Animal Rights or Animal Welfare?

 

A few weeks ago I was able to attend the annual conference of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA) in Kansas City.  The AZA is the organization responsible for accrediting zoos in the Americas with a rigorous set of requirements.  One of my main objectives during the conference was to network with animal welfare scientists, following up with my research this summer in San Diego and shopping for potential graduate advisors.  This was a particularly good year for me to go because animal welfare was a significant part of the conference proceedings.  There were five separate sessions on animal welfare issues, and one session offered the first preliminary results of a massive 2012 study of elephant welfare in zoos, the largest study of its kind to date.

One session I attended addressed the work of the Animal Welfare Committee, a body which deliberates the standards of animal welfare to which the AZA holds its member zoos.  The committee is made up largely of scientists in whose work I have an interest, including my mentor from this summer.  One of the talks during the session, given by Dr. Nadja Wielebnowski of the Oregon Zoo, was called "Defining Animal Welfare".  I want to share some of the points from that talk as a counter-perspective to Tom Regan's perspective on animal rights.

 

Brambell's five freedoms (1965)

The Animal Welfare Committee (AWC) thinks of itself as promoting ethics with science.  Their proposed ethical obligation does not seem too different from Regan's view:  "Animals should be treated kindly and without inflicting any unnecessary pain or suffering."  In order to appropriately address this ethical concern, the AWC promotes the use of scientific metrics to assess animals' states of well-being.  This combination of ethics and science is evident in their definition of animal welfare:

Animal welfare is the degree to which an animal can cope with its environment and associated challenges as determined by a combination of measures of physical and psychological health and well-being.

Animal welfare refers to an animal's collective physical, mental, and emotional states over a period of time and is measured on a continuum.

 This definition proposes that animals experience good welfare when they are under conditions like those projected in Brambell's five freedoms (poster above).  This definition also makes animal welfare measurable on a continuum, taking it out of the realm of subjective speculation and placing it the realm of science.  It is for this reason that the AWC is made up largely of scientists, as they would have the most objective view on what constitutes good animal welfare.  The AZA also prompts its member zoos to use science to monitor the welfare of their collections.

Overall animal welfare science is relatively new thing on the zoo scene.  Prior to the last decade the quality of animal care was thought to be the only factor affecting animal welfare, but now more factors like psychological states, environmental enrichment, and hormone levels are being taken into account.  This requires a barrage of scientific monitoring that can assess levels of all of these factors.

This leads back into philosophy in the AWC's stance on animal rights:  The concepts of animal welfare and animal rights are considered closely related and sometimes synonymous, but the AWC considers itself a proponent of animal welfare and not animal rights.  The difference is in the use of science;  the AWC considers animal welfare a scientific and ethical decision based on a scientific approach to life condition, while animal rights is an ethical and philosophical belief, one which cannot be validated with science.

What do you think of this distinction?  Is the AWC correct in limiting its scope to what it can assess scientifically, or does failing to endorse animal rights represent a bias in favor of zoos?  Given Regan's proposed goals of the animal rights movement, his viewpoint would not favor the existence of zoos at all, while the AZA continually argues for the role that zoos play in educating the public about conservation and providing support for animal conservation around the globe.