Animal Welfare. John Webster
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and mental skills the sentient animal can recruit to cope with the challenges of life and promote an emotional sense of wellbeing. It also carries the potential for suffering when coping becomes too difficult.
The physical and mental skills and resources present at birth are those acquired through adaptation of their ancestors to the ancestral environment, because these were the skills that mattered the most. Animals that demonstrate deeper degrees of sentience have the capacity to develop these inborn, instinctive skills throughout their lifetime and teach these new skills to subsequent generations. Differing demands of differing environments mean that each species exhibits a portfolio of skills most appropriate to their special needs. It follows that, in our eyes, individual species may appear to be brilliant at some things and dumb at others. Raptor birds that hunt by day develop an exquisite visual ability to locate their prey whereas bats that hunt at night use radar based on ultrasound. The albatross can navigate its way home to its nest across the barren expanses of the Southern Ocean but will fail to recognise its chick if it has blown out of the nest. Domestication distorts the process of natural selection in two ways. We compel these animals to adapt to an environment largely determined by us, and this may be very different from that of their ancestors. We also introduce the entirely unnatural business of breeding: we tinker with the physical and mental phenotype of our animals to suit our needs for food, fashion, recreation or unqualified love.
We cannot observe animals through our eyes and conclude that any one species is better, or more highly developed than another. Each species adapts to meet its own special needs and the skills required to meet these needs vary in their nature and complexity. Pigs are good at being pigs, sheep are good at being sheep. Rats are very good at being rats because they have had to develop the physical and mental skills necessary for survival in a complex and frequently hostile environment. Sharks are very good at being sharks but, because they have thrived for millennia in a food‐rich, stable environment, they have never really had to think. Many dogs are not very good at being dogs because they have not had the chance to grow up in an environment of dogs.
Human Attitudes to Animals
Most of this book is devoted to an exploration of the minds of sentient animals, their feelings, thoughts and motivation to behaviour seen so far as possible, through their own eyes. Human attitudes to animals would be irrelevant were it not for the fact that our actions, based on our attitudes, can have such a profound effect on their lives. In an earlier book, ‘Animal Welfare: A Cool Eye towards Eden’ (76) I wrote ‘Man has dominion over the animals whether we like it or not. Wherever we share space on the planet, and this includes all but the most inaccessible regions of land, sea and air, it is we that determine where and how they shall live. We may elect to put a battery hen in a cage or establish a game reserve to protect the tiger but in each case the decision is ours, not theirs. We make a pet of the hamster but poison the rat. These human decisions are driven by the same incentives that motivate non‐human animals since they reflect the will of us as individuals and as a species to survive and achieve a sense of well‐being. We need good food and we seek highly nutritious eggs at little cost. We need good hygiene and seek to remove rats that carry germs. We choose to provide for our pets in sickness and in health because they enrich the lives of us and our children. We admire the tiger not only for its fearful symmetry but as a symbol of freedom itself, so we offer it more freedom than we give the laying hen. However, in either case it is impossible to escape the conclusion that both are living on our terms.’
The history of human attitudes to animals (and to other humans) is awash with ignorance and inhumanity. The European Judeo‐Christian belief was inscribed in Genesis as ‘every beast of the earth and every fowl of the air…I have given for meat’. The attitude of other religions to non‐human animals varies. Of the Eastern religions, Taoism and Buddhism recognise the sentience of our fellow mortals and treat them with respect. More of this later. So far as I can gather, Confucianism regards non‐human animals as commodities or tools, and therefore ‘off the page’ so far as philosophy is concerned. Islam and Judaism display rituals of respect for their food animals at the point of slaughter but these bring no comfort to the conscious animal while it bleeds to death. The Hindu veneration of the Holy Cow is driven more by fear of divine retribution than any concern for animal welfare.
The French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596–1650) sought to justify the Judeo‐Christian attitude by asserting that humans are fundamentally different from all other animals because we alone possess mind, or consciousness. His notorious phrase Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am – further implied non cogitant ergo non sunt – they don’t think therefore they aren’t. He saw non‐human animals as automata, equivalent to clockwork toys, and thereby provided an ‘ethical’ basis for treating them simply as commodities on the assumption that it is not possible to be cruel to animals because they lack the capacity to suffer. His view may appear to us as totally lacking in any understanding of animals. However, he was not alone. For most of history, the moral concepts of right and wrong were applied only to intentions and actions within the human species. The utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was an exception when he wrote of animals ‘the question is not can they reason…. but can they suffer?’. The supreme challenge to this limited concept of morality came from Albert Schweitzer who wrote ‘the great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all that comes within his reach’. This became the basis for his principle of reverence for life (10).
The last Century has seen a steady progression of the evolution of morality into law. The UK Protection of Animals Act (1911) made it an offence to ‘cause unnecessary suffering by doing or omitting to do any act’ (59). The 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam acknowledged that ‘since animals are sentient beings, members should pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals’ (73). The UK Animal Welfare Act (2006) imposed a duty of care on responsible persons to provide for the basic needs of their animals (both farmed animals and pets) (25). This act signified a considerable advance, since it is no longer necessary to prove that suffering has occurred, it is only necessary to establish that animals are being kept or being bred in such a way that is liable to cause suffering. These proscriptive laws are written in broad terms, which gives them the flexibility to deal with a range of specific circumstances. However, they beg several questions: ‘what constitutes suffering, especially necessary suffering? ‘what are the welfare requirement of animals?’, and (above all) ‘what is meant by sentience?’ One of the main aims of this book is to guide all those directly and indirectly involved in matters of animal welfare (which means almost everybody) towards a deeper understanding of the complex biological and psychological properties of animal minds that determine their perception and their behaviour, thus determining the principles that should govern our approach to their welfare.
Despite the evidence of progress in the law relating to the protection of animals, there is still too much evidence of cruelty, both deliberate and mindless. Deliberate cruelty is a crime punishable by law and relatively rare. Mindless cruelty is far more common. It reflects a mindset conditioned by ignorance or training to the assumption that animals are automata, thus incapable of suffering. We are constantly presented with images of abuses to animals from all over the world. I cite only three examples.
A few years ago, Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) released a shocking video of behaviour in a small abattoir. Lambs for slaughter were hung up by driving a hook through their legs behind the Achilles tendon prior to stunning and having their throats cut. In this video, four lambs were hung on hooks and left to struggle while the slaughterman went off to smoke a cigarette. From the lambs’ perspective, this was cruelty in the extreme. I suggest, however, that from a human perspective this may not have been deliberate cruelty but an extreme case of mindlessness. It had never occurred to him, or been explained to him, that sentient animals are capable of suffering. If he had been really cruel, he would have watched.
My most extreme personal experience of the mindless ill‐treatment of animals came from a large commercial pig abattoir in Beijing. Pigs transported to the abattoir in crates had been gaffed by the neck and hauled out of their crates on