Assessing Animal Welfare at the Farm and Group Level: The Interplay of Science and Values

By D. Fraser. Animal Welfare, 2003

250 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the social debate about animal welfare we can identify three different views about how animals should be raised and how their welfare should be judged: (1) the view that animals should be raised under conditions that promote good biological functioning in the sense of health, growth and reproduction, (2) the view that animals should be raised in ways that minimise suffering and promote contentment, and (3) the view that animals should be allowed to lead relatively natural lives. When attempting to assess animal welfare, different scientists select different criteria, reflecting one or more of these value-dependent views. Even when ostensibly covering all three views, scientists may differ in what they treat as inherently important versus only instrumentally important, and their selection of variables may be further influenced by a desire to use measures that are scientifically respected and can be scored objectively. Value assumptions may also enter animal welfare assessment at the farm and group level (1) when empirical data provide insufficient guidance on important issues, (2) when we need to weigh conflicting interests of different animals, and (3) when we need to weigh conflicting evidence from different variables. Although value assumptions cannot be eliminated from animal welfare assessment, they can be made more explicit as the first step in creating animal welfare assessment tools. Different value assumptions could lead to different welfare assessment tools, each claiming validity within a given set of assumptions.

Subfields: Ecology, Genetics, Small Animals

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4a3f34aa8e19ae6adfb5e11771ed9db3bce73dc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. Bidda Jones
2. K. Hartcher
3. D. Mellor
4. F. Wemelsfelder

In Genetics

1. D. Mellor
2. Bidda Jones
3. K. Hartcher
4. B. Forkman
5. Peter Sandøe
6. F. Wemelsfelder
7. K. Svartberg

In Small Animals

1. D. Mellor
2. Bidda Jones
3. K. Hartcher
4. B. Forkman
5. Peter Sandøe
6. F. Wemelsfelder

Citations in the corpus

• Updating Animal Welfare Thinking: Moving beyond the “Five Freedoms” towards “A Life Worth Living” (2016, background): “Three different orientations have been identified as influencing the focus of science-based thinking about the nature of animal welfare and its management [33,97,98].”
• The Correlation of Qualitative Behavior Assessments with Welfare Quality® Protocol Outcomes in On-Farm Welfare Assessment of Dairy Cattle (2013, background): “However, the relationship between experience and welfare is not straightforward (Fraser, 2003; Appleby and Sandoe, 2002).”
• The welfare of layer hens in cage and cage-free housing systems (2017, background): “…ability to cope with its environment and whether its needs are met; 2) affective state; an animal's subjective experiences, and 3) natural living; the ability for an animal to live according to its nature and perform normal behaviours (Broom, 1986; EFSA, 2005; Fraser, 2003; Hemsworth et al., 2015).”