After helping the Prime Minister’s Strategic Reforms Unit with the formulation of revolutionary approaches to protecting animals in the country this summer, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is now inviting federal and provincial government officials to collaborate with it to continue the development and enforcement of the reforms.
PETA’s Vice-President, International Laboratory Methods, Shalin Gala, tweeted the open invitation this week, asking for interested officials to personally contact him.
If you're a member of provincial / federal government in #Pakistan and want to collaborate on animal policy reforms, please DM me to get in touch. Thanks!
— Shalin Gala (@ShalinGala) October 11, 2022
Speaking exclusively to ProPakistani today, he said, “We’ve identified numerous areas of potential strategic reforms for animals in Pakistan, and we’re happy to collaborate with provincial and federal authorities who are interested in working together to advance these issues forward”.
Gala also shared PETA’s proposed actions with this scribe, which include:
- Urging the Pakistan Veterinary Medical Council (PVMC) to adopt and nationalize Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s historic Islamabad reform that prohibits live testing of animals in veterinary colleges, as well as switching to superior and humane simulation models, and banning training methods that are not medically necessary and do not directly benefit the animals involved.
- Influencing the Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC) to prohibit the use of animals for undergraduate medical training (MBBS) and require the use of non-animal education methods.
- Revoking the Lahore Safari Zoo’s captive breeding permit, and requiring that it focus on protecting animals in their natural habitats instead of captive breeding.
- Encouraging the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority (PCAA) to permanently cancel its plans to deploy bird shooters on the runway at the Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore (in lethal attempts to deter birds from colliding with airplanes), and exclusively use humane and non-lethal bird deterrents instead.
- Implementing PETA’s Compassionate Citizen animal empathy program in Pakistani schools.
- Prohibiting the use of animals in Zoology and Life Science dissection courses, and requiring the use of non-animal dissection training methods.
- Establishing a national database for non-animal biomedical research and training methods, and requiring that the use of animals for biomedical research and training must be replaced by approved non-animal methods that appear in the database.
- Implementing PETA’s Research Modernization Deal (http://PETA.org/RMD) to improve medical research results and develop more effective human-relevant treatments in Pakistan without experiments on animals.
- Banning the export of donkeys and dogs to China where they are commonly smuggled by countries for use in Chinese herbal medicines.
PETA is an international nonprofit charitable organization based in Virginia, USA, with entities all around the world. It was founded in 1980 and is dedicated to establishing and defending the rights of all animals while working under the simple principle that “animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way”.
PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and focuses its attention on the four areas in which the largest numbers of animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of time: in laboratories, in the food industry, in the clothing trade, and in the entertainment business. It also works on a variety of other issues, including the cruel killing of animals and birds that are often considered ‘pests’ as well as cruelty to domesticated animals.
With more than nine million members and supporters globally, PETA works through public education, investigative news gathering and reporting, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns.
It also informs policymakers and the public about animal abuse and is currently focusing on similar concerns in Pakistan.
