Senior Year? Celebrate With 12 Animal-Friendly Senior Traditions

Posted by Calvin on October 11, 2023

No matter what your plans are after high school, one thing’s for sure: Senior year is your year. Making it through 12 years of school is high-key impressive, and now you get to celebrate with all your friends before setting off. 🥳 So take advantage of all the fun traditions to mark your time in school—and since we’re honoring you here, we’ve gotta talk about animal-friendly activities.

As a compassionate student, the most authentic thing you can do is make your senior-year traditions animal-friendly. You could spare lives, make yourself and your fellow advocates more comfortable, and inspire countless others to follow your lead. Here’s how to tweak 12 senior-year traditions to be considerate of all animals:

1. Decorating Lockers

To celebrate spirit week, senior night, or graduation, deck out your locker in animal rights drip. You can get a free poster and stickers from us, print out pics of animals, write compassionate messages on paper, and display it all on or in your locker for everyone to see.

2. Class Rings

Can you personalize your class ring? If so, this would be a great place to flash an animal rights message. You’d want something snappy, like “Go Vegan,” “Adopt. Don’t Shop,” “Friends, Not Food,” “Cruelty Isn’t Cute”—or anything that fits and makes a clear point. 👌

3. Senior Quotes

Know how to go down as a legend at your school? Leave a top-tier senior quote in your yearbook. You could use a famous animal rights quote from someone like Mohandas Gandhi, Leonardo da Vinci, or Jane Goodall or come up with your own creative one.

4. Senior Breakfast (Senior Sunrise)

If your school puts on a breakfast for all seniors, make sure there are plenty of vegan options available. You can coordinate with the organizers of the event to come up with a menu feat. a Breakfast Parfait, Breakfast Scramble Tacos, Pumpkin Spice Pancakes, and other animal-free treats. 😋

5. Decorating Parking Spaces

Do you have a designated parking space at school? Give it a glow-up by decorating it with colorful animal rights messages and images. 🤩 All it takes is some chalk to turn plain ol’ tar into a constant reminder for your fellow classmates to make kind choices.

6. Senior Carnival/Field Day

Carnivals and field days should be a good time for everyone, including animals. You could plan with the organizers to have vegan meals and snacks and swap out harmful activities like a spoon-and-egg race or a water balloon toss (which prop up the cruel egg industry and leave behind choking hazards for animals) with way more fun activities like a sack race or tug-of-war.

7. Senior Prank

Mild take: Harmless pranks are awesome. As long as you aren’t hurting or making a mess for anyone—including animals—we see nothing wrong with having a little fun. 😉 Just steer clear of littering, creating waste, or using animals in any way. (They can’t consent.)

8. Senior Class Gift

At some high schools, the entire senior class pitches in and thanks the school community with a gift. You could suggest something that would benefit animals, such as planting a tree for squirrels and birds, setting up a garden for pollinators, or funding your animal rights club. Plus, this kinda makes up for the senior prank, right? 😅 You’re all even now.

9. Senior Skip Day

This is one you can look forward to all year: Seniors take the day off school and have a bonding experience together. Here’s a quick rundown of how to make common skip-day outings animal-friendly:

• Have a vegan beach day by observing animals from a respectful distance and picking up trash along the shore and in the water.
• Have a vegan barbecue or cookout with grilled veggies, fresh fruit, and delicious plant-based protein.
• Instead of viewing animals in captivity at a zoo or an aquarium, see them in their natural habitat at a nature or wildlife center.

10. Senior Car Parade

Want to hype animal rights in the most flamboyant way possible? If your school has a senior car parade, glitz up your vehicle in the most eye-catching animal rights decorations you can think of. Messages on banners, paw print designs, vegan snacks to hand out—as long as you don’t use real-life animals, it’s fair game.

11. Senior Picture

Your senior pic should reflect your personality, and empathy is a huge part of who you are. When others see this on full display, they could be inspired to make similar choices in their lives. Do you volunteer at an animal shelter? Clean up your local park? Table at SOS events? Find a way to incorporate that compassion into your pic. 📸

12. Senior Will

Your senior will—which is way less serious than an actual will—is your chance to leave your friends with important memories and objects. Like, imagine this in your yearbook: “To [friend’s name], my tastiest vegan food (she loves BBQ tofu).” See how even a single sentence can spark someone’s interest in the animal rights movement?

*****

All these opportunities to help animals really make it clear that school is the perfect place to thrive as an activist. 😊 Want a super-easy way to start (or continue) your activism journey? Write anti–animal dissection messages on sticky notes and put them up around your school—you’ll be waking others up to the cruelty of dissecting animals and earning 25 peta2 points in our Rewards Program!