Animal Welfare - Appleby Flashcards
Some questions from chapter 1: animal ethics.
Is the goal to avoid pain and other forms of suffering?
Is it to allow or create pleasure and other positive emotions?
Or is it to permit animals to live natural lives?
Where should we draw the line between the acceptable and unacceptable use of animals?
Sub-questions from chapter 1: animal ethics.
Do animals have moral standing in their own right?
If so, on what would this judgement be based?
An what moral responsibilities do we have towards animals?
Do we have different moral responsibilities towards animals in different contexts?
Do we have responsibilities to individual animals only, or also to species of animals?
Important note on ethics.
Reliance on feelings alone makes it difficult to enter ethical debate, and to explain why particular attitudes or practices might be either ethically problematic of ethically desirable. Need to adopt a reasoned approach to animal ethics.
What are the main ethical views/theories?
Contractarianism
Utilitarianism
Animal rights approaches
Contextual approaches
Respect for species and naturalness
What is the contractarian view?
Traditional versions of this view consider human interests only. Individual humans belong to a human-only moral contract that benefits the individual human concerned, along with other collaborating fellow humans.
Some recent versions of this view have tried to include animals in the moral contract.
What is the utilitarian view?
In this view, they considered not just the interests of all affected humans but also of all affected sentient beings. The aim should be to produce the best balance of good over bad, by maximizing the fulfilment of sentient interests.
Animal rights view?
For this view, animals that are sentient and/or have high-level cognitive abilities have rights to life, liberty, and respectful treatment. The rights of individuals cannot be overridden in order to benefit others, including humans.
Contextual views?
In this view, a variety of factors, as well as animals’ capacities, are of moral significance, such as the emotional bonds between humans and animals, the special commitments humans have made to particular animals, or the roles animals play in human societies.
Respect for species view?
In this view, those argue that whole species are of moral significance, and that animals can be respected as members of valuable species.
Naturalness or wildness.
Can be important ways of valuing animals, though these terms can mean different things.
How should all the views be seen?
These different theoretical approaches to animal ethics should not be understood as rigid and uncompromising. There are many ways in which they can hybridize with one another.
Three questions raised about the effects of modern farming systems upon animal welfare?
(i) Is the animal happy or is it suffering from pain or other undesirable emotions (i.e. concerns about the animal’s feelings or emotions?)
(ii) Is the animal healthy and producing well (i.e. concerns about the animal’s ability to function biologically?)
(iii) Is the animal able to perform its normal behaviour and live a reasonably natural life (i.e. concerns about the naturalness of how the animal lives?)
Animal welfare is multifaceted. What are the Five Freedoms?
(i) from hunger and thirst
(ii) from discomfort
(iii) from pain, injury, or disease
(iv) to express normal behaviour
(v) fear and distress
Do different groups put emphasis on different aspects of animal welfare?
Yes, however, these different aspects are interconnected and are associated with the same key issues.
What are the three aspects discussed in chapter 2?
(1) welfare and the subjective experience of animals
(2) health, production and reproduction
(3) welfare, natural behaviour and the ‘nature’ of animals
Key points from welfare and the subjective experience of animals
- interest in the subjective or emotional experiences of animals and their importance for animal welfare has a long history
- more recent prominence given to animals’ feelings or emotional states in affecting their welfare came from Marian Dawkins and Ian Duncan (1983) who suggested that feelings played a major role in welfare
- considerable progress has been made in understanding and measuring pain
Key points from health, production, and reproduction
- self-evident that good animal welfare requires that the animals be healthy, and that the occurrence of disease and injury will lead to poor welfare
- the importance of good health for good welfare is one of the least controversial aspects of the debate about animal welfare
- a farm animal’s productivity will also reflect its welfare, ex: a dairy cow with poor welfare will produce less milk
- failure to reproduce is often a sign of bad welfare
Key points from welfare, natural behaviour, and the ‘nature’ of animals
- the possibility that farm, laboratory, and zoo animals are suffering because they cannot perform in a more natural environment is one of the enduring concerns
- however, not all natural behaviour is desirable (ex: flight reactions in response to predators could cause panic reactions in flocks)
- in summary, while freedom to perform the whole repertoire of natural behaviour is not crucial for an animal’s welfare, the opportunity to perform natural behaviour may be an effective way to improve welfare in practice
Define competence
Denotes the whole array of cognitive and behavioural experience, tools and strategies that an animal possess at any given moment to deal with novel challenges.
How do animals acquire and enhance such competence?
Animal inherit genetic predispositions that feed into and support the different aspects of competence.
These predispositions unfold through epigenetic influences, developmental maturation, sensory experience, and learning through interaction with the hard-and-real everyday striving for food, security, partners, social ties, etc.
What is agency?
The propensity of an animal to engage actively with the environment with the main purpose of gathering knowledge and enhancing its skills for future use.
Is the intrinsic tendency of animals to behave actively beyond the degree dictated by momentary needs, and widen their range of competencies.
Natural environments expose animals to many varied and novel challenges. What do animals possess to deal with such challenges?
Animals possess an integrated, yet multifaceted ability, which we call competence, to deal with such challenges.
True or false.
Competence is reinforced by an animal’s agency.
True
Explain the effects of competence/agency concerning the integration of different levels of organization.
Since agency/competence concerns that integration of different levels of organization, it provides animal welfare scientists with an opportunity to address the wholeness of animals, an aspect of welfare that tends to be overshadowed by the focus on specific modules of animal welfare.
