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news release

The Government’s badger cull policy exemplifies the current obstacles to animal protection, even when the public and scientists are on our side.

Uncaged is evolving!

After almost 20 years of campaigning, Uncaged is evolving!

Marching, protesting, petitioning, boycotting and lobbying are vital aspects of campaigning for animals and, as this website demonstrates, Uncaged has worked extremely hard at each of these activities for many years.

However, even though the past forty years has been an era of intense animal protection campaigning, meaningful progress still eludes us. In just one week this July, we heard that:

• The numbers of animals suffering and dying in UK labs continues to rise despite the Coalition Government’s promise to reverse this trend.
• Farmers are set to shoot thousands of badgers in an unscientific and doomed attempt to eradicate bovine TB from dairy herds.
• Plans are afoot to introduce more intensive mega-farms (including dairies) into the UK.
• Around the world every day unique habitats are being destroyed pushing many species towards certain extinction.
• Ever more exotic wild animals are captured and shipped around the world to become highly unsuitable ‘pets’.

In short, there seems to be no end to the suffering that humans will inflict on other animals, especially when there’s a profit to be made. And the situation seems to be getting worse rather than better. What’s going on? Although many people care deeply about the treatment of animals and there is a broad social consensus that cruelty to animals is simply unacceptable, successive Governments have ignored animal suffering in favour of powerful vested interests.

So how can we finally convert public pressure and the compelling logic of animal protection into the real-world changes that millions of defenceless animals are waiting for? This is the big question that animals need us to answer - and that’s what we intend to do.

Your support has nurtured Uncaged into a pioneering force for good. Now we are ready, with your help, to advance to a new level of animal advocacy. We have years of experience on the front line, we have the dedication and passion to help animals, and with our Campaigns Director Dr Dan Lyons’ award-winning PhD in the politics of animal protection, we also have unparalleled expertise and credibility. We are now applying that unique combination to solving the big question facing animals - allow us to introduce our new organisation: the Centre for Animals and Social Justice (CASJ).

The CASJ is a registered charity (no. 1144250) which aims to open the realm of social justice to animals, to finally give them the protection they need and deserve. Our central strategy is:

To establish animal protection as a central priority of the UK Government, international governments and intergovernmental organisations such as the UN, using high-quality politics research as our primary tool to achieve this.

Dan’s groundbreaking animal protection research shows that this means giving animals a powerful voice within Government for the first time. Animals need effective laws and agencies that will make sure their wellbeing is not automatically sacrificed whenever it conflicts with greedy industries. The CASJ is the first organisation in the UK dedicated to conducting the research that is essential to tackle the relentless abuse of millions of animals. Please click here to read a paper by Dan explaining why the animals need the CASJ.

Our project aims to establish genuine justice in human-animal relationships for the first time in history.
One way the CASJ is starting this process is by funding new research in the field of animals and politics, developing proposals to feed into the political and legal system. We are also working to develop a new university-based Distance Learning course to enhance the effectiveness of animal advocates and nurture a new generation of experts to help challenge the entrenched power of cruel industries.

The CASJ has already received an incredibly positive response from the animal protection movement, sympathetic academics and animal advocates in Parliament. Again and again, we hear comments like:

'I'm so glad you've done this, the animals have been crying out for something like the Centre for Animals and Social Justice'.

By bringing these compassionate forces together, advising and coordinating, we are in a unique position to enable our movement to be greater than the sum of its parts. The CASJ promises to be the exciting new beginning that animals so urgently need.

The CASJ is an independent research centre and think tank, funded solely by ordinary people like you, dedicated to justice and defending the defenceless. Nevertheless, our eventual aim is for the animal protection cause to have the power and influence to become the institutionalised norm rather than the radical exception, because we need to make that transition to make a significant difference to the millions of animals in need of social justice.

• Click here to make a vital donation to help launch the CASJ's pioneering work for animals off to the strongest possible start.
• Click here for FAQs on the Uncaged-CASJ evolution.
• Click here for a copy of the CASJ prospectus.

Uncaged Campaigns 26.09.12

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