Editors’ Introduction somewhat disproportionate representation of domesticated animals in the book, for example, but this is to be expected because it is these animals who are in the most immediate contact with people and who are consequently most commonly the focus of enquiry Some readers may find that some of the chapters not address actual categories of crimes As such, a central question weaving its way throughout this book, as one of us has previously asked, is: Why some harms to animals are defined as criminal, others as abusive but not criminal, and still others as neither criminal nor abusive? In exploring these questions, a narrow concept of crimes against animals would necessarily have to be rejected in favour of a more inclusive concept of harm Without it, the meaning of animal abuse will be overwhelmingly confined to those harms that are regarded as socially unacceptable, one-on-one cases of animal cruelty Certainly, those cases demand attention But so, too, those other and far more numerous institutionalized harms to animals, where abuse is routine, invisible, ubiquitous, and often defined as socially acceptable (Beirne 2009, p 200) That said, there are some forms of animal abuse that not appear in this Handbook, either owing to limitation of space or because there is little or no current research on them Prominent among these are the abuse of animals used in religious practices and in certain forms of entertainment, such as circuses and movies Much of the scholarly research and activist work on human–animal studies is conducted in the US, Europe, Canada and Australasia; regrettably, therefore, other regions appear here less often Nonetheless, this book is international in scope: topics were selected and authors were invited to comment on the international context of animal abuse and, where possible, to recognise that many of the harms criss-cross national and cultural boundaries and are global in nature Animals killed for food in the UK, for example, are increasingly likely to come from elsewhere: lamb from New Zealand, for example, makes up 30 % of lamb sales in the UK (worth $646 million NZD dollars), while the international trade in animals and their body parts is worth up to US $200 billion worldwide We asked that each chapter consider four key issues in the animal abuse that forms its subject matter: its basic characteristics; its incidence and prevalence; how it might be explained and the variety of social reactions and responses to it We imposed no other restrictions on authors Scholars and writers from a variety of disciplines and fields (criminology, sociology, law, psychology and science, for example) were invited to contribute original