In pursuit of peak animal welfare; the need to prioritize the meaningful over the measurable

Abstract

Despite the diversity of animal welfare definitions, most recognise the centrality of the feelings of animals which are currently impossible to measure directly. As a result, animal welfare assessment is heavily reliant upon the indirect measurement of factors that either affect what animals feel, or are effected by how they feel. Physiological and health orientated measures have emerged as popular metrics for assessing welfare because they are quantifiable, can effect and be affected by how animals feel and have merits regardless of their relationship to the feelings of animals. However, their popularity in animal welfare assessment has led to them having a disproportionate influence on animal management to the detriment of animal welfare in numerous instances. Here, the case is made that a tension exists between management that prioritizes aspects of care reflecting popular animal welfare metrics such as those relating to physical health, and management that emphasizes psychological wellbeing. By re-examining the relative merits of physical and psychological priorities in animal management, an alternate animal welfare paradigm emerges less tied to traditional welfare metrics. This paradigm theorizes about the possibility for an optimal animal welfare state to exist where managed animal populations provided essential psychological outlets but protected from key physical stressors routinely experienced in the wild, might experience higher levels of welfare than wild populations would routinely experience. The proposition that optimal animal welfare could theoretically be achieved in well managed and well designed captive environments challenges a widely held ethical perspective that captivity is inherently bad for animal welfare.

Predator size and prey size–gut capacity ratios determine kill frequency and carcass production in terrestrial carnivorous mammals

“…In a study where lions were gradually adapted from a conventional feeding program to a random gorge feed/fasting day program, it was observed that food digestibility and body weight improved (Altman et al 2005). In particular, recent speculations suggest that a practice of feeding large-prey feeders, such as lions or tigers, daily -and hence comparatively small -rations, may prevent these animals from ever experiencing the extreme distension of their stomach that occurs after a gorge-feeding event, and that is putatively linked to satiety (Veasey 2017). Hence, these animals might be in a constant condition where their energetic requirements are met but they do not receive an important satiety signal, which could be the reason why these carnivores are particularly susceptible to showing stereotypies (Clubb and Mason 2007).…”

Assessing the Psychological Priorities for Optimising Captive Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) Welfare

“…Analysis of welfare assessments can provide insights into likely welfare impacts of management priorities and habitat design, but such an approach is inevitably constrained by the challenges inherent in the nature of welfare assessments, see [4,6,9,10,15,16], as well as the nature of the pre-existing management conditions in which elephants are maintained. The capacity of population-wide welfare assessments such as those undertaken by Meehan et al [2], Clubb and Mason [5] and Mason and Veasey [6] to identify conditions necessary to deliver optimal elephant welfare are inevitably constrained by the quality of habitats assessed, which may all be qualitively or quantitively deficient in features necessary to guarantee optimal welfare.…”

“…Whilst it is evident that the physical health of an animal can impact its welfare and vice versa, physical wellbeing is not directly referenced in this and other feelings-based conceptions of animal welfare because physical health is only relevant to welfare if it affects how animals feel, see [6,9,10,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Moreover, this assessment is intended to identify the psychological priorities of Asian elephants, not their physical needs which are arguably more widely understood and comprehensively addressed in existing husbandry guidelines [24,25].…”

“…However, because the feelings of animals including elephants remain largely closed to us, there are considerable challenges in both assessing and prioritising captive care [4,15,16,21,[29][30][31][32], which frequently results in both animal welfare assessment and animal welfare management focusing unduly on more tangible metrics linked to physical health [15,18,22]. Veasey [15] argues that management that prioritizes the physical wellbeing of animals including captive Asian elephants, often does so at the expense of the psychological needs of those animals, reflecting an inherent conflict between physical and psychological priorities in relation to captive animal welfare management.…”

“…These might include the freedom to roam, to forage, to breed, to fight, to seek seclusion or the company of others, to successfully respond to challenges, to take risks and to make choices which might include choosing not participating in husbandry activities. For large, social, tropical and subtropical animals as Asian elephants, not only may these freedoms be challenging to provide for in captivity, they may also conflict directly with many of the conditions routinely considered desirable for safeguarding physical wellbeing [15].…”