Campaigns and Goals
In the organization’s early years, its particular emphasis was on the needs of animals used for experimentation. AWI expanded the scope of its work in the following decades to address many other areas of animal suffering.
One major current area of emphasis is factory farms. AWI speaks out against this cruelty and promotes small, humane independent family farms that follow the organization's animal welfare and husbandry standards. Other efforts include ending the use of steel-jaw leghold traps for catching fur-bearing animals, improving the lives of animals in laboratories and promoting the development of non-animal testing methods.
AWI representatives regularly attend meetings of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to fight for the protection of threatened and endangered species. They also attend meetings of the International Whaling Commission to fight to preserve the ban on commercial whaling and work to protect all marine life against the proliferation of anthropogenic ocean noise.
Marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson joined the Animal Welfare Institute Advisory Board in 1960 just prior to the release of her groundbreaking book Silent Spring.
Read more about this topic: Animal Welfare Institute
Famous quotes containing the words campaigns and/or goals:
“That food has always been, and will continue to be, the basis for one of our greater snobbisms does not explain the fact that the attitude toward the food choice of others is becoming more and more heatedly exclusive until it may well turn into one of those forms of bigotry against which gallant little committees are constantly planning campaigns in the cause of justice and decency.”
—Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901–1979)
“Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain’t-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on—our lost narcissism lives on—in our ego ideal.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)