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Full-Text Articles in Organisms
Recognition Of Distress In Animals – A Philosophical Prolegomenon, Bernard E. Rollin
Recognition Of Distress In Animals – A Philosophical Prolegomenon, Bernard E. Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
For those who continue to doubt the studiability of distress or suffering or misery in all of its forms in animals, consider the following thought experiment: If the government were to come up with a billion dollars in research funding for animal distress, would that money go a-begging? We can study these states just as we studied pain—excellent work on boredom by Franciose Wemelsfelder in a volume on laboratory animal welfare I co-edited made the methodology for such study quite explicit. (Wemelsfelder, 1990) And when the ideological scales fall from our eyes, we realize that the work of scientists like …
Animal Pain: What It Is And Why It Matters, Bernard E. Rollin
Animal Pain: What It Is And Why It Matters, Bernard E. Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
The basis of having a direct moral obligation to an entity is that what we do to that entity matters to it. The ability to experience pain is a sufficient condition for a being to be morally considerable. But the ability to feel pain is not a necessary condition for moral considerability. Organisms could have possibly evolved so as to be motivated to flee danger or injury or to eat or drink not by pain, but by ‘‘pangs of pleasure’’ that increase as one fills the relevant need or escapes the harm. In such a world, ‘‘mattering’’ would be positive, …