Animal welfare is the viewpoint that animals, especially those under human care, should not suffer unnecessarily, including where the animals are used for food, work, companionship, or research. This position usually focuses on the morality of human action (or inaction), as opposed to making deeper political or philosophical claims about the status of animals, as is the case for an animal rights viewpoint. For this reason animal welfare organizations may use the word humane in their title or position statements.

History of animal welfare

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Systematic concern for the well-being of other animals probably first arose as a system of thought in the Indus Valley Civilization as the religious belief that ancestors return in animal form, and that animals must therefore be treated with the respect due to a human. This belief is exemplified in the existing religion, Jainism, and in varieties of other Dharmic religions. Other religions, especially those with roots in the Abrahamic religion, treat animals as the property of their owners, codifying rules for their care and slaughter premised mainly on hygiene concerns for humans.

Welfare in practice

As in the case of animal rights, the secular forms taken by animal welfare concerns, policies and action have each been pioneered in the UK, where an early industrial revolution first created the modern separation between popular experience and animal husbandry, opening a space for popular sentimentality towards animals.

More on [ Animal welfare ]

Culture - International Herald Tribune

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REVIEWED BY RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:21:53 -0000
Takeshi Kitano's in-competition latest is excellent in part, but not entirely satisfactory. Barbet Schroeder's crime story should have been an exotic thriller but it loses the plot.
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ESSAY BY MICHAEL SCAMMELL Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:21:53 -0000
What seems to have gotten lost in all the tributes to Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the reason he was listened to in the first place - namely, his virtues as a writer.
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Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:21:53 -0000
A roundup of the day's celebrity news
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By JIM HOLT Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:21:53 -0000
Orwell and Waugh were, in almost every salient respect, precise opposite that makes his "same man" thesis seem perhaps not so preposterous after all. their shared fearlessness in opposing what Orwell called the "smelly little orthodoxies" of the day.
Observations of nature, with artistic license
By SOUREN MELIKIAN Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:21:53 -0000
"Amazing Rare Things," on view until Sept. 28 at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, reveals how documentary illustration transmutes into artistic creation.

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