Resolutions passed at the Fourth Asia for Animals Conference held at Chennai from Jan 10-12, 2007 Recognizing that animals are sentient beings and that society has a responsibility to protect animals and to ensure their welfare, the 2007 Asia for Animals Conference calls on the governments of Asia: • To promote, support and endorse the proposed draft Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare to be approved by the United Nations; • To phase out the long distance transport of live animals and to fulfill their obligation to ensure the enforcement of the OIE (World Organization for Animal Health) guidelines on the welfare of animals, specifically on transport by land and sea, slaughter for human consumption, and killing for disease control; • To phase out the use of cages for poultry by 2015 and introduce free range systems; • To ensure the welfare of animals at the time of slaughter by promoting the introduction and use of pre-slaughter stunning systems, including reversible stunning systems, to address religious concerns; • To protect wild animals and their habitats, ensure that all relevant agencies take urgent action to close down markets and/or commercial farms for wildlife and wildlife products, stop the wildlife trade, share information, and establish domestic and international communication to achieve these objectives; • To phase out the use of animals for entertainment; • To accept and support a methodical, systematic and scientific Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme coupled with mass immunization of the dog population as the most efficacious means of humanely controlling the street dog population and rabies; • To phase out the use of animals in research and to respect the Three R’s (Reduce, Refine and Replace) and Rehabilitation with regard to the use of animals for experimentation, including promoting the sharing of data on experiments in order to avoid repetitive research, ensuring the welfare of animals used in research, and developing and validating alternatives to the use of animals for experimental purposes; • To reiterate that all progressive governments must reject the eating of cats and dogs and stop the practice. • To eliminate all subsidies for farm animals • To ensure that appropriate technical resources are identified and made available at the governmental level to achieve the above objectives.
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