Introduction | xxxiii Concerning the use and well-being of birds, Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns notes that Millions of birds suffer miserably each year in government, university, and private corporation laboratories, especially considering the huge numbers of chickens, turkeys, ducks, quails, and pigeons being used in agricultural research throughout the world, in addition to the increasing experimental use of adult chickens and chicken embryos to replace mammalian species in basic and biomedical research Slaughter experiments are also routinely performed on live chickens, turkeys, ducks, ostriches, and emus, in which these birds are subjected to varying levels of electric shock in order to test the effect of various voltages on their muscle tissue for the meat industry (See http://www.upc-online.org/genetic/experimental.htm for specific references.) For example, the Spring 2002 issue of the Journal of Applied Poultry Research featured an article in which USDA researchers describe shocking 250 hens in a laboratory simulation of commercial slaughter conditions to show that “subjecting mature chickens to electrical stimulation will allow breast muscle deboning after two hours in the chiller with little or no additional holding time.” Concern for animals has moved beyond primarily captive situations such as laboratories, zoos and aquaria, rodeos, circuses, slaughterhouses, and fur farms into the field Many of the new essays in this encyclopedia reflect this growing interest and concern The lives of individual animals are also now much more centrally located in the conservation or green movement, and animals’ points of view, including what they like and what they want, and their fate, is more and more factored into conservation decisions, such as relocation and reintroduction projects This has been evident in popular reaction to urban animals who become pests For example, in July 2008, a mother bear was shot when she returned to Boulder, Colorado, my hometown, to look for her cub, which had been electrocuted by an uninsulated electric wire The citizens were incensed and made their feelings known The vast majority of people thought it unnecessary to kill the mother bear, and she should have been relocated so that she could live without bothering people She had done nothing wrong, and was merely trying to live where bears had previously lived before being displaced because of human development In another story, when a bear whose head was stuck in a jar left as trash by humans was killed in Minnesota (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7534325.stm), people were outraged by this action as well They wanted to know why the bear couldn’t have been tranquilized instead of killed In a very real sense, animals are part of the green movement, and coexistence is the guiding philosophy that drives many decisions about how to treat them without trumping their interests with our own Fewer and fewer decisions to trade off animals for humans go without discussion and concern by a growing portion of the general population Much interest is driven by interactions with the companion animals who share the homes of people around the world and by children, who are inherently interested in the lives of animals regardless of where they live