a photograph of a primate who had been imprisoned for months in a Bethesda Naval Hospital chair to the Black Star Wire Service, which sent the picture around the world. It was shown to Indira Gandhi, India's PM, who cancelled monkey exports to the U.S., because the photograph suggested the U.S. Navy was violating a treaty with India that forbade military research on animals.
Other campaigns targeted the face branding of cattle, the poultry industry, and fast food giant KFC
KFC
KFC, founded and also known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, is a chain of fast food restaurants based in Louisville, Kentucky, in the United States. KFC has been a brand and operating segment, termed a concept of Yum! Brands since 1997 when that company was spun off from PepsiCo as Tricon Global...
(with an advert that combined a KFC bucket and a toilet). Nevertheless, Spira was an advocate of gradual change, negotiating with McDonald's
McDonald's
McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...
, for example, for better conditions in the slaughterhouse
Slaughterhouse
A slaughterhouse or abattoir is a facility where animals are killed for consumption as food products.Approximately 45-50% of the animal can be turned into edible products...
s of its suppliers. He proved especially adept at leveraging the power of the larger animal welfare
Animal welfare
Animal welfare is the physical and psychological well-being of animals.The term animal welfare can also mean human concern for animal welfare or a position in a debate on animal ethics and animal rights...
organizations, such as the Humane Society of the United States
Humane Society of the United States
The Humane Society of the United States , based in Washington, D.C., is the largest animal advocacy organization in the world. In 2009, HSUS reported assets of over US$160 million....
, to advance his campaigns.
Spira died of esophageal cancer
Esophageal cancer
Esophageal cancer is malignancy of the esophagus. There are various subtypes, primarily squamous cell cancer and adenocarcinoma . Squamous cell cancer arises from the cells that line the upper part of the esophagus...
in 1998.
Further reading
- Spira, Henry. "Fighting to Win". In Peter SingerPeter SingerPeter Albert David Singer is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne...
(ed), In Defense of Animals, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. 194-208. - Singer, Peter. Ethics Into Action, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. (Describes much of Spira's work. Some excerpts available online: "Ten Ways to Make a Difference" and "A Meaningful Life").
- In Memoriam - from Animal Rights International.
- Henry Spira: The Vegan.com Interview