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Full-Text Articles in Anthropology
Assessing Animal Well-Being: Common Sense, Uncommon Science, David Fraser
Assessing Animal Well-Being: Common Sense, Uncommon Science, David Fraser
Assessment of Animal Welfare Collection
The scientific assessment of the well-being of an animal involves finding indicators of three broad criteria: 1) a high level of biological functioning; 2) freedom from suffering in the sense of prolonged fear, pain, and other negative experiences; and 3) positive experiences such as comfort and contentment. The tools available to assess animal wellbeing include a mixture of common sense and cutting-edge science. Measures of animal productivity can help to assess an animal’s level of biological functioning, but they need to be used with care. Among veterinary approaches, pathology detects breakdown in biological functioning, while epidemiology identifies the circumstances under …
Animal Welfare And Individual Characteristics: A Conversation Against Speciesism, Marc Bekoff, Lori Gruen
Animal Welfare And Individual Characteristics: A Conversation Against Speciesism, Marc Bekoff, Lori Gruen
Animal Welfare Collection
It seems impossible for a human being not to have some point of view concerning nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) welfare. Many people make decisions about how humans are permitted to treat animals using speciesist criteria, basing their decisions on an individual's species membership rather than on that animal's individual characteristics. Although speciesism provides a convenient way for making difficult decisions about who should be used in different types of research, we argue that such decisions should rely on an analysis of individual characteristics and should not be based merely on species membership. We do not argue that the concept of …