The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience (1995) Alexander Fernando Pacheco (born August 1958) is an American animal rights activist.

He is the founder of 600 Million Dogs,[1] co-founder and former chairman of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and a member of the advisory board of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Filmmaker Oliver Stone writes that the political campaign to save the monkeys gave birth to the animal rights movement in the United States.

[3] Pacheco was born in Joliet, Illinois, but moved to Mexico with his family when he was very young, where he and his two siblings were raised near the ocean by his Mexican father, a physician, and his mother, an American nurse.

Kathy Snow Guillermo writes in Monkey Business (1993) that Pacheco's early life was filled with animals; bats lived in the rubber trees in his front yard, snakes slept behind nearby rocks, and fishermen regularly dragged dolphins out of the water onto the beach.

Guillermo writes that he was shocked by the sight of two men throwing a newborn calf, cut from the uterus of its slaughtered mother, into a dumpster.

Guillermo writes that, as Ohio is an agricultural state, his activism met with stiff opposition and the occasional anonymous telephone call threatening to blow his head off.

PETA filed a $3 million libel lawsuit, which was settled out of court when the magazine agreed to issue an apology and donate an unspecified amount of money to animal rights organizations.

[10] The proceedings, which lasted years, generated a large amount of publicity for PETA, transforming it from what Ingrid Newkirk called "five people in a basement" into a national movement.

[5] In 1992, Pacheco and a staffer went to the Hawaiian island of Molokai and destroyed several hundred wire snares that were causing pigs and goats to die slowly of strangulation, starvation, and dehydration.

[17] He also worked with Congressional contacts and the media in order to convince the military to make the change permanent and include other facilities and other species.

[25] In May 1984, Pacheco compiled a 30-minute video called Unnecessary Fuss based on 60 hours of videotapes taken from the Pennsylvania Head Injury Lab by the underground organization Animal Liberation Front.

[29][30] The sit-in lasted 4 days, after which Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler publicly announced the termination of funding for the $14 million Head Injury Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania.

[31] During his 20-year tenure as chairman of PETA, Pacheco was involved in bringing public attention to the way animals are treated in cosmetic tests and in urging companies to abandon this practice.