There is a dearth of academic research on the ethics of pigeon racing. We argue that pigeon racing is associated with significant benefits and disadvantages, but that the benefits that have been associated with it can be provided by alternative practices. Disadvantages include the competitive element associated with racing, which creates a strong incentive to kill birds where this is not in their best interests, as well as the welfare issues related to transportation, the widowhood system, the races themselves, and (...) the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Whilst some of these disadvantages can be diminished, we argue that an ethical form of pigeon racing is not possible, and that it therefore ought to be prohibited. In the final part of this article, we question whether the moral problems associated with pigeon racing include the keeping of pigeons per se. On this issue, we argue that keeping pigeons does pose moral problems, but that more research is needed to explore whether these might be relatively minor compared to the problems associated with de-domesticating pigeons. The moral implications of our research extend beyond the world of pigeon racing as similar arguments should be used to question the racing and keeping of many other animals. (shrink)

Although human well-being is a topic of much contemporary philosophical discussion, there has been comparatively little theoretical discussion in philosophy of (nonhuman) animal well-being. Animal welfare science is a well-established scientific discipline that studies animal well-being from an empirical standpoint. This article examines parts of this literature that may be relevant to philosophical treatments of animal well-being and to other philosophical issues. First, I explain the dominant conceptions of well-being in animal welfare science and survey some debates in that literature (...) surrounding these competing conceptions. Second, I explain the empirical methods used to measure animal well-being. Third, I argue for the philosophical relevance of the research in animal welfare science and outline some philosophical issues concerning animal welfare and its science that I claim are worthy of attention by philosophers. (shrink)

One of the primary concerns in animal research is ensuring the welfare of laboratory animals. Modern views on animal welfare emphasize the role of animal sentience, i.e. the capacity to experience subjective states such as pleasure or suffering, as a central component of welfare. The increasing official recognition of animal sentience has had large effects on laboratory animal research. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (Low et al., University of Cambridge, 2012) marked an official scientific recognition of the presence of sentience (...) in mammals, birds, and cephalopods. Animal sentience has furthermore been recognized in legislation in the European Union, UK, New Zealand and parts of Australia, with discussions underway in other parts of the world to follow suit. In this paper, we analyze this shift towards recognition of sentience in the regulation and practice in the treatment of laboratory animals and its effects on animal welfare and use. (shrink)

After describing the disorder of psychopathy, I examine the theories and the evidence concerning the psychopaths’ deficient moral capacities. I first examine whether or not psychopaths can pass tests of moral knowledge. Most of the evidence suggests that they can. If there is a lack of moral understanding, then it has to be due to an incapacity that affects not their declarative knowledge of moral norms, but their deeper understanding of them. I then examine two suggestions: it is their deficient (...) practical reason or their stunted emotions that are at fault. The evidence supports both explanations. I conclude with an overview of the debate concerning whether they are morally or legally responsible for their actions. (shrink)

This article is about a specific, but so far neglected peril of AI, which is that AI systems may become existential as well as causing suffering risks for nonhuman animals. The AI value alignment problem has now been acknowledged as critical for AI safety as well as very hard. However, currently it has only been attempted to align the values of AI systems with human values. It is argued here that this ought to be extended to the values of nonhuman (...) animals since it would be speciesism not to do so. The article focuses on the two subproblems—value extraction and value aggregation—discusses challenges for the integration of values of nonhuman animals and explores approaches to how AI systems could address them. (shrink)

Over the last decade many emerging economies, and in particular Brazil, have established themselves as major players in global food animal production. Within these countries much of the increase in food animal production has been achieved by the adoption of intensive housing systems similar to those found in most industrialized countries. However, it is now well established that many of these systems are associated with numerous welfare problems, particularly with respect to restriction of movement. Previous work has shown that people (...) living in industrialized’ countries broadly support farm animal welfare reform, and that similar criticisms may be voiced from citizens living in developing countries as they become more aware of confinement housing and potentially contentious husbandry practices. Given the developments that have taken place in other countries, there are lessons that could be learned and applied by emerging economies that would undoubtedly ease or prevent the challenges observed in other countries. Thus, we briefly describe the vehicles used by different countries when addressing animal welfare that may provide insights into identifying possible challenges and potential solutions for Brazil and other emerging economies. Where available we review the associated science and identify gaps where more research is needed. We conclude by providing a possible roadmap on how farm animal welfare reform may be addressed in emerging countries. Solutions will need to be tailored, culturally relevant, and science must play a key role in supporting animal welfare reform in the emerging countries. (shrink)

I argue that death can be (and sometimes is) bad for cattle because it destroys relationships that are valuable for cattle for their own sake. The argument relies on an analogy between valuable human relationships and relationships cattle form with conspecifics. I suggest that the reasons we have for thinking that certain rich and meaningful human relationships are valuable for their own sake should also lead us to think that certain cattle relationships are valuable for their own sake. And just (...) as death is bad for us when it destroys our valuable relationships, so death is bad for cattle when it destroys their valuable relationships. This argument is important because it pinpoints something that is bad about death for cattle that is overlooked by popular accounts of the badness of death for non-human animals that focus exclusively on the impact of death on lifetime well-being levels. Thus, the argument reveals an overlooked moral cost of some of our farming practices. (shrink)

The public can influence animal welfare law and regulation. However what constitutes ‘the public’ is not a straightforward matter. A variety of different publics have an interest in animal use and this has implications for the governance of animal welfare. This article presents an ethnographic content analysis of how the concept of a public is mobilized in animal welfare journals from 2003 to 2012. The study was undertaken to explore how experts in the discipline define and regard the role of (...) the public in determining animal welfare standards. Analysis indicates that experts in animal welfare constitute different types of citizen and consumer publics around specific types of animal use, framed by different theories of value. These results suggest a need for greater clarity about the roles and responsibilities of experts and publics in animal welfare reform processes. Clearly citizens and consumers can both contribute to promoting higher welfare standards, but an over-reliance on market mechanisms and consumer behaviour to assign value is beset by moral hazards, foremost being the risk of disarticulating the concept of animal welfare from the public good. (shrink)

Definitions of health in terms of some kind of balance form a category of their own within the sphere of health definition. Such definitions have their roots in the beginnings of scientific medicine, and popular versions are common among lay people. It has even been claimed that balance is fundamental to health for all species. Several present-day definitions of health in terms of balance are presented here. Particular attention is given to the call for a definition of health applicable to (...) both humans and animals within the One Health approach, involving human medicine, veterinary medicine and ecology. Definitions in terms of balance have been suggested but none has been thoroughly analysed with regard to its suitability. There are therefore three concerns in this paper. The first is to introduce versions of the category of balance, as a first step towards a nomenclature of health definitions. The second is to analyse the claim made recently that balance is a universal criterion of health in all species including humans. The third is to ascertain whether any of the versions discussed is suited to the One Health approach. (shrink)

Animal welfare science and ecology are both generally concerned with the lives of animals, however they differ in their objectives and scope; the former studies the welfare of animals considered ‘domestic’ and under the domain of humans, while the latter studies wild animals with respect to ecological processes. Each of these approaches addresses certain aspects of the lives of animals living in the world though neither, we argue, tells us important information about the welfare of wild animals. This paper argues (...) for the development of a new scientific discipline ‘welfare biology’ to address these issues and more, given the deficiencies of pre-existing life science disciplines to research the subject. Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of all living beings who have a welfare, with a value orientation toward promoting that welfare, regardless of the beings’ situation or relationship to humans and our activities. (shrink)

In the following paper, I connect Levinas’s notions of il y a and hypostasis to nature as alterity via Sallis’s interpretation of nature in its return. I interpret Levinas’s idea of the elemental as an unpossessable milieu, an excess with indirect traces, indicating alterity, something strange. I then turn to Levinas’s idea of the ruin of representation to argue for a contextual reversal in which meaning arises from the non-human other. This reversal uncovers the possibility of understanding non-human things as (...) existents, sites where nature in its return reveals the need for respect of the other—an ethical Sinngebung. (shrink)

That death is not a welfare issue appears to be a widespread view among animal welfare researchers. This paper demonstrates that this view is based on a mistaken assumption about harm, which is coupled to ‘welfare’ being conceived as ‘welfare at a time’. Assessments of welfare at a time ignore issues of longevity. In order to assess the welfare issue of death, it is necessary to structure welfare assessment as comparisons of possible lives of the animals. The paper also demonstrates (...) that excluding the welfare issues of being deprived of life from the ethical assessment of killing distorts the ethical considerations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to take normative aspects of animal welfare in corporate practice from a blind spot into the spotlight, and thus connect the fields of business ethics and animal ethics. Using insights from business ethics and animal ethics, it argues that companies have a strong responsibility towards animals. Its rationale is that animals have a moral status, that moral actors have the moral obligation to take the interests of animals into account and thus, that as moral (...) actors, companies should take the interests of animals into account, more specifically their current and future welfare. Based on this corporate responsibility, categories of corporate impact on animals in terms of welfare and longevity are offered, including normative implications for each of them. The article concludes with managerial implications for several business sectors, including the most animal-consuming and animal-welfare-threatening industry: the food sector. Welfare issues are discussed, including the issue of killing for food production. (shrink)

The roles companion animals have played in our lives has dramatically changed over the last few decades. At the same time, the terms we use to describe both the people and animals in these human-animal relationships have also changed. One example includes the use of the terms ‘owner’ or ‘guardian’ to refer to the human caretaker. While preferences by society appear to indicate increased interest in referring to companion animal caretakers as ‘guardians’, others have cautioned against its use or attempted (...) to restrict it. Additionally, the use of animal welfare terminology has direct implications for how we conduct both welfare research and practice. Our paper examines the use of ‘owner’ and ‘guardian’ with respect to (1) the implications for changing terminology on the function, clarity and uniformity of their use, and (2) the ethical and welfare impact that coincides with each term’s use. Our goal is to propose terminological considerations that could influence future welfare research, as well as help guide our interactions with companion animals. (shrink)

Slaughter sets the debate about what is acceptable to do to animals at an extremely low bar. Recently, there has been considerable investment in developing cell-based meat, an alternative meat production process that does not require the raising and slaughtering of animals, instead using muscle cells cultivated in a bioreactor. We discuss the animal ethics impacts of cell-based and plant-based meat on human-animal interactions from animal welfare and rights perspectives, focusing on industrial meat production scenarios. Our hypothesis is that the (...) insertion of cell-based meat in the global meat market may alleviate farm animal suffering and potentially restore resources for wild fauna. We employed a conservative estimation of the cell-based meat contribution to the global meat market in the year 2040 to analyze the consequences for human-animal relationships for both wild animals and farmed domesticated animals. We discuss possible effects of an animal cell domestication process, previously described as the second domestication, on human-animal relationships. We consider its potential to reduce the impact of human demographic changes and land use on animal life, in particular whether there would be increased biomass availability and free land for wild animals. We anticipate a major reduction in animal suffering due to the decrease in the number of individual animals involved in food production, which justifies the adoption of cell-based meat from a utilitarian perspective. For the conventional animal food production that remains, further consideration is needed to understand which systems, either high or low welfare, will be retained and the impact of the innovation on the average farm animal welfare. Additionally, it seems likely that there will be less acceptance of the necessity of animal suffering in farming systems when meat production is uncoupled from animal raising and slaughter, supported by a deontological perspective of animal ethics. Consequent to this is anticipated the mitigation of relevant barriers to animal protection and to the recognition of animals as subjects by legislation. Thus, the development of the alternative meats may be related to a significant change in our relationship with non-human animals, with greater benefits than the prima facie effects on farm animals. (shrink)

In “Do Animals have an Interest in Liberty?” Alasdair Cochrane brings some much needed attention to the ethics of animal confinement (2009a). Of particular significance is the question of whether confinement in itself is bad for nonhuman animal (hereafter, animal) well-being. If confinement conditions cause animals to suffer or frustrate their preferences it is safe to assume that liberty or freedom (following Cochrane, I use the terms interchangeably) would be instrumentally good for them. But, what about seemingly benign conditions of (...) confinement in which animals are not suffering or having their preferences frustrated? Is confinement in such cases bad for their well-being? In other words, do animals have an .. (shrink)

I start by defining sentience and giving an analysis of the epistemological problems that plague its scientific study; this consists mainly in justifying that the attribution of sentience is underdetermined by the data. Second I show that as a result of this situation of underdetermination, most of the types of arguments used to infer sentience from the data are inconclusive and lead to a stalemate. Third, I argue that the stalemates arise from a foundationalist epistemology which needlessly leads to skeptical (...) conclusions; as an alternative, I propose to adopt a coherentist framework and defend a process of ‘epistemic iteration’ (Chang 2004) within that framework, which I argue gives us a way out of the underdetermination. (shrink)