The Global Guide to Animal Protection

Section Five. Areas of Worldwide Concern

five Areas of Worldwide Concern the range of experiments in which they are used, including product testing, tests for toxicity, cloning, genetic manipulation, and military purposes. Most welcome is the advent of reliable alternatives to traditional testing and perhaps the emergence of stem cell research, but without accurate, publicly accessible information, it is not always easy to scrutinize the effectiveness of experiments . In any case, the ethical issue of whether it is right to inflict suffering on animals cannot be avoided. Our third subsection catalogs the uses of animals for entertainment and for “sport. ” “Sport” is by definition a game between equally or nearly equally matched partners , but that can hardly be said to be the case in the practices detailed here, in which animals are unevenly matched against their human persecutors. Killing for entertainment is surely one of the least justifiable things we do to animals, and the catalog of cruelty in this subsection is disturbing. Andrew Linzey This section concentrates on three areas of global concern: animals in farming, animals in research, and the use of animals for “sport” and recreation. By far the most significant (numerically) are the animals utilized in agriculture. Billions of land animals and aquatic animals are raised and slaughtered every year for human consumption worldwide. Yet securing even minimal welfare standards for these animals is an immense global challenge. Through the intensification of farming since the 1960s, animals have been crowded into smaller and smaller units, where their behavioral needs cannot be adequately met, which causes stress, frustration, abnormal behaviors, and both mental and physical suffering. Our first subsection examines the plight of farmed animals worldwide—from fishes to sheep—and highlights the most problematic uses. The second subsection focuses on animals used in research. Accurate figures are not available for the numbers used worldwide, but the total number is around 500 million. Animal testing is a global cause of concern, and the various articles detail the kinds of species used and ...