Farm Animal Welfare

Advocacy Issues

• Farm Animal Transport
  

• Foie Gras Facts

SPCA Certified

• What is SPCA Certified?
  

• Where to buy SPCA Certified Products?
  

• Meet our Farmers
  

• Join the Program
  

• SPCA Certified Standards
  

• Frequently Asked Questions

General Information 

• Farm Animal News
  

• Farm Animal Facts
  

• Farm Animal Diseases
  

• Emergency Preparedness

Contact Us

Animal Welfare

by David Fraser

Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare  

(Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998)

Dictionaries define “welfare” and “well-being by using phrases such as “the state of being or doing well and  “a good or satisfactory condition of existence”.  These phrases tell us that the “welfare” or “well-being” of animals has to do with their quality of life.  To be more precise about the meaning of welfare and well-being requires that we go beyond the issue of how the terms are used and address the value issue of what we consider important for animals to have a good quality of life.

Three main approached to this question have emerged.  Some people emphasize how animals feel.  According to this view, the affective states of animals ("feelings" or "emotions") are the key elements in quality of life. Thus a high level of welfare requires that animals experience comfort, contentment, and the normal pleasures of life, as well as being reasonably free from prolonged or intense pain, fear, hunger, and other unpleasant states.  A second approach emphasizes the biological functioning of the animal.  According to this view, animals should be thriving, capable of normal growth and reproduction, and reasonably free from disease, injury, malnutrition, and abnormalities of behavior and physiology.  A third approach emphasizes natural living and considers that animals should be kept in reasonably natural environments and be allowed to develop and use their nature adaptations and capabilities.

These three approaches, although formulating the issue in different ways, often agree in practice.  However, there are some real differences between the three views of welfare.  For example, a pig farmer using criteria based on biological functioning might conclude that the welfare of a group of confined sows is high because the animals are well fed, reproducing efficiently, and free from disease and injury.  Critics using other criteria might conclude that the welfare of the same animals is at risk because they are unable to lead natural lives, or because they show signs of frustration and discomfort.

Scientific knowledge about animals can often help in assessments of animal welfare.  However, knowledge alone cannon turn judgments and the quality of life into purely factual matters.  Science cannot, for instance, prove whether freedom of movement is better or more important than freedom from disease.

This inevitable involvement of values in the assessment of animal welfare does not mean that we cannot do objective scientific research in assessing the welfare of animals. For example, housing calves in individual stalls has many effects on their degree of movement, disease transmission, levels of “stress” hormones, and so on, and these can be studied as objectively as other scientific variables. But how we use the measures to draw conclusions about the animals’ welfare, and even which ones we choose to study, involve value judgments about what we think is important for the animals.

There are confusing semantic differences concerning the use of “welfare” and  “well-being”.  Scientists and others commonly write about a certain “level of” welfare and thus use the term as a kind of scale, running from high to low.  Thus one might speak of “poor welfare.”  This usage will sound strange to those who think of “welfare” as referring only to the good end of the scale.  However, we do not have a distinctive term for the scale, and using “welfare of” (or “well-being”) in this dual sense fills the need.  A comforting precedent is the word “health,” which means both (1) freedom from illness and injury and (2) the general condition of an organism with reference to its degree of freedom from illness and injury.

Confusion also arises because people have tried to distinguish between “welfare” and “well-being” in various ways.  One approach uses “well-being” for the state of the animal and “welfare” for the broader social and ethical issues; thus one might say that the well-being of animals is at the heart of animal welfare controversies.  A second approach uses “welfare” to refer to the long-term good of the animal and “well-being” for its short-term state especially how the animal feels, hence a painful vaccination may enhance an animal’s welfare but reduce its feelings of well-being.  A third approach, often followed in Europe, uses “welfare” exclusively because it is the traditional term in ethical and scientific writing, in most legislation, and in the names of animal welfare organizations. A fourth approach, often followed in the United States, uses “well-being” instead of welfare” because welfare sounds like a political hot potato.  Finally, many people treat the two terms as synonymous, following the lead of many dictionaries.  Treating “welfare” and "well-being" as synonyms is probably the simplest and conforms best to everyday usage of the terms, but that will not stop scholars and scientists from continuing to use more specialized meanings.