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Picturing The Pain Of Animal Others: Rationalising Form, Function And Suffering In Veterinary Orthopaedics, Christopher J. Degeling

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Advances in veterinary orthopaedics are assessed on their ability to improve the function and wellbeing of animal patients. And yet historically veterinarians have struggled to bridge the divide between an animal's physicality and its interior experience of its function in clinical settings. For much of the twentieth century, most practitioners were agnostic to the possibility of animal mentation and its implications for suffering. This attitude has changed as veterinarians adapted to technological innovations and the emergence of a clientele who claimed to understand and relate to the subjective experiences of their animals. While visualising technologies and human analogies have shaped …