THE CONCEPT OF ANIMAL WELFARE Flashcards
Definition of animal welfare
The state of wellbeing brought about by meeting the physical, environmental, nutritional, behavioural and social needs of the animal or groups of animals under the are of supervision or influence of people
What is intrinsic worth
Animal has worth in its own right (culturally variable) has value as a living entity
What is intrinsic aloe based off?
Intrinsic worth is often based off percieved sentience and emotional capabilities of the species
What does the level of sentience determine for a species
The level of empathy they have
What does the level of empathy determine for a species
The moral obligation to be concerned about the welfare of the species
Are our attitudes to animals guided by self interest?
Yes, the view of a rat depends on if its a lab rat, pet or vermin
What is a sentient animal capable of?
Capable of feeling and for which those feelings matter - if they lack of speech they can conceptualise the feelings
What feelings are associated to a sentient animal?
Pain
Hunger
Anxiety
Friendship
Grief
Sentience has the capacity to:
- Be consciously aware of the environment - of themselves in the environment and the awareness of the environment
- Capable of cognitive processing - involves taking in information from the environment and changing
- Experience emotions and feelings
What are the 2 elements of consciousness
Perception of external world and perception of selff
What must there be in the animal to have a good perception of the world
The animal must have nueral correlates of consciousness
What is the integrated information theory ITT
It’s a formal measure of the quantity of integrated information in any physical system that is information encoded in the whole system that is lost whenever the system is divided into parts
How does ITT treat consciousness?
It treats it as a continuous variable with higher values indicated filler consciousness
Where does evidence for IIT comes from?
0bserved correlations between the apparent emergence of consousnss and rises in the effective connectivity in different sleep stages. Anaesthesia
How can you study an animals awareness with mirrors
Use a mirrors to make animal make choices about its environment
Hold sheep in area A or b
Buckets placed in position 1 or 2 and they can see that there is food in them
Sheep will see the bucket through mirror and locate bucket when released
They must complete several obstacles and go to the right bucket to get the food a.k.a reward
What happens when you use two sub-groups mirror exposed and mirror naive in the bucket experiment
Just use it as another experiment
What happens if you add a mirror into the external environment to change where the buckets are located
If bucket was position 2 it actually looked like it was in position 1
You can get a behavioural measurement to see if sheep picked up that the mirror was placed infront of it and distorted the environment
What happens if you test mirror naive sheep to sheep that have been exposed to a perplex mirror for 530 minutes
Mirror did not affect how sheep responded in the environment
How do you test perception of self. Metacognition
Test via mirror induced stimulation behaviour
What are the 3 levels in relation to self perception
- Exploitary social behaviour as if observing conspecifics
- Contingency behaviour whereby the idnivdiual performers a number of reptitive acts as a way of testing its actions against the visual stimulus
- Self directed behaviour where the animal investigates a specific part of its body
What is the mark test - perception of self
Put mark on window and see if they take interest in it - elephants are knwon to do this
What animals pass the mark test of metacognition?
Children under 18 months old fail - only get to stage 2
Chimpanzees, bottle nose dolphins, Asians elephants, Eurasian magpies have succeeded passing the mark test
How do you determine sentience though cognitive processing
- Memory
- Learning
- Spatial memory
- Spacial navigation
How do you determine sentience when measuring emotions?
Important to determine sentience and be concerned about animals welfare
Human species can verbalise emotions but animals cannot - we must find a way to meausre emotion to determine sentience
What are the neural correlation when measuring emotions?
When we experience certain emotional states - parts of our brain light up FMRI
What did Steiner look at?
Looked at orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum
What did steiner look into
The differences between disappointed and regret - helps rule out each of these behaviour and know the differences between the two
What did Steiner find out
- Disappointment entails the recognition that one did not get the value expected
- Regret entails recogniton that an alternative action would have produced a more valued outcome
- Humans the orbital frontal cortex is active during expression of regret, nd humans with damage to the orbits corral cortex do not express regret
Stud recorded from orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum in rats encountering wait or skip choices for delayed delivery of different flavours
What was Steiner experimental procedures
He used rats
1. Large innner loop with four spikes going to different flavour zones - banana, cherry, chocolate and unflavoured
2. On entry into a zone a tone sounded the pitch of the tone indicate ether delay he rat had to wait in order to relieve (higher pitch = longer delay)
3. Rats could skip o stay
4. Rats trained to go i one direction - if they go in the wrong direction they get no reward
What did the rats do in Steiner experiment
If the tone is long the majority of rats skip and move into the next zone
When delay is short they stay up to 15 seconds
Rats will stay or skip depending on the length of time they have to stay or their preference of old they recieve
How do you find the stage of regret
Peaks in the ribitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum show regret
Economically encountering a high cost choice after skipping a low cost choice should induce regret
In these situations rats in Steiner experiment looked backwards towards the last options, cells within the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum represented the missed action
What is animal welfare based on sentience
A state of omelette mental and physical health, where the animal is in harmony with its environment
What are the 5 animal freedoms
Freedom from hunger or thirst
Freedom from discomfort
Freedom from pain, injury or disease
Freedom to express normal behaviour
Freedom from fear and distress
How did Weiss 1971 show uncontrollable and controllable stress in rats
Rat 1 put Ito apparatus but recieved no shock
Rat 2 revieved warning signal before shock
Rat 3 received no warning before shock
What where the results to Weiss 1971 experiments
No shock has smaller length of gastric lesions however signalled shock had a longer length of gastric lesions
Secondary forms of physiological response to stress can be ulcers in the stomach
What does the domain model talk about?
Physical function affecting mental domain of animal
Takes every aspect that can affect animals welfare
Animal needs can be met but still have other aspects that lack in their welfare
What are the two approaches to measuring animal welfare?
- Subjective experience on animals feelings determine its welfare
- Biological function normal physiology and behaviour (ability to stay within physiological boundaries, homeostasis, cope, stress response
