Pioneering Animal Justice: Emarel Freshel and the Millennium Guild (1865-1948)

In the first half of twentieth-century North America, Emarel Freshel founded and directed the Millennium Guild, an organization which embraced opposition to every single form of cruelty to animals: a strong stance against vivisection for moral reasons, rejection of the promotion of humane slaughtering of animals as a way to prevent cruelty, vegetarianism as the only consistent way to defend animals, and opposition to zoos, to furs, to the use of animals in films, or any other form of animal exploitation, be it financial or to satisfy our desires and whims. Although she is best known for her vegetarian recipe book The Golden Rule Cookbook. 600 recipes for meatless dishes published in 1907 as Maude Russell Lorraine Sharpe, where she advanced the position regarding vegetarianism that she would later advocate, her defense of animals covered every aspect of cruelty. Emarel Freshel’s defense of justice for animals paved the way for future abolitionists.