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BLUECAMP ANIMAL WELFARE ADVOCACY (BAWA)
This page was created under the collaboration between the Outlook English Club (OEC) and the ethologist Veronica Pini (University of Turin, Italy).
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| Nhu and Veronica Pini Topic 1: Animal Sentience
Question 1: In the scientific article "The changing concept of animal sentience" written by Ian J.H Duncan, the author described a brief history of animal sentience research. According to the author, what was the time for the changing concept related to the ability to fear and suffer of an animal occur?
The greatest intellectuals of the Renaissance period (14th-17th century), in Europe, started to notice and support the ability of animals to have feelings. Despite that, some scientists and philosophers didn’t agree with this idea, claiming that animals had no sentience. One of them, Descartes, even wrote that animals were machines unable to think and feel anything.
After Renaissance, in the Age of Enlightenment - the Age of Reason – this point of view was abandoned: in the 19th century the scientific community agreed on animal sentience, the ability of animals to have feelings.
In the 20th century, though, new problems emerged. In 1913 a new approach in psychological science developed: Behaviorism. According to this research methodology, only observable events were considered. As emotions and thoughts are not easily observable in animals they weren’t believed to exist. Only in the second half of the century, the focus slowly came back to animal sentience and welfare.
Question 2: What did happen at the International Ethology Conference in Parma, Italy in 1975? What was the meaning of this event to the study of animal sentience?
This is an important data for animal sentience: it’s the time when it started to be considered in the ethological research. Ethology is a biological discipline that studies animal evolution through the observation of their behaviours and, like Behaviorism, it mostly considered observable events. At the International Ethology Conference, in 1975, Donald Griffin presented his paper on animal subjective feelings. From that day on, this topic became of central importance in ethological research and it opened the road to a large amount of studies on animal sentience and welfare.
Question 3: What did inspire and incite the author of the book "Animal Machines" to write her book?
When the British activist Ruth Harrison published her book “Animal Machines”, in 1964, European animal welfare consideration was still under the influence of Behaviorism. Animals were treated without any consideration of their feelings, as they were believed to have none. In the agricultural industry, biomedical research and product testing, animals were just treated as production units.
Harrison decided to write her book after acknowledging the bad condition of these animals and she described and reported the suffering of livestock in intensive farms.
Her role was crucial for the changes in British and European legislation in animal welfare: thanks to her book, in 1965, the British government appointed a Committee with the task of investigating on animal welfare in farm industries. The Committee published a report indicating Five Freedoms that must be respected in order to guarantee animal welfare; Freedoms that were adopted by several organisations all over the world, including the World Organisation for Animal Health.
Question 4: Since when behavioral scientists step by step agreed on the role of animal feelings in their investigations into animal welfare problems?
The view on animal welfare in behavioral scientists started to change in the ‘80s, with the publication of Marian Dawkins’ “Animal Suffering”. In this book, she stated that animals’ feelings are an important element in animal welfare. With time, this idea gradually evolved to considering feelings as all that matter in determining the welfare.
(to be continued)
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