Bob Barker is perhaps best known as the host of the popular TV game show The Price is Right, which he turned into a forum for encouraging millions of Americans to help control the pet population by having their companion animals spayed or neutered. This many-time Emmy-award-winning television personality and much-beloved animal rights advocate has since been named an Honorary Fellow by the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics for his groundbreaking contribution to the establishment of animal studies within academia.
By generously endowing America’s top law schools, including Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, Northwestern, Duke, Georgetown, Columbia and the University of Virginia, and by endowing a chair in animal rights at Drury University (his own alma mater), Barker has pioneered the teaching of animal law in the United States. These endowments have enabled, for the first time, hundreds of university students to study animal law and ethics.
“We cannot change the world for animals without also changing people’s ideas about animals. Almost single-handedly in little more than a decade, Bob’s sagacity and generosity have propelled animal ethics from a marginal issue into the academic mainstream. This is a colossal achievement,” says Professor Andrew Linzey of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.
Earlier this year, Barker helped expose the routine abuses that calves raised for veal are forced to endure by narrating hidden-camera video footage secretly shot by an MFA investigator at one of the nation’s top veal producers. Pleading for baby calves who are chained inside 2-feet wide wooden stalls – so narrow they cannot turn around, walk, run, play, socialize with other animals, or engage in other basic natural behaviors, Barker encouraged consumers to withdraw their support for this needless cruelty by boycotting both dairy and veal.
From the work that he has done to bring animal studies programs into universities across the country to consistently speaking up for the most defenseless among us, Bob Barker is a true hero for animals. MFA commends Mr. Barker for his decades of outspoken animal advocacy and congratulates him for this prestigious and well-deserved honor.
