'More than a feeling': An empirical investigation of hedonistic accounts of animal welfare

A perspective on ungulate management and welfare assessment across the traditional zoo to large landscape spectrum

Wild ungulates are managed in human care in a range of settings from traditional zoos to large ranches. These varied settings present different portfolios of risks for good or poor welfare, which leads some to question whether a particular setting is "good for welfare" and have frustrated others interested in comparing the welfare of ungulates across these settings. Differing housing and management scenarios present different challenges and opportunities in terms of welfare but this commentary posits that good welfare is possible in all of these settings. In this commentary, we also consider natural behaviors that may, at face value, compromise welfare and discuss how taking a long view on welfare addresses concerns about these behaviors, in part using arguments related to normal behavioral development that likely improves welfare at other life stages. We also highlight the role of motivation in seemingly welfare-compromising behaviors. Finally, some indicators of welfare that we believe transcend management scenarios, and are thus able to be compared across scenarios, are suggested.

Too Close to Eat? Solidarity with Animals, Animal Welfare and Antibiotic Use

Meat consumption is influenced by a variety of factors including feelings of affinity towards farm animals. The goal of this study was to examine the relationship between solidarity with animals, attitudes towards the treatment of animals and antibiotics use in livestock, and pork  consumption. Data were drawn from a sample of 265 respondents in the US. Correlation and mediation analyses were performed. The results indicate a moderate but positive correlation between solidarity with animals and proecological beliefs. The association between attitudes towards the treatment of farm animals, aspects of the attitudes towards antibiotic use and solidarity with animals was also positive. We also find  that proecological beliefs and concerns about the treatment of farm animals negatively influenced consumption. The effect of attitudes towards antibiotic use and solidarity with animals on consumption were however fully mediated by proecological beliefs. The results suggest that social identification with animals can play a significant role in food choice. However, its effect is part of a broader connection to nature. Holistic approaches are therefore required to address livestock production practices that may be considered unnatural.

Review: Towards an integrated concept of animal welfare

Animal welfare is an important field of study due to animal sentience, yet there is to date no consensus on the definition of animal welfare. There have been four key developments in the field of animal welfare science since its birth: the theoretical and empirical study of affective states, and hence our understanding thereof, has increased; there has been a shift from a primary focus on unpleasant experiences towards an inclusion of pleasant experiences; there has been an increasing mention and investigation of the notion of cumulation of experiences in time, and with this, the importance of the time component of both affective states and animal welfare has come forward. Following others, we define welfare as a balance or cumulation of pleasant and unpleasant experiences over time. The time period of welfare depends on when welfare considerations are necessary, and may range from the duration of single and relatively short-term experiences to the entire life of an animal. We further propose that animal welfare conceptualised in this way can be assessed at three levels: level 1 represents the assessment of the environment and 'internal factors' such as health and personality, which interact in their impact on the affective experiences of animals; level 2 represents the assessment of affective states; and level 3 represents the assessment of the balance or cumulation of these affective states in time. The advancement of research necessitates studies to be more or less comparable, and this would be facilitated by researchers mentioning which concept of animal welfare they are basing their work on, at which level of assessment they are working, which assumptions they might be drawing from to infer welfare and which time period of interest they are focusing on, even if this is not mirrored by the timing of the assessment in practice. Assessment at levels 2 and 3 still needs much study, at both the theoretical and empirical levels, including agreements on validation tools.

The influence of background music and narrative setting on anthropomorphic judgements of killer whale (Orcinus orca) emotional states and subsequent donation behavior

Animal documentary films such as Blackfish, considered nonfiction accounts of reality, nonetheless use rhetorical devices to engage viewers and shape their emotional experience for maximum effect. Such devices can also influence attitudes and alter behavior. In animal documentaries, anthropomorphic impressions of the animals by audiences are key. Using general population samples in the US, three online experiments assessed the influence of background music and narrative setting on how viewers emotionally appraised the emotional state of a killer whale (Orcinus orca) and subsequently donated to causes affiliated with killer whales. While happy music led to perceptions of a happy whale, sad music led to perceptions of a sad whale. mediation analyses showed that these perceptions indirectly influence donation behavior, via beliefs about the killer whale's welfare and wellbeing. Analyses also indicated that the highest donation amounts towards killer whales were elicited from footage depicting a killer whale in the wild, with sad background music. These findings highlight the potential power that animal and nature documentaries have over viewers, which, when combined with human tendencies toward anthropomorphism, can have significant influence on conservation attitudes and behavior.

A theoretical approach to improving interspecies welfare comparisons

The number of animals bred, raised, and slaughtered each year is on the rise, resulting in increasing impacts to welfare. Farmed animals are also becoming more diverse, ranging from pigs to bees. The diversity and number of species farmed invite questions about how best to allocate currently limited resources towards safeguarding and improving welfare. This is of the utmost concern to animal welfare funders and effective altruism advocates, who are responsible for targeting the areas most likely to cause harm. For example, is tail docking worse for pigs than beak trimming is for chickens in terms of their pain, suffering, and general experience? Or are the welfare impacts equal? Answering these questions requires making an interspecies welfare comparison; a judgment about how good or bad different species fare relative to one another. Here, we outline and discuss an empirical methodology that aims to improve our ability to make interspecies welfare comparisons by investigating welfare range, which refers to how good or bad animals can fare. Beginning with a theory of welfare, we operationalize that theory by identifying metrics that are defensible proxies for measuring welfare, including cognitive, affective, behavioral, and neuro-biological measures. Differential weights are assigned to those proxies that reflect their evidential value for the determinants of welfare, such as the Delphi structured deliberation method with a panel of experts. The evidence should then be reviewed and its quality scored to ascertain whether particular taxa may possess the proxies in question to construct a taxon-level welfare range profile. Finally, using a Monte Carlo simulation, an overall estimate of comparative welfare range relative to a hypothetical index species can be generated. Interspecies welfare comparisons will help facilitate empirically informed decision-making to streamline the allocation of resources and ultimately better prioritize and improve animal welfare.

Application of QBA to Assess the Emotional State of Horses during the Loading Phase of Transport

To identify feasible indicators to evaluate animals' emotional states as a parameter to assess animal welfare, the present study aimed at investigating the accuracy of free choice profiling (FCP) and fixed list (FL) approach of Qualitative Behaviour Assessment (QBA) in horses during the loading phase of transport. A total of 13 stakeholders were trained to score 2 different sets of videos of mixed breed horses loaded for road transport, using both FCP and FL, in 2 sessions. Generalized Procustes Analysis (GPA) consensus profile explained a higher percentage of variation (80.8%) than the mean of 1000 randomized profiles (41.2 ± 1.6%; p = 0.001) for the FCP method, showing an excellent inter-observer agreement. GPA identified two main factors, explaining 65.1% and 3.7% of the total variation. Factor 1 ranging from 'anxious/ to 'calm/relaxed', described the valence of the horses' emotional states. Factor 2, ranging from 'bright' to 'assessing/withdrawn', described the arousal. As for FL, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) first and second components (PC1 and PC2, respectively), explaining on average 59.8% and 12.6% of the data variability, had significant agreement between observers. PC1 ranges from relaxed/confident to anxious/frightened, while PC2 from alert/inquisitive to calm. Our study highlighted the need for the use of descriptors specifically selected, throughout a prior FCP process for the situation we want to evaluate to get a good QBA accuracy level.

Differing animal welfare conceptions and what they mean for the future of zoos and aquariums, insights from an animal welfare audit

Animal welfare is a growing public concern that has the potential to undermine the social license of zoos and aquariums. The lack of consensus on how animal welfare is defined across such a diverse sector combined with and a widespread belief that commercial priorities such as entertaining visitors conflicts with animal welfare, hinders efforts to effectively address this fundamental issue for the sector. Data derived from an audit of habitats across a major North American wildlife attraction revealed that holistic animal welfare assessments undertaken by animal carers embracing three principal constructs of animal welfare, correlated strongly with visitor perceptions of animal happiness. Visitor assessments of animal happiness also correlated with animal carer assessments of social, behavioural and locomotor opportunities and inversely with the prevalence of stereotypic behaviours, supporting the proposition that folk conceptions of animal welfare are more accurate than may have previously been considered to be the case. However, the holistic animal welfare assessment inversely correlated with assessments of a habitat's capacity to safeguard welfare as determined by the facility's veterinary staff, supporting the proposition that tensions exist between physical and psychological components of captive animal welfare provisioning. This further underlines the importance of clarity on how animal welfare is conceived when developing institutional animal welfare strategies. Finally, the data also showed that both holistic animal welfare assessments and visitor perceptions of animal happiness strongly correlated with the level of enjoyment experienced by visitors, challenging the belief that animal welfare competes with the commercial priorities of zoos and aquariums. The audit supports the case that maintaining high animal welfare is a commercial imperative as well as a moral obligation for zoos and aquariums and underlines the necessity to utilize conceptions of animal welfare that acknowledge the centrality of the affective states of animals in maintaining those standards.

A Good Life for Laboratory Rodents?

Most would agree that animals in research should be spared "unnecessary" harm, pain, or distress, and there is also growing interest in providing animals with some form of environmental enrichment. But is this the standard of care that we should aspire to? We argue that we need to work towards a higher standard-specifically, that providing research animals with a "good life" should be a prerequisite for their use. The aims of this paper are to illustrate our vision of a "good life" for laboratory rats and mice and to provide a roadmap for achieving this vision. We recognize that several research procedures are clearly incompatible with a good life but describe here what we consider to be the minimum day-to-day living conditions to be met when using rodents in research. A good life requires that animals can express a rich behavioral repertoire, use their abilities, and fulfill their potential through active engagement with their environment. In the first section, we describe how animals could be housed for these requirements to be fulfilled, from simple modifications to standard housing through to better cage designs and free-ranging options. In the second section, we review the types of interactions with laboratory rodents that are compatible with a good life. In the third section, we address the potential for the animals to have a life outside of research, including the use of pets in clinical trials (the animal-as-patient model) and the adoption of research animals to new homes when they are no longer needed in research. We conclude with a few suggestions for achieving our vision.

Computational animal welfare: towards cognitive architecture models of animal sentience, emotion and wellbeing

To understand animal wellbeing, we need to consider subjective phenomena and sentience. This is challenging, since these properties are private and cannot be observed directly. Certain motivations, emotions and related internal states can be inferred in animals through experiments that involve choice, learning, generalization and decision-making. Yet, even though there is significant progress in elucidating the neurobiology of human consciousness, animal consciousness is still a mystery. We propose that computational animal welfare science emerges at the intersection of animal behaviour, welfare and computational cognition. By using ideas from cognitive science, we develop a functional and generic definition of subjective phenomena as any process or state of the organism that exists from the first-person perspective and cannot be isolated from the animal subject. We then outline a general cognitive architecture to model simple forms of subjective processes and sentience. This includes evolutionary adaptation which contains top-down attention modulation, predictive processing and subjective simulation by re-entrant (recursive) computations. Thereafter, we show how this approach uses major characteristics of the subjective experience: elementary self-awareness, global workspace and qualia with unity and continuity. This provides a formal framework for process-based modelling of animal needs, subjective states, sentience and wellbeing.

Moving Beyond the Absence of Pain and Distress: Focusing on Positive Animal Welfare

For many years, researchers, veterinarians, animal ethics committees, and regulators have focused on minimizing pain and distress as a primary goal of refinement when working with animals in science. More recent publications as well as a shift in animal ethics and public opinion have emphasized promotion of positive affective states, culminating in the concept of positive animal welfare. Robust measures are required to know when positive animal welfare states are occurring, and a number of measures are proposed and discussed. Regardless of whether there are newer methods available that focus exclusively on measuring positive affective states, consistent consideration of research animal behavioral programs, refinement, and adopting periodic stand-alone animal welfare assessments for all species involved will help to push the care and practices of research animals towards an increased focus on positive animal welfare.

Naturalness and the Legitimacy of Thoroughbred Racing: A Photo-Elicitation Study with Industry and Animal Advocacy Informants

Simple Summary

The international thoroughbred industry is concerned about the public’s perception of racing. Therefore, the industry’s priorities are to address the publicly most visible and known welfare violations. However, common day-to-day racing practices also impact thoroughbred welfare. In this study, key industry informants and animal advocacy informants were interviewed to find out how they view common racing practices. For the interviews, photographs of thoroughbreds on race day were used, which the informants were asked to describe. Results show industry informants often naturalise, normalise, downplay or ignore the horses’ expressions, the impact of handling on the horse and the use of equipment. The animal advocacy informants tend to describe a horse whose nature is violated. In conclusion, the industry informants show limited interest in addressing common racing practices, and this places thoroughbred welfare at risk. Both groups of informants have different ideas about what is natural and what that means for thoroughbred welfare. With society’s understanding of welfare and of racing practices growing, the racing industry may be increasingly questioned about common racing practices. This article discusses the notion of naturalness in more detail and how it can be used to advance thoroughbred protection.

Abstract

The idea of what is natural has particular relevance in the thoroughbred racing and breeding discourse. It guides breeding regulations; influences how the thoroughbreds’ behaviour is perceived and has implications for husbandry, handling, training and racing practices. This study investigates how key industry and animal advocacy informants based in the US, Australia and the UK conceptualise naturalness within the context of common racing practices that potentially impact the horses’ welfare. The informants were interviewed using semi-structured interviewing and photo-elicitation. Four common images of thoroughbreds on race day were presented to elicit the informants’ responses. Differences emerged between how the two groups tended to describe the images and the role naturalness played in their conceptualisations. The findings were analysed using an updated version of the Layers of Engagement with Animal Protection developed by Bergmann to situate the informants’ conceptualisations of naturalness within the wider thoroughbred protection discourse. In conclusion, the industry informants tended to defend the status quo of common racing practices. They tended to naturalise and normalise these practices and downplay their welfare impact. This poses risks for thoroughbred welfare, which are amplified by misrepresentations of what is natural. With the public’s understanding of welfare and racing practices growing, racing’s legitimacy may be further questioned. Opportunities to leverage the potential of the notion of naturalness for thoroughbred protection are discussed.

Positive Welfare and the Like: Distinct Views and a Proposed Framework

Positive welfare and related terms such as good welfare, happiness, and a good life are increasingly used in the animal welfare science literature. Overall, they highlight the welfare benefits of providing animals opportunities for positive experiences, beyond the alleviation of suffering. However, the various terms remain loosely defined and are sometimes used interchangeably, resulting in discrepancy. In this perspective article, we lay out the terms and concepts used in the literature. We identify two distinct views: "hedonic positive welfare," arising from likes and wants and their positive outcomes on welfare; and "positive welfare balance," as an overall positive welfare state based on positive experiences outweighing negative ones. Eudaimonia, satisfaction with one's life, may emerge as a third view. We propose a framework that is applicable across the different views. The "Vienna Framework" outlines different facets: frequency, duration, arousal, context, previous experience, individual differences, sense of agency, and long-term benefit. The framework aims to encourage researchers to consider the relevance of these facets for their own research, to indicate how the facets are affected by different interventions (e.g., greater sense of agency in enriched compared to non-enriched animals), or to compare different topics with respect to the different facets (e.g., high arousal of play behavior and low arousal of social affiliation). We encourage researchers to carefully consider and clearly state how their work falls along these views and facets, conceptually, and operationally. This should prevent dilution of the meaning of positive welfare and thereby preserve its potential to improve the welfare of animals.

Hot and bothered: Public attitudes towards heat stress and outdoor access for dairy cows

On many dairy farms cows are kept indoors. Providing outdoor access is often considered desirable, but housing can protect animals from aversive climatic conditions. For example, by providing shade and fans, indoor housing can protect cows from heat stress they might otherwise experience on open pasture. This study tested how public attitudes to cattle rearing varied when participants were experimentally assigned to different scenarios using a 2 x 2 factorial design varying pasture versus indoor housing with or without heat stress. Participants (n = 581) were randomly assigned to a single scenario, and attitudes in response to the scenario were measured using a Likert scale (1 = "strongly disagree" to 5 = "strongly agree"). We also asked open-ended questions allowing participants to explain their responses. Participants responded most positively to the scenario that provided both pasture access and protection from heat stress (Likert 4.1±0.08), and least positively to scenario with indoor housing and heat stress (Likert 2.2±0.08). However, when the different animal welfare attributes were in conflict (i.e. naturalness as provided by pasture, and biological functioning/affective state as associated with protection from heat stress), participants placed priority on the latter: they were more supportive of the scenario providing indoor housing that protected cows from heat stress (Likert 3.5±0.08), than they were of a pasture rearing system that exposed cows to heat stress (Likert 2.4±0.08). Open-ended responses indicated that participants viewed the lack of protection from heat stress as a failure in the farmer's duty of care towards the cow. We conclude that participants valued both access to pasture and protection from heat stress for dairy cows, but prioritized protecting animal from heat stress when these features were in conflict.