(highlight:: let's talk about at least three ways we can conceive of animal welfare.
One is a net balance of positive to negative feelings. A second way of thinking about it is whether animals are performing natural behaviors. The third way is thinking about biological functioning, or just having good health.)
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(highlight:: The interesting thing about studies that utilize cortisol or other stress hormones is that there's a growing recognition that they really just measure levels of arousal, not necessarily of negative experience. Cortisol will certainly go up during long-term painful experiences, but they'll also go up during generally pleasurable experiences like sex and eating. So we have a tool that's useful for looking at how aroused animals are, but not necessarily whether that arousal is associated with something that's positive or negative.
And yes, different ways of thinking about ethics and welfare often don't overlap a lot. A natural-behavior benefit for an animal doesn't always mean that there's going to be an associated improvement in their subjective experiences)
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I think intuitions is the key word there. A real stumbling block for all of this science is that it's hard to separate our own tastes or distaste for what we'd like to happen to us from what we think is good or bad for an animal. Prey animals have an evolved aversion to the idea of being attacked and eaten. It's hard for us to sit back and say, “well, you know, I don't think that would be so bad,” without putting ourselves in that position of being hunted down by a pack of ravenous animals. On the other hand, there are killing methods that have been shown from our objective measures to be relatively quick, efficient, and painless. Here I'm thinking about methods like the shooting of kangaroos at night time in Australia, where the animals are required to be shot in the head. Ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of animals probably have no experience of it beyond seeing a bright light. Most people intuitively still don't like the idea of that, and if they're forced to think about the welfare impact, they generally score it as quite high suffering. So this is a limitation of relying on expert opinion and thinking about subjective experiences.
- View Highlight
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My PhD supervisor used to say to me, “if you want to improve animal welfare, you have to start by being inside the tent.” You need to have enough rapport to be part of the conversations and have your suggestions taken seriously if you want to see any improvements made. A lot of really strong emotions and opinions come out in animal welfare. There are some ethical views that are really aligned with abolition of all animal use practices, whether that’s farming or hunting or even pet ownership. But the disadvantage of some of the more extreme views is that those groups have been marginalized, and their voices haven't been considered when management or regulatory decisions are made.
- View Highlight
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I think increasingly we're seeing wildlife managers, veterinarians, and other biologists trying to treat wild animals more like we would treat domestic pets or livestock. There’s more discussion of supplementary feeding during cold winters or after bushfires, more discussion of parasitism, of whether we should intervene to save animals if they're drowning in a river or a flood. And even if that's not a conscious decision, I think it's being manifested in how we manage wildlife. We’ve moved from the older days of “nature red in tooth and claw” to the attitude that we're in the Anthropocene now and everything that happens on the globe is within our sphere of influence.
- View Highlight
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I did a project with a few colleagues on a very conceptual overview of this question. We settled on foraging for wild plants and wild fungi. If you could make it nutritionally balanced, that would negatively impact the fewest animals. Beyond that, we started moving down the rankings, and we found that if you can harvest abundant wildlife species in a way that results in a very quick death, that's going to really yield very few animal welfare impacts. But anything that involves the clearing of land fencing, irrigation, or fertilizers is going to impact millions and millions of animals, often in indirect or invisible ways.
- View Highlight
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(highlight:: A: I've been having a bit of a crisis about wheat since I read in a paper that around five-hundred mice are poisoned for every ton of wheat harvested in Australia. And rodent poison is usually a horrifically painful way to die.
J: What happens to those species that live in the paddock really is significant, particularly with mice that will congregate en masse when there's grain spilled on the ground or stored in a silo or grain elevator, and it’s quantifiable. A few studies have had eye-watering results about the number of small mammals that are killed.
But if you want to minimize the animal welfare impacts from how you get your food, land clearing alone is much better than first clearing the land and then putting cattle on it. There are impacts on the cattle themselves, and then there might be predator control to prevent the cows from being eaten, and fertilizer and irrigation and fencing. These consequences just add up and up and up. In the paper we did, we ended up with intensive dairy farming as one of the worst systems.)
- View Highlight
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In any context, the indirect harms are going to dwarf anything that we do directly, and they're not always intuitive. Whatever our understanding is right now of the indirect harms being created by cropping or fencing or clearing, it's likely that we're missing a lot. In Australia, something that looks relatively benign, like the use of fertilizer, causes outbreaks of blue-green algae because the extra nitrogen is ending up in our creeks and our rivers, which is in turn causing the mass death of fish and profound impacts to marine and estuarine ecosystems. If we're going to think about animals in a relatively egalitarian sense, in that they all have lives or welfare status that's roughly equal, the indirect harms are just astonishingly elevated beyond what we do directly.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: let's talk about at least three ways we can conceive of animal welfare.
One is a net balance of positive to negative feelings. A second way of thinking about it is whether animals are performing natural behaviors. The third way is thinking about biological functioning, or just having good health.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: The interesting thing about studies that utilize cortisol or other stress hormones is that there's a growing recognition that they really just measure levels of arousal, not necessarily of negative experience. Cortisol will certainly go up during long-term painful experiences, but they'll also go up during generally pleasurable experiences like sex and eating. So we have a tool that's useful for looking at how aroused animals are, but not necessarily whether that arousal is associated with something that's positive or negative.
And yes, different ways of thinking about ethics and welfare often don't overlap a lot. A natural-behavior benefit for an animal doesn't always mean that there's going to be an associated improvement in their subjective experiences)
- View Highlight
-

I think intuitions is the key word there. A real stumbling block for all of this science is that it's hard to separate our own tastes or distaste for what we'd like to happen to us from what we think is good or bad for an animal. Prey animals have an evolved aversion to the idea of being attacked and eaten. It's hard for us to sit back and say, “well, you know, I don't think that would be so bad,” without putting ourselves in that position of being hunted down by a pack of ravenous animals. On the other hand, there are killing methods that have been shown from our objective measures to be relatively quick, efficient, and painless. Here I'm thinking about methods like the shooting of kangaroos at night time in Australia, where the animals are required to be shot in the head. Ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of animals probably have no experience of it beyond seeing a bright light. Most people intuitively still don't like the idea of that, and if they're forced to think about the welfare impact, they generally score it as quite high suffering. So this is a limitation of relying on expert opinion and thinking about subjective experiences.
- View Highlight
-

My PhD supervisor used to say to me, “if you want to improve animal welfare, you have to start by being inside the tent.” You need to have enough rapport to be part of the conversations and have your suggestions taken seriously if you want to see any improvements made. A lot of really strong emotions and opinions come out in animal welfare. There are some ethical views that are really aligned with abolition of all animal use practices, whether that’s farming or hunting or even pet ownership. But the disadvantage of some of the more extreme views is that those groups have been marginalized, and their voices haven't been considered when management or regulatory decisions are made.
- View Highlight
-

I think increasingly we're seeing wildlife managers, veterinarians, and other biologists trying to treat wild animals more like we would treat domestic pets or livestock. There’s more discussion of supplementary feeding during cold winters or after bushfires, more discussion of parasitism, of whether we should intervene to save animals if they're drowning in a river or a flood. And even if that's not a conscious decision, I think it's being manifested in how we manage wildlife. We’ve moved from the older days of “nature red in tooth and claw” to the attitude that we're in the Anthropocene now and everything that happens on the globe is within our sphere of influence.
- View Highlight
-

I did a project with a few colleagues on a very conceptual overview of this question. We settled on foraging for wild plants and wild fungi. If you could make it nutritionally balanced, that would negatively impact the fewest animals. Beyond that, we started moving down the rankings, and we found that if you can harvest abundant wildlife species in a way that results in a very quick death, that's going to really yield very few animal welfare impacts. But anything that involves the clearing of land fencing, irrigation, or fertilizers is going to impact millions and millions of animals, often in indirect or invisible ways.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: A: I've been having a bit of a crisis about wheat since I read in a paper that around five-hundred mice are poisoned for every ton of wheat harvested in Australia. And rodent poison is usually a horrifically painful way to die.
J: What happens to those species that live in the paddock really is significant, particularly with mice that will congregate en masse when there's grain spilled on the ground or stored in a silo or grain elevator, and it’s quantifiable. A few studies have had eye-watering results about the number of small mammals that are killed.
But if you want to minimize the animal welfare impacts from how you get your food, land clearing alone is much better than first clearing the land and then putting cattle on it. There are impacts on the cattle themselves, and then there might be predator control to prevent the cows from being eaten, and fertilizer and irrigation and fencing. These consequences just add up and up and up. In the paper we did, we ended up with intensive dairy farming as one of the worst systems.)
- View Highlight
-

In any context, the indirect harms are going to dwarf anything that we do directly, and they're not always intuitive. Whatever our understanding is right now of the indirect harms being created by cropping or fencing or clearing, it's likely that we're missing a lot. In Australia, something that looks relatively benign, like the use of fertilizer, causes outbreaks of blue-green algae because the extra nitrogen is ending up in our creeks and our rivers, which is in turn causing the mass death of fish and profound impacts to marine and estuarine ecosystems. If we're going to think about animals in a relatively egalitarian sense, in that they all have lives or welfare status that's roughly equal, the indirect harms are just astonishingly elevated beyond what we do directly.
- View Highlight
-