2011 was a year of unprecedented growth for the Humane League with the opening of two new offices in New York and Washington, cage-free campaigns in Chicago and Arizona, and the bringing on of a host of fresh new faces to help make an even bigger difference to animals! Read on to hear about our amazing victories for 2011:

Encouraging a Vegetarian Lifestyle

• The horrors of factory farming happen behind closed doors, away from the public eye. We are opening those doors and showing thousands of people how to make compassionate eating choices by personally handing out full-color brochures showing the cruelty of factory farming with resources on vegan eating to students and concert-goers across the country. In 2011, we reached over 590,000 people across the US – more than doubling our impact from last year!
• We distributed over 88,000 Vegetarian Starter Guides through restaurants, cafes, schools and public newsstand boxes, giving new vegetarians a helping hand and doubling our outreach from 2010.
• The Humane League launched and distributed 6,000 brand-new Vegetarian Eating Out Guides for Boston and Philadelphia, highlighting veg-friendly restaurants and eateries to make dining out even easier.
• Along with our popular VegPA and VegNJ sites, the Humane League now hosts VegMass, a comprehensive listing of vegetarian businesses that has drawn over 43,000 unique visitors.
• We launched our first ever Veg Fest in Baltimore, Animal Walk in Boston, and Veg Cocktails in Philadelphia, creating veg communities around the country where people can meet, share ideas, and participate in making a kinder world for all animals

The Hidden Face of Food

• Over half a million people have visited our TheHiddenFaceofFood.com site since it's launch in early 2011, and have viewed the on-site video of farm animal cruelty and links to veg eating resources. Tens of thousands of people have written to tell us the impact the video had on them, and our follow-up surveys indicate that many thousands of people have gone vegetarian as a result of visiting the site.

Improving the Welfare of Egg-Laying Hens

• 30,000 hens will be spared a miserable life in a battery cage after more than 20 colleges, hospitals and businesses went cage-free in 2011! Large institutions have major purchasing power and affect thousands of animals - for example our successful campaign to switch Harvard University to using exclusively cage-free eggs will impact over 1.5 million eggs each year.
• We also launched cage-free campaigns in Chicago and Phoenix, secured cage-free victories in both cities, and look forward to even bigger successes there in 2012.

Educating Our Future

• At the Humane League we are actively working on creating a better future for animals – one student at a time. In 2011 we expanded our popular Humane Education courses to high schools in Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, Delaware and New York as well as Pennsylvania, presenting classes to over 2,600 students and showing them that creating a better future for animals lies in their hands.
• We aired over 100 hours of television programming this year, bringing the cruel realities of factory farming into the homes of thousands of Americans.

Changing Lives

• Winston the snuggling bunny and Elmo the adorable rat are just two of the 81 animals the Humane League has rescued in 2011 now living in comfortable new homes, far away from their barren lives in factory farms, laboratories and testing facilities.