AUSTIN, Texas (January 26, 2005) Whole Foods Market® (NASDAQ: WFMI), the world's leading natural and organic foods supermarket, announced today its shoppers helped raise more than $650,000 during its “Global Five Percent Day” on Tuesday, January 24th to continue the work of the Animal Compassion Foundation™, an independent non-profit 501c(3) organization created in January 2005.
Whole Foods Market donated five percent of its sales from its 180 locations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to the Foundation, which works to improve the lives of farm animals by serving as an interactive resource for ranchers, meat producers and researchers to learn, share ideas, and collaborate on projects that focus on animals' welfare and well-being. The funds will go solely to research projects and on-farm experiments, not to Foundation administrative expenses.
“The Animal Compassion Foundation will help producers make the transition to more compassionate farming by searching the world for innovative practices and making the information readily available – something no other organization is doing,” said Executive Director Anne Malleau. “Our goal is to bring animal welfare to the forefront by utilizing information and skills from the past, enhanced by present and future innovations. Whole Foods Market and the Animal Compassion Foundation see real opportunities to improve the lives of farm animals, and we are working to make that happen.”
The Foundation's focus is in four primary areas:
- Searching the globe for ideas and innovations from ranchers and farmers who are raising their farm animals compassionately
- Creating a worldwide network of animal compassionate producers to share knowledge and improve practices
- Collecting knowledge of compassionate husbandry methods in an online library to assist interested producers to successfully adopt these techniques
- Providing research money to producers for on-farm research and to animal scientists to seek solutions to current husbandry issues
More information about the Animal Compassion Foundation, its board of directors, and current projects is available at www.animalcompassionfoundation.org.
