We’re moving the world to protect animals. Here’s how:
World Animal Protection’s strategic plan disrupts and transforms the global systems that cause the most animal suffering.
Wildlife
Our Global Wildlife strategy will end the exploitation of wild animals by disrupting the systems that support exploitative industries.
As a result of our past work, several of the largest travel companies in the world like Expedia Group, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com have committed to stop selling or promoting tourist venues that exploit wild animals for entertainment. These successes demonstrate that using animals for entertainment is not only bad for animals, it’s also not a viable business model.
- We will continue to educate and move tourists and travel companies to stop participating in wildlife entertainment. By reducing demand for these cruel forms of entertainment, we will force the travel and tourism industry to shift to wildlife-friendly tourism.
- At the same time, we are establishing humane and sustainable tourism alternatives – Wildlife Heritage Areas – where tourists can see wild animals in the wild through certified responsible best practices and community-led tourism. We know the best place to see wild animals is in the wild and when properly incentivized, local tourism-dependent communities can be on the frontlines of protecting animals in the wild.
- And by passing national laws to ban the breeding of wild animals for entertainment in Canada and other countries we will stop the system of suffering once and for all.
We will use a similar advocacy approach in our work to end the suffering of animals for traditional medicine and the pet industry. By building on people’s love for animals and their belief that animals deserve compassion, we will point them to activities and behaviors that protect rather than exploit wild animals.
By exposing the cruelty behind these industries and showing the reputational risk, including through the role these industries play in driving pandemic risk and the biodiversity crises, we will reduce demand for these ‘products’ and divert resources and revenue away from the businesses that profit from them.
By showcasing humane and sustainable alternatives to consumers, industry, government and local partners, and passing laws to shift these systems that commodify wild animals, we will put an end to the commercial wildlife trade and shift the world towards a new wildlife-friendly paradigm.
Photo: Pippa Hankinson / Blood Lions
Farming
Our Global Animals in Farming strategy is based on the belief that there is “No Future for Factory Farming”.
We are working to change attitudes and behaviors around meat and dairy to encourage individuals and companies to create meals and menus that are better for animals. Access to information and resources is critical to rebalancing the protein in our food system and on our plates.
To make meat reduction even more accessible, we are challenging the systems that let factory farming off the hook for its negative impacts and prevent plant-based proteins from getting a foothold in the market.
The growth of factory farming is fuelled by artificially cheap animal foods, government subsidies, and lax regulations, that have allowed this system to flourish. However, the low price for meat and dairy has high costs for animals, the environment and human health. Millions of hectares of cropland and millions of pounds of chemicals are used to grow subsidized corn and soy as animal feed. And most antibiotics sold globally are given to farm animals to prevent them from getting sick, rather than to change the overcrowded, stressful, and barren confinement systems they are raised in. This system isn’t working for anyone. Even the workers are given low pay for gruelling, hazardous work and the companies return a small fraction of the price they charge for meat to the farmers raising the animals.
By making companies pay for their true costs to animals, our health, and the planet, and government regulations reflect these hidden costs to society, we can make more sustainable options more available and affordable.
And, by exposing the harms caused by the systems supporting this model of production – such as the threat of antibiotic-resistant infections or the increasing climate catastrophes related to increased global consumption of meat, dairy and eggs and expanding crop production to feed the higher number of animals – we will shift resources away from factory farming and towards a new humane, sustainable, resilient, healthy food system.
Photo: Joe McUbed/Shutterstock
