Tell your friends about ASI:
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Spring is in the air! The snow is finally melting and trees are starting to bloom. I’ve noticed a few new birds at my backyard feeder and a beautiful butterfly fluttering around my porch the other day. These are a wonderful indications that we are transitioning to warmer, sunny days.
While nature is preparing for a new season, ASI is busy as well. Read below to find out about the work we are doing to create kinder and more compassionate communities for all.
Do you want to learn more about ASI programs and see real-time updates? Check out our
web site
and connect with us on
Facebook,
Twitter
and
YouTube
.
Enjoy!
Warmly,
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Ivy Collier
Executive Director
Animals & Society Institute
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We are extremely pleased to announce that the Universidade de Lisboa has been awarded the 2019-2020
International Development Project Award
from the Animals & Society Institute, for the creation of a Human-Animal Studies Hub at the University.
From the project proposal:
The HAS hub @ICS-ULisboa aims to create and foster HAS in Portugal. Using the hub concept, this proposal intends to boost social innovation, to build a collaborative community on HAS with shared goals, to attract diverse members with heterogenous knowledge, and to facilitate creativity and collaboration in physical and digital space.
The implementation of a HAS hub @ICS-ULisboa would be favored not only by the growing critical mass that has been increasingly gathering around the topic, but also by the thriving academic environment of the University of Lisbon to which the Institute belongs. This will give the hub a strategic positioning not only at a national level, but also at an international one. ICS-ULisboa is an institute of the University of Lisbon, which is the largest and most prestigious university in Portugal and one of Europe’s leading universities. Having almost 50,000 students, the University of Lisbon brings together various areas of knowledge and has a privileged position for facilitating the contemporary evolution of science, technology, arts, and humanities. Accepting the responsibility of making the city of Lisbon one of the great European capitals of culture and science, the University of Lisbon welcomes about 6,900 international students each year, about 14.5% of the total number of students coming from more than 100 countries, who seek a high quality education, as well as the culture, climate and hospitality that Lisbon and Portugal have to offer.
In particular, the grant will help fund:
- the organization of the first national post-graduate course in HAS
- the organization of an international conference
- the publication of a handbook in HAS, in Portuguese
- the co-organization of an international Summer School in HAS
We are so excited about this, and about the development of a brand new HAS program in Portugal!
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We are happy to share our current issue of
Sloth
, our online journal for undergraduate and early graduate students in Human-Animal Studies, is out!
This issue features the following articles:
You can
find the whole issue
here!
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ASI shows support for California's
Animal Cruelty and Violence Intervention Act of 2018
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Last year ASI worked with the Animal League Defense Fund in support of California SB 1024 that sought to make counseling mandatory for animal abuse offenders. Though the bill was not enacted in 2018, it passed the California Senate and its first committee in the Assembly. We are pleased that Senator Scott Wilk has revised and reintroduced CA SB 580, the California Animal Cruelty and Violence Intervention Act of 2019.
The changes made to this bill reflect the complexity of animal abuse crimes. Specifically, the revised bill requires that a defendant who is granted probation or a suspended sentence for animal abuse or neglect undergo a psychological evaluation. The results of the evaluation will be used by the court to inform decisions about the intervention to be ordered. Professional evaluation of animal maltreatment offenders is essential to help the court determine the most appropriate and effective type of intervention.
Our Director of Human-Animal Programs, Lisa Lunghofer, wrote a letter of support for the bill that will be presented at a hearing on April 9. The bill is an important step forward and reflects growing recognition of the relationship between animal abuse and other antisocial behavior and increased awareness of the wide range of motivations for and causes of animal maltreatment.
ASI recognizes the need for a range of intervention options that can be tailored to meet the circumstances of individual cases. We will continue our work to raise awareness in California and nationwide of ASI’s intervention programs for animal maltreatment offenders. The importance of timely intervention cannot be overstated. By equipping offenders with the knowledge and skills to avoid future offending, we are making communities safer for people and animals alike.
ASI has developed intervention programs for misdemeanor animal abuse offenders. Intervention programs offer a viable option to provide early intervention, reduce cruelty to animals and humans, and reduce recidivism. To learn more about these programs,
click here.
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Alternatives to Conventional Meat Threatened By Censorship
By Elan Abrell, ASI Board Member
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Contemporary industrialized animal agriculture leads to untold suffering and death for billions of animals per year, but it also poses an array of threats to human and ecological wellbeing. It is a major source of green house gas (GHG) emissions, with the livestock sector alone contributing to “about 18 percent of the global warming effect” (Steinfeld et al. 2006). It likewise contributes to ground and water pollution through waster runoff, while it is also responsible for a significant amount of fresh water consumption. Agriculture in general accounts for approximately 80-90% of annual US water consumption, but about 2/3 of that is used for feed crops for livestock. Further, animal agriculture is a significant driver of both the spread of zoonotic diseases and the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Finally, current industrial agricultural practices are driving global food inequality. Food policy debates often focus on the year 2050 as a potential breaking point. World population is predicted to increase by 2 billion people over the next 32 years, which, combined with increasing demands for animal products around the world – particularly in large, population-dense countries like China and India – will require an approximate doubling of current global crop production (with much of that going to feed animals). Not only would the production levels required to satisfy this vastly increased demand for animal products drastically exacerbate the other problems outlined above, but it would likely be impossible to achieve with current production methods.
Technological advancements and corporate investment in the development of plant-based and cell-cultured alternatives to meat and other animal products offer hopeful means of satisfying growing global protein demands. The rapid development of cell-cultured meat (also called clean meat, cell-based meat, and cultured meat) technology is particularly promising, and essentially entails the growth of animal tissue in machines called cultivators which allow small cell samples from live animals to replicate in nutrient media until they produce edible-sized portions of meat. Although over a dozen companies around the world are working on developing these products, they will likely not be ready to bring products to market for another year or two.
Nonetheless, the promise of this new technology has scared conventional meat producers and led to the introduction of meat label censorship bills in over twenty state legislatures. Often backed by cattle producer groups, these bills seek to restrict cell-cultured meat products – and in many cases plant-based meat products as well – from using meat-related terms on their labels. Unfortunately, these bills both place unconstitutional limits on free speech and place consumers at risk by preventing those with meat allergies from being able to clearly discern that cell-cultured meat products are in fact made of animal meat, though not derived from a slaughtered animal. Thus far, five bills have passed, and at least six have stalled or been defeated, but new ones can still be introduced this legislative session.
Fortunately, there has been some positive news at the federal level. On March 7, 2019, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a Formal Agreement on their shared regulation of cell-cultured meat. In addition to formalizing how the two agencies will divide regulatory oversight, the USDA specifically asserted that it would be conducting pre-market approval of the labels for these products. Under federal law, the USDA label requirements will preempt any state meat labeling laws that are implemented. Hopefully the legislators in the states that have not introduced these bills take the Formal Agreement and federal preemption seriously and resist making the same mistake as the states that have passed these bills into law already. But even if they don’t, preemption provides a strong basis for challenging these laws in court. Even with the current legal hurdles arising at the state level, there is good reason to remain hopeful that cell-cultured meat companies will be able to deliver on the promise of this new technology.
About Elan:
Elan Abrell received his J.D. from Berkeley Law School at the University of California, and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His dissertation, Saving Animals: Everyday Practices of Care and Rescue in the US Animal Sanctuary Movement (funded by a grant form the National Science Foundation), examines how sanctuary caregivers respond to a range of ethical dilemmas and material constraints while attempting to meet the various and sometimes conflicting needs of rescued animals.
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Did you know you can shop on Amazon and support ASI?
Visit
smile.amazon.com
, choose Animals and Society as your charity, and shop. The AmazonSmile Foundation will donate 0.5% of the purchase price from your eligible AmazonSmile purchases.
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