The Columbia Center for Oral History Archives at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library is pleased to announce that a finding aid is now available for the Animal Advocates Oral History Collection.

The collection’s fourteen interviews were conducted between 1999 and 2004 to document the activities of individuals and organizations that had fought for the protection of animals in the preceding decades. The 1970s and 1980s saw the publication of groundbreaking books, new articulations of ethical frameworks, and increased national publicity for animal rights and protection. The project was undertaken by the non-profit organization Recording Animal Advocacy as the movement entered a more introspective phase in the 1990s, and members began asking questions about their past that traditional archival sources did not readily address. The interviews are a unique resource on activists’ views on animal shelters, opposition to vivisection and scientific testing on animals, vegetarianism and veganism, the treatment of agricultural animals, and environmentalism.

Please contact oralhist@library.columbia.edu for more information about the collection and accessing the materials.

-David A. Olson, Archivist for the Columbia Center for Oral History Archives