Definitions can be useful. They ensure that we’re all talking about the same thing. And in that regard, they can bring clarity. Clarity is an essential ingredient to shaping a better world for animals.
The term “animal welfare” has been and continues to be defined in many different ways across the literature. It would appear that, throughout history, every person who gave the inner lives of animals any thought at all came up with a new definition.
This walk down animal welfare’s memory lane can be interesting. Where it becomes dangerous is if we let these multiple definitions of animal welfare stop us in our tracks. In other words, if we say, “You know, we really can’t improve animal welfare until we all agree on a universal definition.”
If all this debate over how animal welfare is defined seems ridiculous to those of you who work with animals every day—who see, smell, hear, and touch animals—it’s because it is ridiculous. You already know what animal welfare is. You witness it every day:
In a nutshell,
Animal welfare is the animal’s emotional experience.
That’s it. Each animal has his own life experiences, positive and negative experiences that change from moment to moment depending on what’s happening around and inside him. What makes an emotional experience positive or negative is defined by the animal, so it is the animal’s subjective experience. Subjective experience, in a nutshell, is animal welfare. Sometimes the animal’s subjective experience is also called the animal’s “mental state” or “affective state.” These are terms for the same phenomenon, which is essentially just what the animal is feeling at any given moment. It’s just the animal’s experience—nothing fancier than that.
Confusion over the term
There is some history behind this confusion over animal welfare. For many decades, scientists were cautious to attribute emotions to animals, lest other scientists accuse them of being anthropomorphic. Accordingly, they couched their definitions in conservative language to convey the uncertainty around whether animals were truly capable of feelings. Thankfully, now some of this fog has lifted. Today most scientists agree that animals are sentient (capable of experiencing emotions), hence the possibility of a simpler definition.
Some of the trouble with defining animal welfare has come from the antiquated belief that animals have a reptilian brain, where emotions like fear are processed, and a thinking brain, where higher-level thoughts occur. This triune brain hypothesis, put forth by American neuroscientist Paul MacLean, stimulated a lot of research in the 1960s and 1970s, but it has since been criticized and rejected by many scientists as overly simplistic. Modern neuroscience now recognizes that cognitive and emotional processes in the brain are strongly interdependent. It makes sense that, at a basic level, animals must have some information processing to experience emotions. They need to attribute valence to an emotion (does this feel good or feel bad?) and to establish cause and effect; otherwise, their emotions would serve no purpose for them. The term “subjective experience” encapsulates both the emotional and cognitive components; therefore, it reflects our modern understanding of animal welfare.
A positive experience is something that feels good to the animal. A negative experience is something that feels bad to the animal. And herein lies our simplest definition of animal welfare: experience.
Isn’t animal welfare subjective?
We have just said that animal welfare is the animal’s subjective experience. So if animal welfare is subjective, how can we ever agree what is good or bad for welfare?
Animal welfare is subjective according to the animal, but that does not make animal welfare science subjective. It is subjective in that each animal experiences the world slightly differently depending on his genetics, development, and previous experiences. So what is positive for one individual will not necessarily be positive for all individuals of that species. This is where the subjectivity lies. Each animal is the subject, a study of one.
Animal welfare is not subjective according to us. An animal’s welfare is completely unaffected by how we feel about it. The reality is, the animal is experiencing positive and negative emotions within her nervous system, and she doesn’t know or care at all whether I say it’s positive and you say it’s negative. To her it’s either negative or positive, and it’s very real.
Because animal welfare is subjective to the individual animal, we always assess animal welfare at the individual level. Even when we assess animal welfare at a farm, enclosure, or facility level, we are still considering the individual animal’s experience within those groups.
The animal tells us about his emotional experience through many different “welfare indicators.” Because of their ease of collection, behavioural indicators are the mainstay of animal welfare assessment in the field currently. Every animal, even a sea jelly, uses his behaviour to control his environment. If we watch the animal’s behaviour closely, the animal can tell us what feels good or bad to him. Physiological indicators such as cortisol, heart rate, and core body temperature, can also tell us about what an animal is experiencing. In addition, resource-based indicators, such as whether there is enough shade in the animal’s enclosure, provide helpful clues as to whether the animal may be experiencing positive or negative welfare.
Because an emotional experience is something that happens within the animal, animal welfare is not subjective according to us—it’s not the product of society’s expectations. It is not something that morphs over time if people change their minds from thinking that the giant panda in the zoo looks cute to thinking the panda looks sad. Public perception has nothing to do with the panda’s welfare. The panda is at the center of the question. It’s what the panda is experiencing.
In other words,
We don’t define positive and negative welfare. The animal does.
Ask the animal
Because welfare is defined by the animal, the truest test of animal welfare is to ask the animal!
If we look at the animal sitting in front of us, the key to their welfare is in plain sight. We watch them go about their day and we can see them choosing to approach certain things and choosing to avoid others. Many of these choices are based on the animal’s previous experiences. When there is a positive experience, positive emotions are triggered within the animal, and they are more likely to try and repeat that experience. When there is a negative experience, negative emotions are triggered, and they are likely to try and avoid it in future.
Emotions are an evolutionary adaptation to help us learn from our environment. Learning, by definition, arises from experience. And because we see that all animals learn even the simplest of things, like where to find water, we can only assume that their internal experience of their environment is what has caused this learning.
Can we provide good animal welfare?
Animal welfare is not what we do. We can put one hundred puzzle feeders into an enclosure. We can provide animals with the highest quality, most varied diets. But at the end of the day, that is better animal care. It doesn’t necessarily lead to better animal welfare. By defining animal welfare as the animal’s “emotional experience,” we are constantly reminded that animal welfare is defined by the animal and not by us. Animal welfare is what is going on within the animal.
To know if what we’re doing improves animal welfare, we need to ask the animal. Using a collection of welfare indicators, we can understand whether the animal is having mostly positive, rewarding, feel-good experiences or mostly negative, stressful, aversive experiences. We need to try to shift any bad experiences in an animal’s day to good ones, and then we need to ask the animal whether we succeeded. It’s elegantly simple.
If your organisation is currently looking to establish a robust system of monitoring and improving the welfare of the animals under your care, Animal Centric is here to help you. Every system will look slightly different according to the context and culture of the organisation, but the output will be the same: a science-based method of understanding of what the animals are experiencing and improving their experiences over time. If this is your situation, please GET IN TOUCH.
Conclusion
As a community, we could go round and round in circles for another 50 years trying to get the perfect definition of animal welfare. But we don’t need to. Animals have already given us one. By showing us how they respond to their environment, they are telling us what they consider to be good and bad experiences. They are showing us what animal welfare means to them.
