Animal cruelty can take many different forms, as you’ll discover below, but the impact is always the same. A sentient animal capable of love and creating social relationships experience pain, fear, and desperation. And it needs to stop.

Animal cruelty is the abuse toward or neglect of an animal. It’s that simple. Some aspects of animal cruelty involve purposefully putting animals in situations that harm, scare, and terrorize them, while others simply result from people looking the other way.

We live in a world that not only turns a blind eye to animal cruelty but condones it — whether through indifference or legislation. It’s legal to raise chickens in deplorable conditions for the sole purpose of slaughtering them later. If that isn’t animal cruelty, then what is?

The problem is that there aren’t enough people fighting for animal rights. If everyone started to look at animals — and not just dogs and cats — as fellow animals who share our planet, we would see far fewer cases of cruelty toward animals.

As a human we can save animals from cruelty by helping together to shelter an animal in need. You can be the helping hand that an animal need. An animal that has been mistreated needs support, sometimes immediately. You can make a real difference by taking an animal out of a harmful situation.