Animal Welfare. John Webster

The aim of all educational books is to contribute to knowledge and understanding. My book is addressed to all who care for sentient animals, which is a much broader reading public than just academics and students diligently studying animal welfare as a part of their formal education. However, it must carry the authority that comes from diligent research. Just as the animals acquire different skills to meet different challenges, being expert in some things, ignorant of others, so too the academics. With this I mind, I must acknowledge at the outset that this book is crazily ambitious in scope. It carries the scent of ‘life, the universe and everything’ in that it seeks to embrace the full extent of our knowledge and understanding of the sentient minds of animals in the context of the full range of challenges and opportunities presented by life on earth. Moreover, I acknowledge, it abounds in speculation. Many millions of words have been written by scientists, philosophers and fellow travellers seeking to understand the minds of animals, how they are shaped by their environments and how these are linked to the workings of the brain. My reading of this is wide but, inevitably less wide than it could be. If I were to attempt to acknowledge the sources of every assertion made in this book, the list of references would be longer than the book itself and even then, I would be guilty of omitting at least as many seminal references as I included. Moreover, a comprehensive list of references intended to direct a library search no longer carries the importance it once had. In recent years, my research, like that of everybody else, has been made so much quicker and more comprehensive by the reading and careful interpretation of on‐line information from sources such as Google Scholar and Wikipedia. Readers wishing to confirm or contest my assertions in regard to well‐documented issues, or simply seek further and better particulars, should be able to get access to almost all my sources in two to three clicks. In the section ‘Further Reading’, I list a number of good books that expand on some of the big topics presented here in brief. Most of the specific references listed under further reading deal with material taken from a specific scientific communication. When I speculate beyond the constraints of the literature and cannot therefore stand on the shoulders of others, I strive always to conform to first principles of science that apply across a broad spectrum so do not need the support of written evidence relating to every possible circumstance. Water runs downhill, wherever one happens to be.

      I have spent over 60 years working with animals, thinking about animals, discussing animals with wise colleagues, writing and teaching about animals. I cannot possibly acknowledge by name all those who have guided and developed my thoughts: distinguished colleagues who have enriched my understanding; razor‐sharp students who have challenged my convictions. I have therefore taken the easy option and never (well, almost never) named names. Those of you who read this book and recognise that I am talking about you, please accept my heartfelt thanks. I would make one exception to my policy of not naming names. I am deeply indebted to Birte Nielsen of UFAW, who has conscientiously and wisely helped to knock this manuscript into shape, purged me of repetitions and reined me in whenever my imagination was getting out of hand.

      Part 1

      The Sentient Mind: Skills and Strategies

       I think I could turn and live with animals…I look at them long and long.

       They do not sweat and whine about their condition.

       They do not lie awake at night and whine about their sins.

       Not one is dissatisfied. Not one is demented by the mania of owning things.

       Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

      From Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

      1

       Setting the Scene

      Some years ago, I took part in a late night, ‘bear‐pit’ style television debate on the rights and wrongs of fishing. My role was to present scientific evidence as to whether fish can experience pain and fear. In brief, the evidence shows they can. After I had outlined the results of this work, a member of the audience got up and said ‘This is all rubbish. These scientists don’t know what they are talking about. I have been fishing all my life and I know for certain that fish don’t feel anything’. He then added ‘What sort of fish were they anyway? and when I said ‘carp’ he said: ‘Ah well, carp are clever buggers’. These four words encapsulate the need for this book. We sort of assume animals have minds. We may even think we understand the meaning of sentience but most of us don’t give it much thought, because, for most of us, most animals don’t much matter.

Figure 1.1 Cordelia at play. (from Webster, 1994)

This book is written for those for whom it matters a lot. My central aim is to equip you to seek a better understanding of the minds of sentient animals. To this end, it will not only give an outline review of existing knowledge relating to the mental processes that determine animal behaviour and welfare but also offer suggestions and guidance on how to approach subjects where we know little or have been relying on easy preconceptions. Those of us who embark on the scientific study of animal welfare, their needs, their behaviour and their motivation, are cautioned to avoid the fallacy of anthropomorphism: the fallacy of ascribing human characteristics to other animals. However, I suggest at the outset, that it is valid to apply a principle of reverse anthropomorphism that asks not ‘how would this chicken, cow, horse’ feel if it were me but how would I feel if I were one of them?’ As we shall see, thought experiments based on the principle of reverse anthropomorphism provide the basis for most studies in motivation analysis.

      This voyage into the minds of sentient minds is going to be quite a journey. The nature of sentience is far too complex to be encapsulated within a one‐line definition, such as ‘the capacity to experience feelings’. Chapter 2 examines in detail the meaning and nature of consciousness and the sentient mind within the animal kingdom. To keep this enquiry as simple as possible, I shall consider the animal mind almost entirely as an abstract concept, within the brain and powered by the brain (mostly), but as an intangible compendium of information bank, instruction manual, filter and digital processor of incoming sensations and information. It is not too far‐fetched to make the analogy with the digital computer and describe the brain as the hardware and the mind as the software. The neurophysiology involved in driving the hardware has its own beauty, but that is another story.

      Through evolution by natural selection, animals have acquired behavioural skills appropriate to their design (phenotype) and natural environment. All animals are equipped at birth with a basic set of mental software: instructions genetically coded as a result of generations of adaptation to the physical and social challenges of the environments in which they evolved. This, which I shall hereafter refer to as their mental birth‐right, is instinctive and hard wired. In some species that we may define as primitive, their responses to stimuli may always be restricted to invariant, hard‐wired, pre‐programmed responses to sensations induced by environmental stimuli. According to one’s definition, this alone may be sufficient to classify them as sentient. However, throughout the animal kingdom, from the octopus to the great apes, we find overwhelming evidence of species that exhibit sentience to a higher degree. They build on this instinctive birthright and develop their minds. They learn to recognise, interpret and memorise new experiences in the form of feelings, good, bad or indifferent, and develop patterns of behaviour designed to promote their wellbeing measured, in all cases, in terms of primitive needs such as the relief of hunger and pain and, within the deeper, inner circles of sentience, feelings of companionship, comfort and joy. The ability to operate on the basis