ANIMALS SHELTER
An animal shelter or pound is a place where stray, lost, abandoned or surrendered animals – mostly dogs and cats – are housed. The word "pound" has its origins in the animal pounds of agricultural communities, where stray livestock would be penned or impounded until they were claimed by their owners.
While no-kill shelters exist, it is sometimes policy to euthanize animals that are not claimed quickly enough by a previous or new owner. In Europe, of the 30 countries included in a survey, all but six (Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Italy and Poland) permitted euthanizing non-adopted animals.
Animal control has the municipal function of picking up stray dogs and cats, and investigating reports of animal abuse, dog bites or animal attacks. It may also be called animal care and control, and earlier was called the dog catcher or rabies control. Stray, lost or abandoned pets picked up off the streets are usually transported to the local animal shelter, or pound. Uncomplicated stray cases are usually kept for a period of time, called stray hold. After the holding period, an animal is considered forfeited by its owner, and may become available for adoption. Animals involved in attacks or bites are placed in quarantine and are not available for adoption until investigations or legal cases are resolved. Animal control's interest is mainly public safety and rabies control.
Many shelter policies allow individuals to bring in animals to the shelter, often called owner surrender, or relinquishing an animal. An open admission shelter will accept any animal regardless of reason, and is usually a municipal-run shelter or a private shelter with a contract to operate for a municipality. Municipal shelters may limit incoming animals to those from the area in which they serve. A managed admission shelter requires an appointment and will restrict admission of animals to fit their available resources. Limited admission shelters are usually private or non-profit shelters without municipal contracts, and they may limit their intake to only highly-adoptable and healthy animals.
An animal in a shelter has four outcomes: return to owner, adoption, transfer to another shelter or rescue facility, or euthanasia. Return to owner is when a stray animal, that was found and housed at the shelter, is picked up by its owner. Most animal shelters practice adoption, where an animal in their care is given or sold to an individual who will keep it and care for it. Some shelters work with rescue organizations, giving an animal to the rescue rather than adopting it to an individual. Some jurisdictions mandate that shelters cooperate with rescues; some shelters utilize rescues to offload animals with health or behavior problems that they are not equipped to deal with. Many shelters practice some level of euthanasia.
Euthanasia is the act of putting an animal to death. A high kill shelter euthanizes many of the animals they take in; a low kill shelter euthanizes few animals and usually operates programs to increase the number of animals that are released alive. A shelter's live release rate is the measure of how many animals leave a shelter alive compared to the number of animals they have taken in. A no kill shelter practices a very strict high live release rate, such as 90%, 95%, or even 100%. Since there is no standard of measurement, some shelters compare live releases to the number of healthy, adoptable animals, while others compare live releases to every animal they took in – as such, the terms high kill, low kill, and no kill are therefore subjective.
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Shelter partners include rescue groups, fosters and sanctuaries. Rescue groups will often pull dogs from shelters, helping to reduce the number of animals at a shelter. A rescue group often specializes in a specific dog breed, or they pull hard-to-adopt animals such as those with health or behavioral issues with the intention of rehabilitating the animal for a future adoption. Many rescues don't have brick and mortar locations but operate out of a home or with foster partners. A foster will temporarily take animals from the shelter to their home to give them special attention or care, such as a newly whelped litter of puppies, or an animal recovering from an illness. An animal sanctuary is an alternative to euthanasia for difficult-to-adopt animals; it is a permanent placement which may include secure kenneling and care by staff experienced in the handling of animals with serious aggression or permanent behavioral problems, or a home for aged animals that will be cared for until their natural death. Adoption and sending to rescue or sanctuary are permanent placements; fostering is a temporary placement.
A retail rescue takes advantage of right-of-first-choice of the free or cheap inventory of animals from shelters to flip shelter-pulled animals under the banner of 'adoption', with little or no retraining or veterinary care in between pulling a dog and selling it. They may also obtain animals cheaply from auctions or puppy mills and command high dollar for their adoptions under the ruse of having 'rescued' the animal. A retail shelter operates like an ordinary animal shelter but with more of the flavor of a pet store than a traditional shelter by selling pet supplies. They may even obtain animals from out of the area to increase their inventory of animals, rather than serving only their geographic service area.
Many shelters routinely spay or neuter all their adoptable animals and vaccinate them for rabies and other routine pet diseases. Shelters often offer rabies clinics or spay-neuter clinics to their local public at discount rates. Some shelters participate in trap–neuter–return programs where stray animals are captured, neutered and vaccinated, then returned to the location they were picked up.
Shelter partners include rescue groups, fosters and sanctuaries. Rescue groups will often pull dogs from shelters, helping to reduce the number of animals at a shelter. A rescue group often specializes in a specific dog breed, or they pull hard-to-adopt animals such as those with health or behavioral issues with the intention of rehabilitating the animal for a future adoption. Many rescues don't have brick and mortar locations but operate out of a home or with foster partners. A foster will temporarily take animals from the shelter to their home to give them special attention or care, such as a newly whelped litter of puppies, or an animal recovering from an illness. An animal sanctuary is an alternative to euthanasia for difficult-to-adopt animals; it is a permanent placement which may include secure kenneling and care by staff experienced in the handling of animals with serious aggression or permanent behavioral problems, or a home for aged animals that will be cared for until their natural death. Adoption and sending to rescue or sanctuary are permanent placements; fostering is a temporary placement.
A retail rescue takes advantage of right-of-first-choice of the free or cheap inventory of animals from shelters to flip shelter-pulled animals under the banner of 'adoption', with little or no retraining or veterinary care in between pulling a dog and selling it. They may also obtain animals cheaply from auctions or puppy mills and command high dollar for their adoptions under the ruse of having 'rescued' the animal. A retail shelter operates like an ordinary animal shelter but with more of the flavor of a pet store than a traditional shelter by selling pet supplies. They may even obtain animals from out of the area to increase their inventory of animals, rather than serving only their geographic service area.
Many shelters routinely spay or neuter all their adoptable animals and vaccinate them for rabies and other routine pet diseases. Shelters often offer rabies clinics or spay-neuter clinics to their local public at discount rates. Some shelters participate in trap–neuter–return programs where stray animals are captured, neutered and vaccinated, then returned to the location they were picked up.
ANIMALS WELFARE
Animal welfare is the well-being of non-human animals. Formal standards of animal welfare vary between contexts, but are debated mostly by animal welfare groups, legislators, and academics. Animal welfare science uses measures such as longevity, disease, immunosuppression, behavior, physiology, and reproduction, although there is debate about which of these best indicate animal welfare.
Respect for animal welfare is often based on the belief that nonhuman animals are sentient and that consideration should be given to their well-being or suffering, especially when they are under the care of humans.These concerns can include how animals are slaughtered for food, how they are used in scientific research, how they are kept (as pets, in zoos, farms, circuses, etc.), and how human activities affect the welfare and survival of wild species.
There are two forms of criticism of the concept of animal welfare, coming from diametrically opposite positions. One view, held by some thinkers in history, holds that humans have no duties of any kind to animals. The other view is based on the animal rights position that animals should not be regarded as property and any use of animals by humans is unacceptable. Accordingly, some animal rights proponents argue that the perception of better animal welfare facilitates continued and increased exploitation of animals. Some authorities therefore treat animal welfare and animal rights as two opposing positions.Others see animal welfare gains as incremental steps towards animal rights.
The predominant view of modern neuroscientists, notwithstanding philosophical problems with the definition of consciousness even in humans, is that consciousness exists in nonhuman animals. However, some still maintain that consciousness is a philosophical question that may never be scientifically resolved. Remarkably, a new study has managed to overcome some of the difficulties in testing this question empirically, and devised a unique way to dissociate conscious from nonconscious perception in animals. In this study conducted in rhesus monkeys, the researchers built experiments predicting completely opposite behavioral outcomes to consciously vs. non-consciously perceived stimuli. Strikingly, the monkeys' behaviors displayed these exact opposite signatures, just like aware and unaware humans tested in the study.
HISTORY, PRINCIPLES, AND PRACTICE
Animal protection laws were enacted as early as 1st millennium BCE in India. Several Indian kings have built hospitals for animals, and emperor Ashoka (304–232 BCE) issued orders against hunting and animal slaughter, in line with ahimsa, the doctrine of non-violence. In the 13th century CE, Genghis Khan protected wildlife in Mongolia during breeding season (March to October).
Early legislation in the Western world on behalf of animals includes the Ireland Parliament (Thomas Wentworth) "An Act against Plowing by the Tayle, and pulling the Wooll off living Sheep", 1635, and the Massachusetts Colony (Nathaniel Ward) "Off the Bruite Creatures" Liberty 92 and 93 in the "Massachusetts Body of Liberties" of 1641.In 1776, English clergyman Humphrey Primatt authored A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals, one of the first books published in support of animal welfare. Marc Bekoff has noted that "Primatt was largely responsible for bringing animal welfare to the attention of the general public."
Since 1822, when Irish MP Richard Martin brought the "Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act 1822" through Parliament offering protection from cruelty to cattle, horses, and sheep, an animal welfare movement has been active in England. Martin was among the founders of the world's first animal welfare organization, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or SPCA, in 1824. In 1840, Queen Victoria gave the society her blessing, and it became the RSPCA. The society used members' donations to employ a growing network of inspectors, whose job was to identify abusers, gather evidence, and report them to the authorities.
In 1837, the German minister Albert Knapp founded the first German animal welfare society.
One of the first national laws to protect animals was the UK "Cruelty to Animals Act 1835" followed by the "Protection of Animals Act 1911". In the US it was many years until there was a national law to protect animals—the "Animal Welfare Act of 1966"—although there were a number of states that passed anti-cruelty laws between 1828 and 1898. In India, animals are protected by the "Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960".
Significant progress in animal welfare did not take place until the late 20th century. In 1965, the UK government commissioned an investigation—led by professor Roger Brambell—into the welfare of intensively farmed animals, partly in response to concerns raised in Ruth Harrison's 1964 book, Animal Machines. On the basis of Brambell's report, the UK government set up the Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Committee in 1967, which became the Farm Animal Welfare Council in 1979. The committee's first guidelines recommended that animals require the freedoms to "stand up, lie down, turn around, groom themselves and stretch their limbs." The guidelines have since been elaborated upon to become known as the Five Freedoms.
In the UK, the "Animal Welfare Act 2006" consolidated many different forms of animal welfare legislation.
A number of animal welfare organisations are campaigning to achieve a Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare (UDAW) at the United Nations. In principle, the Universal Declaration would call on the United Nations to recognise animals as sentient beings, capable of experiencing pain and suffering, and to recognise that animal welfare is an issue of importance as part of the social development of nations worldwide. The campaign to achieve the UDAW is being co-ordinated by World Animal Protection, with a core working group including Compassion in World Farming, the RSPCA, and the Humane Society International (the international branch of HSUS).
The 2019 UN Global Sustainable Development Report identified animal welfare as one of several key missing issues in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
ANIMALS WELFARE SCIENCE
ANIMAL WELFARE ISSUES
- Animal testing
- Abandoned pets
- Bambi effect
- Behavioral enrichment
- Blood sport
- Cruelty to animals
- Feral cat
- Hunting
- Overpopulation in companion animals
- Overview of discretionary invasive procedures on animals
- Poaching
- Puppy mills
- Whaling
- Hypertype
FARMED ANIMALS
A major concern for the welfare of farmed animals is factory farming in which large numbers of animals are reared in confinement at high stocking densities. Issues include the limited opportunities for natural behaviors, for example, in battery cages, veal and gestation crates, instead producing abnormal behaviors such as tail-biting, cannibalism, and feather pecking, and routine invasive procedures such as beak trimming, castration, and ear notching.More extensive methods of farming, e.g. free range, can also raise welfare concerns such as the mulesing of sheep and predation of stock by wild animals. Biosecurity is also a risk with free range farming, as it allows for more contact between livestock and wild animal populations, which may carry zoonoses.
Farmed animals are artificially selected for production parameters which sometimes impinge on the animals' welfare. For example, broiler chickens are bred to be very large to produce the greatest quantity of meat per animal. Broilers bred for fast growth have a high incidence of leg deformities because the large breast muscles cause distortions of the developing legs and pelvis, and the birds cannot support their increased body weight. As a consequence, they frequently become lame or suffer from broken legs. The increased body weight also puts a strain on their hearts and lungs, and ascites often develops. In the UK alone, up to 20 million broilers each year die from the stress of catching and transport before reaching the slaughterhouse.
Another concern about the welfare of farmed animals is the method of slaughter, especially ritual slaughter. While the killing of animals need not necessarily involve suffering, the general public considers that killing an animal reduces its welfare. This leads to further concerns about premature slaughtering such as chick culling by the laying hen industry, in which males are slaughtered immediately after hatching because they are superfluous; this policy occurs in other farmed animal industries such as the production of goat and cattle milk, raising the same concerns.
A 2023 report by the Animal Welfare Institute found that animal welfare claims by companies selling meat and poultry products lack adequate substantiation in roughly 85% of analyzed cases.
CETACEANS
Research on wild cetaceans leaves them free to roam and make sounds in their natural habitat, eat live fish, face predators and injury, and form social groups voluntarily. However boat engines of researchers, whale watchers and others add substantial noise to their natural environment, reducing their ability to echolocate and communicate. Electric engines are far quieter, but are not widely used for either research or whale watching, even for maintaining position, which does not require much power. Vancouver Port offers discounts for ships with quiet propeller and hull designs. Other areas have reduced speeds. Boat engines also have unshielded propellers, which cause serious injuries to cetaceans who come close to the propeller. The US Coast Guard has proposed rules on propeller guards to protect human swimmers, but has not adopted any rules. The US Navy uses propeller guards to protect manatees in Georgia. Ducted propellers provide more efficient drive at speeds up to 10 knots, and protect animals beneath and beside them, but need grilles to prevent injuries to animals drawn into the duct. Attaching satellite trackers and obtaining biopsies to measure pollution loads and DNA involve either capture and release, or shooting the cetaceans from a distance with dart guns. A cetacean was killed by a fungal infection after being darted, due to either an incompletely sterilized dart or an infection from the ocean entering the wound caused by the dart.Researchers on wild cetaceans have not yet been able to use drones to capture noninvasive breath samples.
Other harms to wild cetaceans include commercial whaling, aboriginal whaling, drift netting, ship collisions, water pollution, noise from sonar and reflection seismology, predators, loss of prey, disease. Efforts to enhance the life of wild cetaceans, besides reducing those harms, include offering human music. Canadian rules do not forbid playing quiet music, though they forbid "noise that may resemble whale songs or calls, under water".
WILD ANIMAL WELFARE
In addition to cetaceans, the welfare of other wild animals has also been studied, though to a lesser extent than that of animals in farms. Research in wild animal welfare has two focuses: the welfare of wild animals kept in captivity and the welfare of animals living in the wild. The former has addressed the situation of animals kept both for human use, as in zoos or circuses, or in rehabilitation centers. The latter has examined how the welfare of non-domesticated animals living in wild or urban areas are affected by humans or natural factors causing wild animal suffering.
Some of the proponents of these views have advocated carrying out conservation efforts in ways that respect the welfare of wild animals,within the framework of the disciplines of compassionate conservation and conservation welfare,while others have argued in favor of improving the welfare of wild animals for the sake of the animals, regardless of whether there are any conservation issues involved at all. The welfare economist Yew-Kwang Ng, in his 1995 "Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering", proposed welfare biology as a research field to study "living things and their environment with respect to their welfare (defined as net happiness, or enjoyment minus suffering)."
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ANIMALS RIGHTS
Many advocates of animal rights oppose the assignment of moral value and fundamental protections on the basis of species membership alone. They consider this idea, known as speciesism, a prejudice as irrational as any other. They maintain that animals should not be viewed as property or used as food, clothing, entertainment, or beasts of burden merely because they are not human. Multiple cultural traditions around the world such as Jainism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto and Animism also espouse forms of animal rights.
In parallel to the debate about moral rights, law schools in North America now often teach animal law, and several legal scholars, such as Steven M. Wise and Gary L. Francione, support the extension of basic legal rights and personhood to non-human animals. The animals most often considered in arguments for personhood are hominids. Some animal-rights academics support this because it would break the species barrier, but others oppose it because it predicates moral value on mental complexity rather than on sentience alone. As of November 2019, 29 countries had enacted bans on hominoid experimentation; Argentina has granted captive orangutans basic human rights since 2014.
Outside of primates, animal-rights discussions most often address the status of mammals (compare charismatic megafauna). Other animals (considered less sentient) have gained less attention—insects relatively little (outside Jainism) and animal-like bacteria hardly any. The vast majority of animals have no legally recognised rights.
Critics of animal rights argue that nonhuman animals are unable to enter into a social contract, and thus cannot be possessors of rights, a view summarised by the philosopher Roger Scruton, who writes that only humans have duties, and therefore only humans have rights. Another argument, associated with the utilitarian tradition, maintains that animals may be used as resources so long as there is no unnecessary suffering; animals may have some moral standing, but any interests they have may be overridden in cases of comparatively greater gains to aggregate welfare made possible by their use, though what counts as "necessary" suffering or a legitimate sacrifice of interests can vary considerably. Certain forms of animal-rights activism, such as the destruction of fur farms and of animal laboratories by the Animal Liberation Front, have attracted criticism, including from within the animal-rights movement itself, and prompted the U.S. Congress to enact laws, including the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, allowing the prosecution of this sort of activity as terrorism.
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ANIMAL RESCUE
Animal rescue or pet rescue may refer to:
- Animal rescue group, organizations dedicated to the rescue of animals, including pets, from shelters, to homes
- Animal Rescue Foundation, San Francisco Bay Area based charity dedicated to pet adoption and other animal welfare works
- Animal sanctuary, sites dedicated to caring permanently for rescued wild or domestic animals
- Animal welfare, a general term for the well-being of animals, more specifically the idea of activism towards increasing the well-being of animals
- International Animal Rescue, international organization dedicated to animal welfare
- Pet adoption, adoption of pets that have been abandoned by previous owners
- Rescue dog, dogs placed in homes, from shelters
- Wildlife rehabilitation, the process of caring for wild animals, with the intent of returning them to their natural environment.
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CRUELTY TO ANIMALS
Cruelty to animals, also called animal abuse, animal neglect or animal cruelty, is the infliction by omission (neglect) or by commission by humans of suffering or harm upon non-human animals. More narrowly, it can be the causing of harm or suffering for specific achievements, such as killing animals for entertainment; cruelty to animals sometimes encompasses inflicting harm or suffering as an end in itself, referred to as zoosadism.
Divergent approaches to laws concerning animal cruelty occur in different jurisdictions throughout the world. For example, some laws govern methods of killing animals for food, clothing, or other products, and other laws concern the keeping of animals for entertainment, education, research, or pets. There are several conceptual approaches to the issue of cruelty to animals.
Even though some practices, like animal fighting, are widely acknowledged as cruel, not all people and nations have the same definition of what constitutes animal cruelty. Many would claim that docking a piglet's tail without an anesthetic constitutes cruelty. Others would respond that it is a routine technique for meat production to prevent harm later in the pig's life. Additionally, laws governing animal cruelty vary from nation to nation. While it is routine practice in the United States, docking a piglet's tail as part of regular practice is prohibited in the European Union (EU).
Utilitarian advocates argue from the position of costs and benefits and vary in their conclusions as to the allowable treatment of animals. Some utilitarians argue for a weaker approach that is closer to the animal welfare position, whereas others argue for a position that is similar to animal rights. Animal rights theorists criticize these positions, arguing that the words "unnecessary" and "humane" are subject to widely differing interpretations and that animals have basic rights. They say that most animal use itself is unnecessary and a cause of suffering, so the only way to ensure protection for animals is to end their status as property and to ensure that they are never viewed as a substance or as non-living things.
