The 2019 »Peter Singer Prize for Strategies to Reduce the Suffering of Animals« has been awarded to our President and CEO Mahi Klosterhalfen. We appreciate very much his long and tireless commitment to the protection of animals being honored in this way. Mahi will donate the prize money of € 10,000 to the Albert Schweitzer Foundation.
Determined and Strategic Against Animal Suffering
In his laudatory speech, Dr. Eisenhart von Loeper emphasized the award winner’s determination in his commitment to ending animal suffering and his strategic approach. Dr. von Loeper looked back at Mahi Klosterhalfen’s initial successes as a student to ban cage eggs from the menus of many university canteens. Then – as the first and yet unpaid employee of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation – he convinced supermarket chains to stop selling cage eggs. He forged alliances with other animal protection groups, negotiated with companies and continued to expand the foundation.
In their reasoning for awarding the Peter Singer Prize to the Albert Schweitzer Foundation’s president the jury stated: »Mahi Klosterhalfen has turned the foundation established by Wolfgang Schindler in 2000 that originally had no employees, no professional website, no newsletter and no other donors into a powerful animal protection and animal rights organization with currently around 40 employees and an annual turnover of almost two million Euros.«