Animal Welfare Institute

Our Mission

Since its founding in 1951 the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) has sought to reduce the sum total of pain and fear inflicted on animals by people. In the organization's early years our particular emphasis was on the desperate needs of animals used for experimentation. In the decades that followed we expanded the scope of our work to address many other areas of animal suffering.

Today one of our greatest areas of emphasis is cruel animal factories, which raise and slaughter pigs, cows, chickens and other animals. The biggest are in our country, and they are expanding worldwide.

Specific goals are:

--Abolishing factory farms and achieving humane slaughter for all animals raised for meat.

--Improving the housing and handling of animals used for experimentation and pushing for the development of animal research alternatives.

--Ending the use of steel-jaw leghold traps and reforming other cruel methods of controlling wildlife populations.

--Preserving species threatened with extinction and protecting wildlife

in international trade.

--Enforcing strict regulation of transport conditions for all animals.

--Encouraging animal-friendly science teaching and preventing painful experiments on animals by students.