ANIMAL RIGHTS AWARENESS WEEK
Animal Rights Awareness Week has been celebrated in the middle of June for more than two decades, to raise public awareness of global animal rights issues. The concept of animal rights stems from the philosophy that all living things have inherent moral value, which as such is independent of their usefulness to human beings. Furthermore, this philosophy proposes that the basic interests of all living beings, such as above all the avoidance of their exploitation, should be taken into account, which can most simply be compared to the basic rights of man.
In the last few decades, human cruelty towards a large number of different animal species has increased due to globalization processes and industrialization, but also because of the greater demand for products that come from animal exploitation. The growing body of evidence about the negative impact that human beings have on animals has increased our moral obligation to ensure that animals are harmed as little as possible, which can best be achieved by respecting their basic rights.
When we talk about animal rights, unfortunately we mostly rely on national regulations of the rights and welfare of animals at the level of individual countries. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Law on the Protection and Welfare of Animals (Official Gazette of BiH, No. 25/2009 and 09/2018) that is currently in force, covers the issue of animal rights in a relatively high quality, along with accompanying by-laws that deal with certain individual issues from this sphere in more detail. The problem related to the application of the mentioned Act, and to a large extent its by-laws, can be found primarily in the fact that the Expert Council for the Protection and Welfare of Animals - the body intended for its implementation, has never been established at the state level. The multi-layered state government, the insufficiently defined division of responsibilities and the absence of adequate bodies that would supervise the implementation of provisions related to the protection and welfare of animals, as well as the absence of adequate databases, also do not contribute to solving this problem.
