Rita Anderson
Policy and Investigations Specialist, Responsible Research Campaign

For over eight years Rita Anderson, Policy and Investigations Specialist for IDA’s Responsible Research Campaign, has contributed to IDA in many areas. She has an impressive history of activism including organizing  candlelight vigils, delivering speeches, and meeting with university officials.

Rita started her career with IDA in 2000 after she became the first person in the country to convince her hometown officials in Boulder, Colorado to adopt the term guardian instead of “owner” when referring to their animal companions.

Over the years, she has had many animal rights successes, including anti-vivisection campaigns. After a two and a half year battle over cruel and needless maternal separation experiments, she convinced the University of Colorado to release eleven monkeys from their laboratories to a sanctuary. That researcher is now conducting studies with human subjects. Rita was also responsible for ending an agreement CU had with a private medical device company which had previously resulted in the killing of over 200 dogs and pigs just to train the company’s sales staff.

Rita worked for months to save fifteen horses from years of abuse and neglect by finding homes for them in Arizona. She worked with local colleagues and officials in Boulder to convince the Colorado Division of Wildlife (CDOW) to end the killing of healthy deer in their bogus campaign to stop the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD). After a pit bull ban was put in force in Denver, Rita saved many dogs from a certain death by helping them get to safe havens out of the city. The newspapers dubbed her the head of the “Underground Pit Bull Highway”.