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.

"Dogs Are People, Too" NYTimes this week

"Dogs are people, too"

Here's an interesting article I've been thinking about all week that may bring up the potential to argue for animal rights based on some sort of science, and I thought you all might enjoy it. There's a study getting dogs to go into MRI machines, and then these researchers look at their brains and compare dog brains to human brains.

Tom Regan's Case for Animal Rights

Tom Regan is an advocate of animal rights.

In this article he begins by defining the goals of animal rights movement, which are practical in their ends:

1.  Abolishing animal use in science

 

2.  Dissolving commercial animal agriculture

3.  Eliminating all forms of hunting and trapping (and presumably fishing, though not listed)

These goals are absolute in their scope, and Regan acknowledges that some proponents of animal rights make moral allowances, such as animal testing for cancer research.  He considers the basis of these allowances to be emotional and says they still reflect a mindset of animals as resources for humans.  Regan argues that the goals of the animal rights movement are based in reason, not just emotion, and he lays out the historical reasoning that led to this view.

Question:  Why should humans not mistreat animals?

1.  The Kantian Account
Answer:  People who mistreat animals are likely to mistreat other humans as well.
Problem:  While we would not disagree with Kant's reasoning, he presents good conduct towards animals as only necessary when beneficial to humans.  Regan argues that this reasoning promotes speciesism, a viewpoint which still evokes prejudice against the interests of non-human animals.  Such a viewpoint would not contribute to the idea of animal rights.

2.  The Cruelty Account
Answer:  Mistreating animals is cruelty, and humans should not be cruel.
Definition:  Cruelty is defined by John Locke as causing suffering to a sentient creature and taking pleasure in doing so.
Problem:  Not all things addressed by the goals of animal rights fall into this definition of cruelty.  Regan cites the Draize test, a type of experimentation in which toxic substances are applied to the skin or eyes of animal subjects and the effects are monitored.  It is not likely that researchers take pleasure in the pain inflicted on the subjects, so their actions do not fall under Locke's definition of cruelty.  Nonetheless animal rights activists take issue with the practice, even if not with the practitioners themselves.  Cruelty by this definition will not suffice to establish a basis for animal rights.

 

An albino rabbit allegedly used in a Draize test

3.  The Utilitarian Account
Answer:  Mistreatment of animals runs contrary to the principles of equality and utility.
Definitions:  (1) The principle of equality declares that desires and needs are of equal importance to different individuals, the desires and needs are equal no matter who or what the individuals are.  (2) The principle of utility dictates that humans ought to bring about the greatest good outcomes over bad outcomes, accounting for interests of everyone affected.
Problem:  Equality and utility are not inherently connected.  It is possible to increase good outcomes but disproportionately for some interested groups.  Thus utility can allow for the introduction of prejudice, making it an unfit basis for animal rights.

Regan proposes that it is possible to account for animal rights (while avoiding all of the shortcoming above) by simply postulating the existence of animal rights, similarly to human rights.

1. In some situations the group does wrong to ignore individual rights (Romans executing Christians).
2. In other situations the individual ought to surrender rights for the good of a greater whole (Bert has eaten the microfilm).
3. Individuals' right to avoid harm should be overridden only under certain conditions:
1. Overriding individual right is the only realistic way to prevent harm to innocent others.  OR
2. Overriding individual right is the only realistic way to prevent a chain of events that would have brought harm to innocent others.  OR
3. Overriding individual right is the only reasonable hope of preventing harm to innocent others.
4. IF animals have the right not to be harmed, that right cannot be violated unless one of these conditions is met, and the weight of proof is on those causing harm.
5. Do animals have the right not to be harmed?

The same question, when posed of human rights, inquires whether humans have inherent value, independent of their utility and/or value according to another human.  Humans are mistreated when they are considered to have no value other than for the interests of others.

IF humans and/or animals have inherent value, then their rights are derived from the value of the individual, not the value of consequences.



All photo credits:  Wikipedia