Belgium, Brussels Eurogroup for Animals is an animal rights federation composed of 70 NGOs, which was cofounded in 1980 by the UK-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and five other NGOs based in EU states. Located in Brussels, the Eurogroup’s secretariat focuses on influencing decisions made by the European Commission, Parliament and Council.… Continue reading Eurogroup for Animals
Kenya Conservation Alliance of Kenya (CAK) was founded in 2015 by a large group of well-resourced NGOs based overseas and a few local groups which they fund. CAK describes itself as an umbrella organization. One half of CAK’s mission is to be the catalyst for exchanging information on wildlife and environmental issues. The other consists… Continue reading Conservation Alliance of Kenya
African Wildlife Foundation’s (AFW) conservation policy maintains that people are not part of the solution. But, in its words, ‘the biggest threat to wildlife in Africa’. In Kenya this misanthropic attitude has brought AFW into conflict with indigenous communities, amidst accusations of intimidation, violence and torture, used on a large-scale to force once free people into densely populated reservations to make ‘room’ for a wildlife park.
USA, Hawaii Earth Trust was established in Hawaii in 1976 by Don White, a founding member of Greenpeace and its former international campaign director. The organization claims to pay no full-time salaries and to be staffed by a network of volunteers. However, according to its website, it pays programme managers and other staff ‘whenever there… Continue reading Earth Trust
Washington D.C, USA The Animal Welfare Institute’s (AWI) was founded in 1951 by Christine Stevens (1918 – 2002), the wife of Roger L Stevens who once held a major stake in the Empire State Building in New York. As the first president of AWI, she was known to her supporters as the mother of the… Continue reading Animal Welfare Institute
Hong Kong, China The charitable organisation ADM Capital Foundation was launched in 2006 by ADM Capital, a Hong Kong-based investment firm established in 1998, which manages assets worth USD1.6 billion. ADM Capital’s co-founder Robert Appleby has an MA in Zoology and a BA in Zoology and Anthropology from Oxford University, England. He spent 13 years at… Continue reading ADM Capital Foundation
Arlington, Virginia, USA Conservation International (CI) was founded in 1987. Its driving force was Peter Seligmann, an ecological scientist, who began his career in 1976 at The Nature Conservancy. Today, CI operates in 70 countries, managed by an office network that it finances and staffs in two dozen countries. According to Seligmann, what differentiates CI from… Continue reading Conservation International
US and UK The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) was founded in 1984 by Dave Currey, Jennifer Lonsdale and Allan Thornton OBE, who set up Greenpeace’s London office in 1976. These three activists came together to form EIA as a consequence of their experience recording minke whale hunts off northern Norway. According to EIA, they realised that on-the-ground documentary… Continue reading Environmental Investigation Agency
According to its 2019 annual report, Friends off the Earth believes that the ‘financialisation of nature’ and ‘market-led mechanisms’ are detrimental to their causes (page 19). FoE pointedly refuses to accept that these two concepts could ever be efficacious. This means that it does not support the sustainable use of natural resources, which depends upon making the conservation of wildlife financially viable.
The Earth Island Institute’s (EII) dolphin-safe eco-‘trust’ label scheme relies on self-certification that demands no proof to confirm how few dolphins tuna fishing vessels claim that they kill or injure. This was a fact that the documentary Seaspiracy usefully exposed, regardless of its motive, which was to persuade people to go vegan, when it filmed EII’s spokesperson Mark Palmer admitting the truth. Namely that EII’s so-called eco-trust-label, which earns the NGO millions of dollars, does not guarantee ‘dolphin-safe’ tuna, even though its ‘seal of approval’ says it does on almost every can of tuna sold in the USA.
