Suchergebnisse

This comprehensive review of recent scientific evidence examines the contributions of animal experimentation to human healthcare and toxicity prediction, its necessity during life and health sciences education, its impacts on student attitudes toward animals, and the extent to which animals suffer as a result.

Governmental and industry representatives have repeatedly claimed that Aotearoa New Zealand leads the world on animal welfare, largely based on an assessment by global animal protection charity World Animal Protection (WAP). New Zealand's leading ranking rested primarily on favourable comparisons of its animal welfare legislation with that of 50 other nations, within WAP's 2014 Animal Protection Index. Unfortunately, however, review of welfare problems extant within the farming of meat chickens and laying hens, pigs, cows and sheep, reveals the persistence of systemic welfare compromises within most New Zealand animal farming systems. These are contrary to good ethics, to our duty of care toward these animals, to the wishes of domestic and international consumers, and to the interests of New Zealand's animal production industries, which make an unusually large contribution to New Zealand's national economy. Accordingly, and despite progress to date, this study finds that significant further resource investment and policy reform within the field of animal welfare are clearly warranted within New Zealand.

This 13,000 word report was published by SAFE (a leading NZ animal advocacy organisation). It documents the welfare problems experienced by around 15,000 New Zealand sows annually, who are confined within metal cages barely larger than their own bodies, in a practice claimed to decrease piglet mortality. It was delivered to NZ's Primary Production Select Committee along with SAFE's own submission in June 2018. The Committee was reviewing a 112,844 signature petition to Parliament (the largest in 5 years), which requested a ban on sow farrowing crates.

Laboratory classes in which animals are seriously harmed or killed, or which use cadavers or body parts from ethically debatable sources, are controversial within veterinary and other biomedical curricula. Along with the development of more humane teaching methods, this has increasingly led to objections to participation in harmful animal use. Such cases raise a host of issues of importance to universities, including those pertaining to curricular design and course accreditation, and compliance with applicable animal welfare and antidiscrimination legislation. Accordingly, after detailed investigation, some universities have implemented formal policies to guide faculty responses to such cases, and to ensure that decisions are consistent and defensible from legal and other policy perspectives. However, many other institutions have not yet done so, instead dealing with such cases on an ad hoc basis as they arise. Among other undesirable outcomes this can lead to insufficient student and faculty preparation, suboptimal and inconsistent responses, and greater likelihood of legal challenge. Accordingly, this paper provides pertinent information about the evolution of conscientious objection policies within Australian veterinary schools, and about the jurisprudential bases for conscientious objection within Australia and the USA. It concludes with recommendations for the development and implementation of policy within this arena.

The advanced sensory, psychological and social abilities of chimpanzees confer upon them a profound ability to suffer when born into unnatural captive environments, or captured from the wild – as many older research chimpanzees once were – and when subsequently subjected to confinement, social disruption, and involuntary participation in potentially harmful biomedical research. Justifications for such research depend primarily on the important contributions advocates claim it has made toward medical advancements. However, a recent large-scale systematic review indicates that invasive chimpanzee experiments rarely provide benefits in excess of their profound animal welfare, bioethical and financial costs. The approval of large numbers of these experiments – particularly within the US – therefore indicates a failure of the ethics committee system. By 2008, legislative or policy bans or restrictions on invasive great ape experimentation existed in seven European countries, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In continuing to conduct such experiments on chimpanzees and other great apes, the US was almost completely isolated internationally. In 2007, however, the US National Institutes of Health National Center for Research Resources implemented a permanent funding moratorium on chimpanzee breeding, which is expected to result in a major decline in laboratory chimpanzee numbers over the next 30 years, as most are retired or die. Additionally, in 2008, The Great Ape Protection Act was introduced to Congress. The bill proposed to end invasive research and testing on an estimated 1,200 chimpanzees confined within US laboratories, and, for approximately 600 federally-owned, to ensure their permanent retirement to sanctuaries. These events have created an unprecedented opportunity for US legislators, researchers, and others, to consider a global ban on invasive chimpanzee research. Such a ban would not only uphold the best interests of chimpanzees, and other research fields presently deprived of funding, but would also ...

Data from a regional Southwest telephone survey in the United States (N= 432) were used to examine the intervening effects of knowledge, morality, trust, and benefits on support for animal and plant biotechnology applications. Results showed that perceptions of agricultural biotechnologies varied by the two applications—animals and plants. Respondents reported higher opposition to the genetic modification of animals, which is consistent with prior research. Results also indicated that morality and perceived benefits directly affected support for both animal and plant applications, but trust and knowledge only had indirect effects. Morality and perceived benefits accounted for most of the variance explained among the intervening variables. The effects of trust were mediated through perceived benefits. The effects of knowledge on support were mediated primarily through trust. The influence of sociodemographic and consumer behavior variables varied by application. Results lend support to several theoretical notions. First, the significance of perceived benefits supports that there is an inverse relationship between benefits and risks. Second, moral objections may outweigh perceived benefits for specific applications, and the genetic modification of animals is deemed to be more morally unacceptable than the genetic modification of plants. These findings demonstrate the need to understand more thoroughly the moral and ethical issues surrounding novel technologies. Third, this research supports the claim that trust is not a powerful predictor of perceptions of technological products, which is contrary to most risk perception research.