Humane Use Of Animals In The 1800s

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Animal Experiments Organized efforts to improve humane treatment of animals began in the nineteenth century in England and the United States. The early goals were to prevent cruelty and oppose experiments on animals. The first US animal rights organizations originated in the 1970s. Their actions and activities were much broader and included both political and social objectives. The close ties between humans and animals go back many centuries. Keith Thomas describes the close associations in England where animals and families shared living quarters, where pets providing companionship were often fed better than servants, and where horses were so valuable for work and transportation that no custom of eating their meat developed. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, writers began to discuss animal feelings of pain and suffering, vivisection (the surgical operations performed upon live animals during experiments), cruel treatment of animals raised and slaughtered for food, and the religious teachings that influenced humane treatment of both humans and animals. This new emphasis upon animals' feelings of sensation in the eighteenth century brought growing criticism of some forms of cruelty. Doubts about the ethics of castrating domestic animals were raised as early as 1714. Using animals in…show more content…
Two decades after Animal Liberation was first published animal activists can cite the move away from testing cosmetics on animals, a reduction in number of animals used in laboratory animal experiments, and efforts in Europe to make livestock and poultry production less stressful. Singer believes it is important to see these reforms as stepping stones on the path to further goals, not as the be-all and end-all of the
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