Our War on Animals

The world wide number of animals killed for food in 2000 was 45 billion, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization. This included 306 million cattle, buffalo, and calves, 1.2 billion pigs, 795 million sheep and goats, and 42.7 billion chickens, ducks, turkeys, and geese. The figures exclude some small countries and non slaughter deaths, which are not generally reported." *  

Our Vivisection Casualties
"Between 25 and 50 million animals are killed in American laboratories each year. While it is true that the most commonly used animals are mice and rats, millions of animals from other species including guinea pigs, rabbits, ferrets, cats, dogs, monkeys, and chimpanzees are widely used in research labs. These animals can be subjected to a myriad of painful procedures. Thy are burned, starved, irradiated, shocked, mutilated, kept in isolation, poisoned, drugged, electrocuted, and he list goes on and on." **

Our Hunting and Trapping Casualties
The total number of animals killed by hunters and trappers each year in the United States is 133,716,496 or in round numbers, 134 million.
An earlier survey (unpublished) conducted by the Fund for animals estimated that during the 1980/90 hunting and trapping season, approximately 200 million animals were killed. If we presume a steady rate o decline from 200 million dead at the beginning of the decade through 134 million dead in 1996 and project that rate through 1999, the total number of animals killed by hunters and trappers during the 1990s is approximately 1.5 billion.***  
   

Our trapping casualties
In addition to the millions of target animals trapped and sold for their pelts, there are also many more “accidental” catches of animals whose pelts are not valuable.  And there are also animals whose pelts are damaged so badly by the time the trapper returns, that they are not valuable enough to use.
Dogs and cats are frequent victims of these cruel traps.  Owls, ducks, jays, porcupines, flying squirrels, rabbits, etc. are also caught.  They are “unwanted” and are thrown away, or let free, often painfully and sometimes fatally injured. Although it is encouraging that the number of animals trapped in North America per year has dropped from about 31-33 million down to about 6 million  there is still much work to be done.
www.banlegholdtraps.com

Our primate hunting casualties
Great apes -- gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos -- are being hunted to extinction for commercial bushmeat in the equatorial forests of west and central Africa. A ragged farflung army of 2,000 bushmeat hunters supported by the timber industry infrastructure will illegally shoot and butcher over 3,000 gorillas and 4,000 chimpanzees this year. That's five times the number of gorillas on Rwanda's Mt. Visoke and 20 times more chimpanzees than live near Tanzania's Gombe Stream. People pay a premium to eat more great apes each year than are now kept in all the zoos and laboratories of the world.    
Network for change

Our Whale Hunting Casualties
Japan and Norway are killing over 1000 whales between them each year in defiance of a global ban on commercial whaling that is not enforced. Japan also kills tens of thousands of dolphins each year. Smaller whales like these receive no international protection at all and face extermination. Norway plans to hunt dolphins too
    http://www.campaign-whale.org