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Animal welfare

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Animal welfare is the viewpoint that animals, especially those under human care, should not suffer unnecessarily, including where the animals are used for food, work, companionship, or research. This position usually focuses on the morality of human action (or inaction), as opposed to making deeper political or philosophical claims about the status of animals, as is the case for an animal rights viewpoint. For this reason animal welfare organizations may use the word humane in their title or position statements.

Contents

History of animal welfare

Systematic concern for the well-being of other animals probably first arose as a system of thought in the Indus Valley Civilization as the religious belief that ancestors return in animal form, and that animals must therefore be treated with the respect due to a human. This belief is exemplified in the existing religion, Jainism, and in varieties of other Dharmic religions. Other religions, especially those with roots in the Abrahamic religion, treat animals as the property of their owners, codifying rules for their care and slaughter premised mainly on hygiene concerns for humans.

Welfare in practice

As in the case of animal rights, the secular forms taken by animal welfare concerns, policies and action have each been pioneered in the UK, where an early industrial revolution first created the modern separation between popular experience and animal husbandry, opening a space for popular sentimentality towards animals.

From the outset in 1822, when Richard Martin MP shepherded a bill offering protection from cruelty to cattle, horses and sheep (earning himself the nickname Humanity Dick) through Parliament, the welfare approach has had human morality, and humane behaviour, at its central concern. Martin was among the founders of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or SPCA, in 1824. In 1840 Queen Victoria gave the society her blessing, making it the RSPCA familiar to modern Britons. The society used members' donations to employ a growing network of inspectors, whose job was to identify abusers, gather evidence, and report them to the authorities. Welfare advocates to this day argue that cruelty to animals is a reliable predictor of other moral weaknesses and risk factors, thus warranting intervention.

Animal welfare for taste reasons

There is a growing contemporary movement among leading chefs that meat should have come from free-range sources where the animal has been well-treated. This has less to do with concern for the animal (although this is a factor), and more the indisputable evidence that well-cared-for meat tastes better.

Key proponents of high-quality slow-reared meat within cookery include Fergus Henderson [link] proponent of 'nose to tail cooking', Raymond Blanc and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, well known for his personal stock of animals, which he raises himself and slaughters.

Modern Western consumers can now choose between mass-produced meat (particularly pork, where high-quality meat will be raised outside while cheaper pork comes from pigs kept in small individual pens) and poultry costing a few dollars a kilo, and free-range animals, which typically costs three or more times as much.

Critics say that those arguing for higher quality meat do so from the position of wealth, and those less privileged cannot afford such high-quality food. Conversely it is argued that the current profusion of cheap protein is unnatural, and that the modern diet consists of too much meat. Certainly in comparison to previous generations, food expenditure represents a lower part of the average household's expenditure. Furthermore, it is argued that the greater use of lower grade cuts from well-treated meat, which tend to be flavoursome while tough, can offset the increased cost.

Welfare principles

The UK government commissioned an investigation into the welfare of intensively farmed animals from Professor Roger Brambell in 1965, partly in response to concerns raised in Ruth Harrison's 1964 book, Animal Machines. On the basis of Professor Brambell's report, the UK government set up the Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Committee in 1967, which became the Farm Animal Welfare Council in 1979. The committee's first guidelines recommended that animals require the freedoms to 'turn around, to groom themselves, to get up, to lie down and to stretch their limbs'. These have since been elaborated to become known as the Five Freedoms of animal welfare:

The five freedoms

  1. Freedom from thirst, hunger and malnutrition.
  2. Freedom from discomfort due to environment
  3. Freedom from pain, injury and disease
  4. Freedom to express normal behaviour for the species
  5. Freedom from fear and distress

Animal Welfare compared with Animal Rights

Many animal rights and animal welfare advocates make a clear distinction between the two philosophies. To argue for animal rights, one needs a general meta-ethical outlook that is based on rights. To argue for animal welfare, one can be a consequentialist.

Most animal welfarists argue that the animal rights view goes too far, and do not advocate the elimination of all animal use or companionship. They may believe that humans have a moral responsibility not to cause cruelty (unnecessary suffering) to animals. Animal rights advocates, such as Gary L. Francione and Peter Singer, argue that the animal welfare position (advocating for the betterment of the condition of animals, but without abolishing animal use: see veganism) is logically inconsistent and ethically unacceptable. However, there are some animal rights groups, such as PETA, which support animal welfare measures in the short term to alleviate animal suffering until all animal use is ended.

Canadian ethicist David Sztybel distinguishes six different types of animal welfare views:

Other views of animal welfare exist which are not included in David Sztybel's list.

Animal welfare principles are codified by positive law in many nations, but animal rights are recognized in none.

Criticisms of animal welfare

At one time, many people denied that animals could feel anything, and thus had no interests. Many Cartesians were of this opinion, though Cottingham (1978) has argued that Descartes himself did not hold such a view. This kind of view may also have been held by some behaviourists, but there is a logical problem involved in going from: 'there is no scientific evidence that the rats in my lab are suffering' to 'the rats in my lab are not suffering', particularly as the behaviourist idea of what constitutes scientific evidence makes settling issues concerning suffering impossible.

Some others argue that animal welfare is given excessive importance especially when even the basic human rights and human welfare is still lacking. They cite Africa and many other parts of the world where poverty and other problems are rampant. These critics sometimes rebuke animal rights activists to improve the conditions for fellow humans many of whom live in conditions that are comparable to, if not worse than animals, before taking on the rights of animals. The problem with this is that it begs the question - assuming that it is a given that the importance of human suffering is given greater weight than that of other animal suffering, a belief that at least some animal welfare supporters do not hold.

More recent critiques have used arguments inspired by Wittgenstein to argue that some kinds of suffering and joy are only available to language users. They claim that only humans, and tendentiously, chimpanzees, have sufficient linguistic capability.

See also

Bibliography

External links

Animal Welfare Organizations

 

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