The Centre for Animals and Social Justice (UK) website has a summary of Dan Lyons’ recent visit to Canada, where he gave a number of talks about the governance of animal experimentation in the UK (which has debated this question much more seriously than Canada). Dr. Lyons was a speaker at the “Thinking Outside the Cage” conference at Queen’s, which explored how we replace self-regulation by animal researchers and industry with open and democratic deliberation on this vital question of ethics and the public interest. A report on this conference will be available in a future link from this site.

Read the summary here

Lori Gruen reflects on the recent high-profile killing of a giraffe and lions at the Copenhagen Zoo. She questions the justification for the killing of the animals and also the purpose of zoos in general.

To quote Gruen: “Awe-inspiring animals such as giraffes and gorillas and cheetahs and chimpanzees are not seen as individuals, with distinct perspectives, when viewed, as Dick says, as either useful or useless “specimens.” They are valued, if at all, as representative carriers of their species’ genes.

This distorts our understanding of other animals and our relationships to them. Part of the problem is that zoos are not places in which animals can be seen as dignified. Zoos are designed to satisfy human interests and desires, even though they largely fail at this. A trip to the zoo creates a relationship in which the observer, often a child, has a feeling of dominant distance over the animals being looked at. It is hard to respect and admire a being that is captive in every respect and viewed as a disposable specimen, one who can be killed to satisfy a mission that is hard for the zoo-going public to fully understand, let alone endorse.”

Read the full article here