Animal Extremist Lexicon: Animal Abuse

What’s in a Word?

Animal Abuse: the definition of animal abuse is not as straightforward as one might think. Indeed, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) has put out a 58-page guideline to help veterinarians develop a reporting guideline for practices to report animal mistreatment.

From AVMA’s guideline to defining abuse, “Animal abuse: more wilful failing to provide care or doing something harmful. Abuse implies maltreatment occurred regardless of the intent, motivation or mental condition of the perpetrator, whereas cruelty connotes more deliberate intention.”

PETA extremists consider animal abuse to be any use of animals for food, clothing, research, entertainment or abuse in any other way. Even owning a companion pet is akin to owning a slave according to animal extremists. Most pet owners would tend to disagree as they walk their dog multiple times a day, let the dog out, clean up yards, litter boxes, and feed their pets twice a day (more if you happen to be bottle raising puppies or kittens).

Farmers are particularly singled out as slave owners. They milk their cows twice daily, bottle feed calves, feed their livestock, clean stalls, pens, coops, and tend to their animals as if they actually cared about them. The fact is all farmers and ranchers know that the less stress their market animals have, the healthier they are, and there is less release of cortisol, a stress hormone. Go to any 4H or FFA livestock show and you see children of all ages handling their chickens, sheep, goats, pigs, steers and cows with love and care. This is the reality, not the rhetoric thrown around by rabid animal and vegan extremists.