We know that animals can suffer and feel pain. Despite this, there is no proper protection for countless animals from many parts of the world.
They continue to suffer unnecessarily because of intentional and unintentional cruelty, ignorance and neglect.
There is an urgent need to have an international commitment to protect animals and their welfare needs.
Such a determination could inspire political leaders, organizations, and individuals to treat animals better and will be the beginning of the end of cruelty to animals throughout the world.
The achievement of such a commitment in the form of a Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare (DUBA), is a vital springboard for changes in policies and legislation, to improve application and promote positive attitudes towards animals in all corners of the world. Achieving this in the United Nations will give more impetus and seriousness to governments, and will also establish the indisputable link between animal welfare and the protection of people and the planet.
Low levels of animal welfare are seen throughout the world, affecting a wide variety of animals. There are examples of many causes, such as our growing demand for meat, the impact of natural disasters and the lack of understanding about how to care for animals. We need a unified agreement between governments to protect animals from cruelty and abandonment in the future.
Billions of animals raised intensively to produce food. These animals have little room to move or behave naturally. Most never have contact with fresh air or daylight or guarantee of a humane death.
Wild animals are hunted and killed cruelly for commercial purposes. Their skins, fangs, bones and other parts are sold both legally and illegally to make clothes, accessories, and medicines. They are also mistreated in the name of sport and entertainment.
There are around a billion cats and stray dogs in the world. Sometimes they are feared and persecuted by people terrified by the possibility of contracting diseases such as rabies. Local authorities often do not have laws on the humane treatment of these animals, so poisoning, shooting, and electrocution – which often cause a slow and painful death – are universal.
Horses, donkeys, mules and other working animals help at least half the people of the world to maintain their means of subsistence. Few laws and resources protect your well-being. Many of them work long hours without rest or water. Lameness, injuries due to inadequate equipment, diseases and poor diet cause them terrible suffering.
A skinny dog with sores on its skin records something to eat in the trash. A small cat, with its eyes still closed, desperately meows in the box where they left it under the tree…
A pregnant dog sniffs without rest to find the route back to the house where they no longer wanted her in that state…
Some puppies writhe in the rain and do not understand why their life changed suddenly…
The city becomes a dumping ground for the soulless who want more space in their homes, although they have less and less in their hearts. Dogs and cats, emotional animals par excellence, do not always find the hand that caresses them or the excessive attention to their welfare. Few roam the streets because there was someone who was unscrupulous and, simple as that, got rid of them.
Changing that reality is the primary objective of the PAC (Animal Protection of the City ), a working group that today brings together 1,100 members including professors, doctors, veterinarians, lawyers, writers, artists, journalists, psychologists, housewives, students, and to which can be added all the loving and protective people of the animals who wish to contribute, in any way, to the cessation of animal abuse .
Organized in different commissions that handle adoptions, sterilization campaigns, deworming and vaccination, educational outreach, among others; PAC aims to reduce, and if possible eliminate the growing number of traveling animals and promote public awareness and education about the proper treatment and respect that animals deserve, comments Cubahora Sucel Jurado, general manager of PAC.
“We have many volunteers with whom we work to restore health to sick and abandoned animals, and to relocate them to homes where they receive them with love, for which we use all available communication channels,” he adds, and should not explain much because As a member of PAC, I receive daily news in my email that connects me with the needs of defenseless animals.
“One of the most important projects of PAC, and for which we continue to work hard, is the approval of an Animal Protection Law, an urgent demand in our country and for which it has already advocated in other spaces. We made a letter of request to the National Assembly of People’s Power, as established by the Constitution, and we are swamped collecting at least 10,000 signatures required to obtain the enactment of the law. Luckily many people join us in this endeavor because they do not approve of the persistent reality of animal abuse or the alternatives of the solution offered by Zoonoses.
“A law of this type would not only be limited to the welfare of dogs and cats … Horses in the city are a point apart if we analyze the inappropriate use they make of them as a means of transport, pigeons hunted in an abusive manner … Una society like ours must govern its act by ethical and moral values that must be reproduced for generations. It is with facts and not so much with words that the foundations of daily life are felt “.
“Currently PAC operates primarily in the capital, but we intend to reach all provinces so that the welfare of pets, sports, exhibition, farm, labor, experimentation and production is not a forgotten issue,” Jurado added.
“We consider the possibility, and hopefully we will, of having a refuge for animals that are not adoptable or in transit towards future adoptions, which must be supported and attended by the members of the organization, so that Zoonosis is not the only alternative. We are interested in working with all state institutions, or not that can support us in this human and peaceful work, because the way we treat our animals, as Gandhi said, also depends on the way in which we treat ourselves or progress or not as a society. “
“They call us on the phone and report the abandonment of an animal, the wandering of one, the critical situation of hunger or illness of another, the need to give to those who can no longer be in a house; but these behaviors are not the ones that abound more than the protectors of the group, so we need PAC to grow, and we will be able to disappear if our goal collapses. If people stopped being indolent and learned to live with animals, it would not be necessary to have a working group that would go out of its way to change what today hurts so much, “concluded Jurado.
