Meet The First Recipient of PETA Asia’s Outstanding Activist Award

Posted on 19 June 2019 at 12:00AM by PETA

Kajol Sethia is the first recipient of PETA Asia’s Outstanding Activist Award. This new award is given to activists who have shown great dedication to helping animals.

Kajol was born to kind parents, who raised her as a vegetarian in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. Her love for animals grew as she became friends with local street dogs, and as a child, she would save her pocket money to buy food for the homeless dogs in her area.

Once she relocated to Singapore for school, she became aware of many other animal rights issues through her own research and watching PETA’s eyewitness investigations. She decided to follow a vegan lifestyle, now saving nearly 200 animals each year with this decision and expanding her compassion to include all animals.

“My love for animals is the very reason I turned vegan overnight and never looked back,” Kajol says. “Being vegan means a way to give back the freedom we took from our fellow animals.”

After learning about the barbaric treatment of animals used in the fashion industry, she knew she wanted to make a positive change. As a passionate online shopper, she noticed that most of her favorite online retailers also carried animal-derived items. So she started Marché Éthique, an online cruelty-free, vegan fashion boutique.

“Let’s build a world where Animal Skin Fashion is a thing of the past,” its website states.

Recently, Kajol returned to Nepal to help her mother with the quickly growing Vegan Dairy Nepal, which offers many different varieties of plant-based milk, butter, yogurt, and cheese and has become popular with vegans and nonvegans alike.

But her work didn’t stop there! While back in Kathmandu, she teamed up with other local activists to help street dogs by raising funds for vital veterinary treatment and placing them with loving families.

“I think it’s not just the responsibility of an organization to rescue animals, but the individual’s responsibility, too,” she says. “It would be great if no animal cruelty took place, but until that day comes, we will keep on fighting, rescuing, and educating people about animal rights.”