Animal Welfare Science: Why and for Whom?

Animals : an Open Access Journal from MDPI · 6 authors, 2 centres

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TL;DR

The analysis found that, overall, the papers showed a low to neutral consideration of animal interests, with a divergence between animal welfare and animal production journals over time.

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Five assessors blindly scored each paper on a scale from 1 to 10 based on the degree of intrinsic value attributed to animals. The overall mean score was 5.60 ± 2.49, indicating low consideration of animal interests. AW journals scored higher (6.46 ± 2.29) and improved over decades, while AP journals scored below 5.0 and showed no improvement. The study suggests that the language in animal welfare science is ambiguous regarding its motivational priorities and that the concept of animal welfare is often distorted in scientific publications. Limitations include moderate inter-assessor agreement and the inherent subjectivity of the scoring method. The authors recommend explicit declaration of motivational priorities in animal welfare research to improve the field.

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other

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animal science

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ORIGINAL PAPER

PMC10252133

Animal Welfare Science: Why and for Whom?

Animals : an Open Access Journal from MDPI

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ABSTRACT

Abstract Simple Summary Considering that there are many ways to approach animal welfare, we aimed to study the value attributed to the animals themselves in scientific papers about farm animals published in animal welfare (AW) and animal production (AP) journals over time. All the papers were analyzed by five assessors, resulting in moderate agreement because the language used in the animal welfare scientific literature is ambiguous in relation to why and for whom it is performed. The overall mean score was 5.60, showing a low consideration of the interest of animals, close to neutrality. While AW journal scored higher and improved over the decades, the AP average score was below 5.0 and did not improve with time. The statement of the main justification for animal welfare papers, with an explicit declaration of their motivational priorities is important for the improvement of animal welfare science. Abstract There are, in the literature, distinct ways to approach animal welfare. The objective of this work was to study the value attributed to farm animals in the scientific papers published in animal welfare and animal production journals at three different points in time, separated by a decade each. The first ten papers mentioning “animal welfare” or “animal well-being” in their objectives or hypotheses from each journal and each focus year were selected. The 180 papers were blindly scored by five assessors between 1 and 10, according to the degree of intrinsic value attributed to animals. The overall mean score and standard deviation were 5.60 ± 2.49, with 6.46 ± 2.29 and 4.74 ± 2.40 for AW and AP journals, respectively, and 5.37 ± 2.44, 5.68 ± 2.52 and 5.75 ± 2.41 for the focus years of 2000, 2010 and 2020, respectively. There was an interaction between focus year and publication area: papers from AW journals scored better over time, in contrast with papers from AP journals, for which scores remained similar over decades. The inter-assessor agreement is moderate, which may reflect the subject complexity, as the language used in the papers studied was ambiguous in relation to why and for whom it is performed. The low overall mean score evidenced that the animal welfare scientific publications are, on average, not prioritizing the interests of the animals. Thus, our results evidenced the presence of animal welfarism in animal welfare science, a problem that seems not to be intrinsic to animal welfare science itself, but rather to the way research is frequently conceived, conducted, interpreted, summarized and applied. Therefore, it seems urgent to further study the motivation for animal welfare research. The statement of the main justification for animal welfare papers, with an explicit declaration of the motivational priorities that constitute each scientific animal welfare study, may be an interesting recommendation for the improvement of animal welfare science. Keywords: animal ethics, farm animal, motivation, sentience, welfarism

CITATION EXPORT

Alessandra Akemi Hashimoto Fragoso, Karynn Capilé, Cesar Augusto Taconeli et al.. Animal Welfare Science: Why and for Whom?. Animals : an Open Access Journal from MDPI. (2023). https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13111833

AUTHORS

6 · 2 CENTRES

Alessandra Akemi Hashimoto Fragoso, Karynn Capilé, Cesar Augusto Taconeli, Gabrielle Cristine de Almeida, Paula Pimpão de Freitas, Carla Forte Maiolino Molento

1Animal Welfare Laboratory, Federal University of Paraná, Rua dos Funcionários, 1540, Curitiba 80035-050, Brazil; [email protected] (A.A.H.F.); [email protected] (K.C.);
2Department of Statistics, Federal University of Paraná, Rua Cel. Francisco Heráclito dos Santos, 100, Curitiba 81531-980, Brazil; [email protected]