Caring animals and the ways we wrong them

Abstract

Many nonhuman animals have the emotional capacities to form caring relationships that matter to them, and for their immediate welfare. Drawing from care ethics, we argue that these relationships also matter as objectively valuable states of affairs. They are part of what is good in this world. However, the value of care is precarious in human-animal interactions. Be it in farming, research, wildlife ‘management’, zoos, or pet-keeping, the prevention, disruption, manipulation, and instrumentalization of care in animals by humans is ubiquitous. We criticize a narrow conception of welfare that, in practice, tends to overlook non-experiential forms of harm that occur when we interfere with caring animals. Additionally, we point out wrongs against caring animals that are not just unaccounted for but denied by even an expansive welfare perspective: The instrumentalization of care and caring animals in systems of use can occur as a harmless wrong that an approach purely focused on welfare may, in fact, condone. We should therefore adopt an ethical perspective that goes beyond welfare in our dealings with caring animals.

Exploring Compassion towards Laboratory Animals in UK- and China-Based Undergraduate Biomedical Sciences Students

“…The teaching of ethical aspects in biomedicine is sometimes limited to a deceptively simple consequentialist/utilitarian view where animal research is taken for granted as morally correct in most circumstances, and that animal suffering is something a student should accept as normal and justified and be obliged to engage with. These anthropocentric utilitarian arguments are often delivered without a great deal of scrutiny, and students are rarely given the opportunity to challenge these ideas and explore alternatives, for example, a virtue ethics or "ethics of care" approach, where an individual's compassion, generosity, kindness, or respect are of a stronger influence in comparison to a person's right to carry out a certain action and/or the ethical nature of the outcomes of that action [17][18][19]. In addition, students are often implicitly taught they must be detached and professional when working with animals, and students who demonstrate kindness and care may be perceived negatively as being sentimental or unprofessional [20].…”