Whether you call it Halloween, All Saints’ Eve, Samhain, or All Hallows’ Eve, October 31 is a great day to share tales of the curious and creepy. One such subject is the mysterious rabbit sculpture crouching above an ornate arched doorway of the Cathedral Buildings in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, adjacent to St. Nicholas’ Churchyard.

With bared fangs, sharp claws, and fearsome eyes, the carving has become known as the Vampire Rabbit. Created in 1901 when the buildings were erected, the rabbit used to have shorter ears and was the same sandy color as the surrounding stonework; he’s since been painted black and the ears are much longer (someone supposedly replaced the original set that a builder had knocked off).

No one is sure why the sculpture, officially called a grotesque, was put there, but locals have enjoyed creating tales about it. One legend says that because the Vampire Rabbit overlooks what was once the cathedral’s cemetery (it has since been paved over for a parking lot), his frightening presence was meant to ward off grave robbers. One fanciful account even suggests that he once sprang from the building to suck blood from the miscreants’ necks.

The “vampire” designation seems to be a later addition. According to art historian Gail-Nina Anderson, who has lectured on the carving, it used to be white and was called the White Rabbit, though even then it had long claws. Presumably, it wasn’t until the rabbit was painted black that locals began referring to the grotesque as the Vampire Rabbit.1

Some say he is actually a hare and is meant to reference Sir George Hare Philipson (1836–1918), a local doctor and friend of one of the building’s architects. Among those who believe the grotesque could be a hare is author Christopher Goulding. “Throughout Britain’s medieval churches,” he writes, “there are examples of carved hares playing bagpipes; hares chasing Green men; and trios of hares in side-relief, running in circles, and sharing three ears arranged in such a way that each hare appears to have its own two ears—a so-called ‘Trinity of Hares.’ So sticking a hare, suitably enhanced in the grotesque tradition of gargoyles, above a back doorway may have been an aesthetic joke on the part of architects.”2

The Vampire Rabbit gained a bit of fame among young readers when he was featured in Goulding’s 1998 children’s book Tinseltoon, in which the statues of Newcastle come to life one Christmas Eve and get up to mischief—the carved bunny jumps off the doorway and uses his enormous fangs to eat grass on the churchyard lawn.

Adults, meanwhile, may appreciate the Vampire Rabbit cocktail bar, which is just a few steps away from the cathedral and features such libations as the Rampant Rabbit (vanilla vodka, passionfruit, vanilla syrup, passionfruit syrup, beetroot, and pineapple) and one served in a goblet shaped like a human skull.

Whatever the reason he was added to Cathedral Buildings, the Vampire Rabbit is an eerie but fun reminder that rabbits (and hares) have a place in so many cultures and traditions.

Happy Halloween!

The path to animal activism can be as varied as those who pursue it. For Alice Morgan Wright, who was born on this day in 1881, that path began when she was very young and stepped foot into her local church. In a 1964 newspaper column about Wright, Cleveland Amory wrote that she “got into humane work early when, as a child of four, she was taken to church with her family. She promptly asked her mother where ‘all the furs came from.’ Told, she swore off church for life. ‘The thought,’ she says today, ‘of all those “pious” people. It still makes me sick.’”1 In another interview, she shared that her opposition to vivisection also began as a child, after she read a story about a dog who was experimented on.2

Decades later, Wright would fight for animal protection and women’s suffrage, which she saw as interconnected, since the dominant patriarchy views both women and non-human animals as inferior.

Before she devoted her life to helping the oppressed, however, Wright was known as an artist. After graduating from Smith College—where she met Edith Goode (1882–1970), who would eventually become her partner in life and activism—Wright studied sculpture at the Art Students League of New York and in Paris, exhibiting internationally at venues including the Royal Academy of Art and the Salon des Beaux-Arts. As a sculptor, her signature work is often thought to be The Fist (1921), a piece that made her one of the few U.S. artists doing abstract sculpture in the early 20th century.

While still in Europe, Wright joined the British and French suffrage movements and organized a Paris speaking engagement for Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst and her daughters had founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, and in 1912, Wright participated in their “Great Militant Protest” of window smashing in London, timed to coincide with the reading of the Conciliation Bill in Parliament. She was arrested, along with many other suffragists, and jailed for two months at Holloway Prison, where she took part in (or possibly led3) a collective hunger strike. Upon returning the United States, she helped found the New York State League of Women Voters, and she reunited with some of her college friends, including Goode.

Wright and Goode would remain lifelong companions, both passionately dedicated to achieving better lives for women and animals. Indeed, one friend referred to the pair as “Right and Good.” When they travelled, they were quick to step in when they saw animals being abused. On a ship in the 1930s, for example, Wright demanded that farmed animals on board were given food and water. At their farm in Vermont and their house in Albany, they enjoyed the company of many animals: “When was I so impoverished as to have only 13 cats?” Wright once asked a correspondent. Goode’s nephew remembered how a window was usually left open in the Albany house “for all the pigeons to come into”; he even got up one morning to find a pigeon nesting in the sink.4

By 1945, Wright had largely set aside sculpture to focus on animal welfare work. With Goode, she helped establish the National Humane Society (later renamed The Humane Society of the United States), whose first facility, the Peace Plantation Animal Sanctuary in Virginia, opened in 1950. In 1948, they helped fund the National Humane Education Society, and Wright, who served on the board of directors, authored the organization’s 12 Guiding Principles, which include “To oppose cruelty in all its forms,” “To strive for an end to bullfighting, rodeo and all cruel sports wherever performed and wherever represented as art or as entertainment,” and “To protect and conserve wildlife for its own sake and not as a resource for man’s exploitation.” Goode, meanwhile, served on the Humane Society’s board from 1958 to 1967.

The pair also urged the United Nations to recognize animal welfare alongside human rights, lobbied against animal use in medical and scientific research, and helped pass the United States’ first humane slaughter law in 1958.

They agreed to donate a substantial portion of their estates to animals after their deaths and established the Alice Morgan Wright–Edith Goode Trust to fund animal welfare causes. Wright died in Albany in 1975 at the age of 93, five years after Goode. Her last will and testament included a clause that highlighted her beliefs about cruelty to animals and her abiding desire to encourage others “to befriend all Earth’s creatures on land, in the sea and in the air; to defend them against the ravages by mankind and inspire in human beings compassion for all.”5

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At some point, every compassionate consumer must consider animals raised and killed for food. For many people, the most frequent contact they have with animals is with those they eat, even if, by the time they are consumed, these beings bear no resemblance to the thinking, feeling, beautiful animals—all with desires of their own—they once were.

World Day for Farmed Animals, which is observed every October 2, is an ideal opportunity for animal advocates to share with family and friends details of the cruelty that the animal industrial complex does its best to shield from view. These include:

• Some 75 billion chickens who are killed for meat around the world every year. They are crammed into windowless sheds with thousands of other birds and are bred to grow extremely fast (reaching slaughter weight in about 5 to 7 weeks), which causes widespread leg deformities, lameness, and heart/lung failure because their skeletons and organs can’t keep pace with muscle growth.

• Roughly 8 billion hens in the global egg industry, the majority of whom have historically been kept in battery cages, each given floor space smaller than a sheet of paper. Hens are typically slaughtered after just 1 to 2 years once their egg output declines, far short of their natural 6-year lifespan. And because male chicks can’t lay eggs, an estimated 6 billion male chicks are killed within a day of hatching every year (by maceration or gassing).

• More than 1.5 billion pigs per year who suffer castration, tail docking, tooth clipping—all without pain relief—before being slaughtered. These animals live in barren, crowded housing, and mother pigs are often kept in gestation crates (also called sow stalls) for part of their reproductive cycle, and in farrowing crates around the time they give birth; neither crate allows the pig to turn around. Their babies will be killed before they reach the age of 6 months.

• An estimated 270 million cows used for dairy worldwide at any given time who are repeatedly impregnated (roughly once a year) so they will “give” milk. Soon after giving birth, their calves are taken from them, which is extremely distressing for both. High milk yields are linked to chronic lameness, mastitis, and reproductive disorders. Essentially all these cows are slaughtered once their productivity drops, usually within 6 years, versus a natural lifespan of about 20 years. Male calves in the dairy industry, meanwhile, have little economic value and are usually slaughtered young (for veal or low-grade beef) or killed shortly after birth.

• Some 310 million cows raised for meat who are slaughtered per year. They are forced to undergo such routine procedures as castration, dehorning, and branding—usually without pain relief. Many spend their final months in crowded feedlots; long-distance transport (including live export by sea) exposes them to heat/cold stress and injury.

• As many as 149 billion farmed fishes (and 3 trillion fishes who are caught in the wild). Most of them are not stunned before death; instead, common methods of killing fishes include suffocation in air, live gutting, or a slow death by being crushed in ice.

• About 695 million sheep and lambs who are slaughtered worldwide each year. They suffer such common practices as tail docking and castration, often without anesthesia, and mulesing (cutting skin from the hindquarters of lambs, mainly in Australia) to prevent flystrike. Millions of these animals are transported live over long distances, including multi-week sea voyages, with documented risks of heat stress, injury, and death in transit.

• Around 522 million turkeys who are killed annually. Like chickens raised for meat, industrial turkeys are bred to grow so large-breasted that they suffer joint and mobility problems, and they cannot reproduce naturally; instead, semen is collected from select males, hens chosen for breeding are restrained and positioned (a practice known in the industry as “breaking the hens”), and the semen is inserted in them. Most turkeys are slaughtered at 4 to 5 months old.

These numbers can feel overwhelming, but behind each one of them is an individual who can experience fear and pain and who wants to live. The same is true of the choice before us: it is made one meal at a time, by ordinary people. And it has never been easier to choose kindness. Grocery store shelves and restaurant menus now offer plant-based milks, bean and mushroom burgers, tofu, tempeh, and jackfruit alongside affordable staples like lentils, chickpeas, and grains that have nourished people for millennia.

If you’re not already vegan, you don’t have to overhaul your diet overnight. Even small shifts—one meatless meal a week, trying a new plant-based product—reduce demand for farmed animals and spare animals real suffering. Today and every day, please remember that each vegan meal is a vote against the crates, the cages, and the slaughterhouses.

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Saturday, September 26, is International Rabbit Day. The Rabbit Charity in London launched International Rabbit Day in 1998 to promote the protection and care of domesticated and wild rabbits. It’s been celebrated on the fourth Saturday in September ever since.

Painfully exploited for animal testing, fur, meat, entertainment, and even the pet industry, rabbits are among the world’s most abused species. Fortunately, there are steps we can all take to make their lives better. From my book The Way of the Rabbit, here are 10 ways you can help these remarkable animals.

1. Treat wild rabbits with kindness. If your yard or garden is overrun with rabbits eating your flowers and vegetables, seek humane solutions. Planting onions may keep rabbits away, since they dislike the smell. Consider landscaping with plants that rabbits don’t particularly care for, such as allium, anise hyssop, bee balm, catmint, daffodils, ice plant, juniper, peonies, and yarrow. Also, strong fencing can help protect your garden.

2. Watch out for nests. Not all rabbits burrow safely underground, so before mowing your lawn, carefully check the grass—and watch for patches of brown (dead) grass, which may indicate a camouflaged nest near the ground surface. Baby rabbits grow up fast, and the family will likely be gone within a few weeks.

3. Volunteer at your local shelter or rabbit rescue organization. There is plenty to do: socialize the rabbits, clean their cages, bring them hay and veggies, and do whatever they need to keep them healthy and happy and to make them more adoptable. (You may need to attend a training session to be a shelter volunteer.)

4. Adopt, don’t shop. If you decide a companion rabbit is right for you, adopt one (or more) from a local animal shelter or rabbit rescue group rather than buying one. You’ll save a life and discourage rabbit breeding.

5. Do not give rabbits as Easter presents. Every year, well-meaning parents give rabbits to their children, believing bunnies are a great “starter pet.” They don’t understand that rabbits need special care and can live a decade or longer.

6. Make companion animals part of the family. Don’t relegate a rabbit to a backyard hutch or cage. These are affectionate, playful animals who deserve to live with you indoors, where they are safe from predators and inclement weather.

7. Do not disturb young rabbits you think are “orphaned.” Mother rabbits often leave their babies alone for long periods of time, and they will return. If you believe a wild rabbit has truly been abandoned, contact a wildlife rescue group.

8. Assist domesticated stray rabbits. If you find an abandoned or lost rabbit who was clearly someone’s companion (physical characteristics may include lop ears or fur that is spotted, white, black, or otherwise unlike that of a wild rabbit), carefully catch them. Capturing a skittish rabbit can require several people and a great deal of patience but leaving out some water and food—such as leafy greens and sliced banana—can help. Once the rabbit is safe, contact your local rabbit rescue organization or animal shelter.

9. Do not participate in rabbit exploitation: don’t wear their fur, eat them, or use products tested on animals.

10. Support rescue nonprofits. There are numerous organizations that either rehabilitate wild rabbits and other wildlife or find homes for companion rabbits. Most of these groups rely on the financial support of donors. An online search will direct you to one in your area, or you can choose to contribute to a national organization, such as the House Rabbit Society in the USA, the Rabbit Welfare Association & Fund in the UK, or the Rabbit Run-Away Orphanage in Australia, among many others.

Of course, you don’t need a special day to help rabbits or any other species. Please be mindful of the beings we share this planet with. They help make the world wonderful.

You’ll learn much more about rabbits in The Way of the Rabbit, available wherever books are sold.

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Hello, I’m Mark Hawthorne, author of five books on animals, animal rights, veganism, and social justice, including The Way of the Rabbit and Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism.

I joined Substack earlier this year and have been posting occasional Notes. Honestly, I believed that would be enough for me—mainly because, after everything I’ve written, I wasn’t sure I had anything left to say. It’s not that I’d run out of opinions. I just figured a few lines and a link on social media would do.

But I was wrong.

I want to get back to sharing longer-form ideas, news, and strategies about animal activism and collective liberation, on my own schedule and in conversation with readers.

My plan is to publish at least one article or story here every week. Some will be personal, drawn from my journey as an ethical vegan. Others will spotlight what fellow activists are doing. You’ll find pieces on how to help a particular species, and occasionally we’ll honor an animal or activist from history whose life or death shaped our society.

One promise up front: like my books, talks, and articles, this newsletter will never include graphic images.

Now I’d love to hear from you. Is there a species, a campaign, or an activist you’d like to see covered? Reply or leave a comment. I read everything.

If this sounds like your kind of space, please subscribe. I look forward to hearing from you all.

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