1. What is the difference between animal rights and animal welfare?

Animal welfare is about showing compassion for all animals, especially those that are ill, infirm, abandoned and unable to take care of themselves. Animal rights go a step further and emphasise that animals have rights of their own, by their very existence, and not because humans grant this to them. This could mean letting the laws of nature apply even where compassion dictates otherwise.

Examples: animal welfare will suggest that a cow can be kept for its milk, if it is well treated; animal rights will say that this is still against the cow's, and more important, the calf's right. Animal welfare will allow animals to be trained for entertainment, if humane teaching methods are used, animal rights will argue that no form of human training and exhibition can be what the animal itself wants.

2.What are the negative aspects of leather and milk?

Leather production involves the widespread killing of healthy young animals and calves, often not just cattle, but also dog hide passed off as leather. Millions of cows are also killed, or smuggled across the border to be killed for their leather. This invloves not only cruelty, but loss of our national wealth.

Milk consumption has negative aspects both for the animals - the calf that is deprived of its mother's milk and often killed off, and the cow that is treated inhumanely with oxytocin and other methods to extact more milk - and for humans for whom it is supposedly an allergenic indigestible substance, not suitable for the Asian or African
constitution, having harmful rather than beneficial effects on health. Milk, available commercially, is also highly adulterated with substances like urea and white paint.

3.What are the economic and environmental reasons to be vegetarian?

Man does not require to be non-vegetarian, and a vegetarian diet by itself can be much cheaper than a nonveg one. However, the principal costs are what is faced by the economy, and the ecology, in terms of the depletion of animal wealth and resources through indiscriminate nonvegetarianism. Animals and birds are bred for their meat in the most inhuman of ways, often the flesh itself thereafter is actually quite nonedible and harmful for human consumption (eg the mad cow disease in Britain). Animals and birds hunted down for food result in a large variety of important species getting extinct, besides causing ecological imbalances with far reaching consequences, often not immediately recognisable.

4. What are the objectives of Zoos? Is it morally justified to have zoos?

There can be two objectives : one, to enable captive breeding of animals on the verge of extinction. And two, to educate the public about animals they would not see in their day to day life. In India the latter is true. However, with the proliferation of other much superior means of education such as TV channels like Discovery and National Geographic, the education reason is no loger valid, and in fact much harm is done in the name of education. It is therefore justified to have zoos only of the kind that make captive breeding of rare animals possible in under as natural conditions as possible.