Environment Secretary for the British Government Michael Gove has announced his plan to increase the current maximum sentence that can be awarded to animal abuse offenders from six months to five ...years. In this critical analysis of the proposal, I will firstly outline the legislative proposal in terms of its aims, and then follow by providing statistics and referring to the most abhorrent cases of cruelty to demonstrate unequivocally the need for the proposal to be implemented. Following this, I will set out the positions of two major relevant stakeholders in response to the proposal: the League Against Cruel Sports, and the RSPCA. I will then proceed to commend the proposal as an important step forward for nonhuman animal welfare, especially given the increasing acknowledgement of the link between violence toward humans and toward nonhuman animals. I will then turn, however, to the two issues that I identify with the proposal and the context within which it has been introduced; firstly, that it highlights our pretension for protecting the welfare of companion animals while simultaneously contributing to the suffering of other animals that are also sentient beings; secondly, that recent Conservative party policies concerning nonhuman animals have been inimical to their welfare and, for this reason, the proposal must be taken with a pinch of salt.
Objective: Preterm children with low birth weight are at greater risk of experiencing speech and language difficulties than full-term children. The aim of the current study was to investigate ...expressive language skills of Finnish-speaking preterm children with low birth weight extremely-low-birth-weight (ELBW) children: n = 8; very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) children: n = 10 at 2 years of corrected age and to compare their language results with full-term controls (n = 18), using spontaneous speech samples. Methods: The children were video recorded in semistructured free-play sessions with their mothers. From these video samples, expressive vocabulary size and maximum sentence length (MSL) were analyzed. In addition, the possible effect of children’s gender on language measures as well as associations between different language measures were examined. Results: The results showed that there was no statistically significant difference between the preterm and full-term groups in the size of expressive vocabulary. In contrast, the MSL, which measures morphosyntactic skills, was significantly shorter in preterm children. A positive correlation was found between MSL and expressive vocabulary. Children’s gender was not associated with language skills measured. Conclusion: The findings indicate that Finnish-speaking preterm children, especially ELBW children, experience difficulties in morphosyntactic skills.
Between roughly 1966 and 1968 a large amount of anti-war activity centered around the draft resistance movement. In the last chapter, for example, I mentioned the “We Won’t Go” statement of spring ...1967 that was signed by thousands of students nationwide, including me.
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