Welcome to Animal Defenders of Westchester (ADOW)

We advocate on all animal protection and exploitation issues, including experimentation, factory farming, rodeos, breeders and traveling animal acts.

Mission

We are a very active group of dedicated grassroots volunteers who do letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and informational tabling in Westchester County and surrounding areas, for the purpose of educating and raising public awareness to the suffering of animals; and the benefits of a vegetarian diet for health and for the environment. We also do a lot of media contact and outreach.

"We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
― Henry Beston

The Problems We Face

Wishful Thinking	Reality

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.   Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."   ~Margaret Meade

Some of Our Accomplishments

• Our persistence and determination got a ban on traveling animal acts in Westchester County
  
  
• We were the first in New York State to get an ordinance against traveling exotic animal acts in the Town of Greenburgh
  
  
• We were successful in getting the South Bronx to drop the Bronx International Championship Rodeo, which was sponsored by the US Tennis Association
  
  
• We persuaded Van Cordtlandt Manor to drop its elephant and camel rides, which they had featured for ten years
  
  
• Our intervention helped Mt. Vernon and North Salem make the decision to stop featuring rodeos
  
  
• Our efforts, which were covered by all major TV stations, helped raise to felony level the arrests of three men accused of running a “training camp” for pitbull fights who had only been charged with misdemeanors
  
  
• Our letters on various animal protection topics regularly appear in major newspapers
  
  
• Our outreach persuaded the Trader Joe's food market chain to stop selling foie gras