Animal Abuse Resulting from Wildlife Habitat Destruction 259 therefore generally ingrained in everyday practices and systems, although these, in turn, are frequently subject to regulation That is, industry and citizens are generally free to pollute, but the law stipulates under what conditions and to what extent Chemicals and other toxic waste such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have proliferated over the past 60 years (Pellow 2007) Specifically, the rise of the chemical industries means that many different types of toxic waste are produced, gathered up and put together into the same dump sites (for example, rivers and lakes and ocean outlets, landfills) This has both immediate and longer-term impacts on nonhuman animal species as their habitats are denuded, destroyed and diminished The destruction of wildlife habitat as a result of war and social conflict also warrants mention The continuing impacts and legacy of war are evident, for example, in the ongoing efforts in Vietnam to recuperate from the horrors of Agent Orange, with its legacy of deforestation and toxicity The militarised uses of natural resources as funding sources not only includes direct exploitation of vulnerable species and their use as ‘bush meat’ in places such as West Africa, but the unregulated demolition of countryside in pursuit of minerals and the like (Brisman et al 2015) The intentional destruction of the environment during warfare remains a social and ecological problem of major proportions, one that has still not been adequately addressed in international legal forums (Freeland 2015) Resource extraction industries are the economic lifeblood of many countries around the world Mining, forestry and petroleum (involving drilling at sea as well as on land) constitute major sources of revenue and profit for states and corporations alike They employ many people, across a broad range of occupations and types of paid work They also demand huge expenditure from the point of view of investment, exploration, operations and rehabilitation Resource extraction is not cheap It also has its environmental and social costs The harms resulting from extractive industries like mining are concerning (Carrington et al 2011; Ruggerio and South 2013) These include harms stemming from environmental degradation and contamination In some circumstances, mining ventures create toxic sites, and thus produce the conditions for contaminated communities, with significant detrimental consequences for local habitats and human residents There are huge questions surrounding the environmental and social consequences of mining, particularly the huge large-scale open-cut mining projects, mountaintop mining, and new forms of mining such as coal-seam fracking (Munro 2012; Stretesky et al 2014)