Women Who Fight For Animals. Get To Know Them!
The Unbound project, by photographer Jo-Anne McArthur, uncovers women activists fighting on the front lines for animals.
“I want to celebrate that most of the people who are changing the world for animals are women.” This is how forceful the Canadian photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur expresses herself when talking about her Unbound project, which aims to tell the stories of very different women and from different parts of the world who have a common denominator: they dedicate their lives to improving that of animals .
Women, pioneers in the defense of animals
It was women, like primatologist Jane Goodall, who inspired her to dedicate her life to working for animals. And it was in 2009, in Africa, when Jo-Anne McArthur felt the need to portray the work of all those women who fight for animals.
Among those women is Rachel Hogan, a British biologist who came to Africa in 2001 to help primates as a volunteer for 3 months.
To this day, Hogan is still in Cameroon and has become the director of the NGO Ape Action Africa. McArthur’s admiration for Rachel’s inspiring story was already portrayed in We Animals , the book where he documents the situation of animals in the human environment.
Until the Unbound project began to materialize, 5 years passed. In 2014, McArthur first met with Dr. Keri Cronin, current contributor and co-founder of Unbound, and the two set out to collect a multitude of women’s stories, both past and present.
Make your favorite activist known
Some stories are already on unboundproject.org. Through this website, in addition, anyone can propose their favorite heroine as a candidate. The condition for being nominated is “working tirelessly to make the world a better place for animals.”
“Most of the nominations we receive are from the United States, probably because of the language,” comments the photojournalist, “so we would love to translate the stories into the language of the country of origin of each of the women we speak about.” Women like the Spanish-Irish Sharon Núñez, co-founder of Animal Equality or the Chinese Hazel Zhang.
An open project of feminist animalism
Unbound will see the light of day in the form of a book, but it is a living archive in continuous growth. A project that seeks to inspire to create a kinder world for all species, but also for the animal movement to be feminist.
As Jo-Anne McArthur says, “It is time for the movement to put more value on women’s work. “
