UK Kennel Club issues new rules to spare animals lives of pain and misery.

From New Scientist:

The UK Kennel Club, representing British dog breeders, issued new regulations on 12 January that could banish hallmark features of bulldogs and other breeds, on the grounds that they're cruel and disabling for the dogs themselves.

The new regulations make complete sense to me from an animal welfare perspective. So well done the Kennel Club, which spells out the changes for each dog breed in a review.

It did make me reflect, however, on how such cruelties have been tolerated and even encouraged without public condemnation for so many years, even though the objective of breeding is one purely of human vanity.

It seems unfair that, while people who breed freakish animals to satisfy vain and frivolous objectives have got away with it, scientists who experiment on animals with the arguably more noble objective of developing medicine to reduce suffering have been pilloried by extremists.