Animal Welfare: Limping Towards Eden

Book excerpt: There has been a recent explosion of active concern in matters ofanimal welfare. The science behind animal welfare has progressedsignificantly, new codes of practice and legislation have come intoto being, and innovative methods to assess welfare schemes for foodproduction have emerged. Part of a major animal welfare series, Animal Welfare: LimpingTowards Eden is John Webster’s new and groundbreaking work onanimal welfare. Building on his first book, the highly acclaimedAnimal Welfare: A Cool Eye Towards Eden, it not only criticallyreviews areas of development, but looks to how animal welfare canbe improved in the future. Special consideration is given to: Defining animal welfare (‘fit and happy’) andestablishing a systematic approach for its evaluation (the‘five freedoms’); Providing a sound ethical framework that affords properrespect to animals within the broader context of our duties ascitizens to the welfare of society; Developing comprehensive, robust protocols for assessinganimal welfare and the provisions that constitute goodhusbandry; Introducing an education policy that will increase humanawareness of animal welfare problems and promote action to reducesuffering. This book is part of theUFAW/Wiley-Blackwell Animal Welfare Book Series. This majorseries of books produced in collaboration between UFAW (TheUniversities Federation for Animal Welfare), and Wiley-Blackwellprovides an authoritative source of information on worldwidedevelopments, current thinking and best practice in the field ofanimal welfare science and technology. For details of all of thetitles in the series see ahref="http://www.wiley.com/go/ufaw"www.wiley.com/go/ufaw/a.