Our definition of welfare

December 22, 2020

Key takeaways

• Wild Animal Initiative uses “welfare” to refer to the aggregate quality of an individual’s subjective experiences over a given time period.
• As we define it, welfare consists solely of mental states. This intentionally differentiates welfare from factors that contribute to mental states, such as physical states or natural behaviors.
• We hope research will improve our definition of welfare by clarifying what exactly constitutes subjective experiences, which animals are capable of having them, and how to aggregate and compare those experiences across time, individuals, species, or communities.

Welfare is central to Wild Animal Initiative’s mission of understanding and improving the lives of wild animals. This post explains what we mean by “welfare” and how that compares to other conceptions of the term we have encountered.

Welfare as mental states

Wild Animal Initiative uses “welfare” to refer to the aggregate quality of an individual’s subjective experiences over a given time period. This could also be called “well-being” or “quality of life.”

“Subjective experiences” are good or bad feelings. We use “sentience” to mean the capacity to have such mental states. This capacity is sometimes referred to as “primary consciousness” or “phenomenal consciousness.” Importantly, sentience does not require “secondary consciousness” or “access consciousness,” which is the ability to reflect upon or report subjective experiences. A sentient individual could have positive and negative feelings without being able to communicate to themselves or to someone else, “I feel this way.”

Aggregating those experiences over time yields the individual’s welfare for that period. An animal might have high welfare in the instant they bite into their favorite food, despite feeling cold at the same time. That same animal might have low total lifetime welfare if they are hungry most of the time and die slowly of a painful disease.

Others have defined welfare similarly. For example:

• “The overall affective experience in the mental domain equates to the welfare status of the animals” (Mellor 2017, Mellor & Beausoleil 2015).

• “Welfare is a property of individuals of species considered to have the capacity for both pleasant and unpleasant mental experiences, i.e., experiences that matter to the animal itself; this capacity is otherwise known as sentience” (Beausoleil 2018).

• “Welfare is dependent on what animals feel (Duncan 1993). … Welfare refers to what is actually being experienced by the animal; thus, the good functioning of the body will usually but not necessarily promote the animal’s welfare” (Fraser et al. 1997).

Excluding non-mental factors

As we define it, welfare consists solely of mental states. This makes it narrower than conceptions of welfare that include other factors.

Physical states

Some descriptions of welfare refer to both physical and mental states. For example:

• “The term ‘animal welfare’ will allude to a complex construct that includes both objective and subjective aspects of the physical and mental well-being of animals” (Sharp & Saunders 2011).

It can be unclear whether these descriptions are meant as empirical claims (that physical health contributes to or influences welfare as a matter of fact) or definitions (that the concept of welfare necessarily includes physical health). 

We prefer to clearly differentiate physical and mental well-being because physical states affect mental states but do not entirely determine them. An incision doesn’t hurt a patient while they are under anesthesia, yet a panic attack can cause suffering even in the absence of physical harm. In such cases where physical and mental well-being diverge, the very acts of delivering anesthesia or calming a panicking person reveal a preference for prioritizing mental well-being. Therefore, we choose mental states as the ultimate measure of welfare, and physical states as important inputs to mental states.

Natural behavior

Others describe welfare as encompassing the expression of natural behavior. For example:

• “Not only will welfare mean control of pain and suffering. It will also entail nurturing and fulfillment of the animals’ natures, which I call telos” (Rollin 1993).

Descriptions of welfare that refer to natural behavior can also be vague about the claims they entail. Do the authors regard the expression of natural behaviors as necessary to a high welfare life as a matter of fact, or are they making a stronger definitional claim that what it means to have good welfare is to be able to express natural behaviors? 

We agree that, like physical well-being, the expression of natural behavior often contributes to high welfare and can often serve as a useful proxy for mental states. But like physical well-being, expressing natural behavior does not always result in positive mental states. Foraging for seeds on the ground is a natural behavior for many birds, but perhaps they have higher welfare when (all else equal) they can simply eat from a bird feeder.

Benefits of a narrow definition

Ultimately, we prefer to restrict the definition of welfare to mental states because they are highly relevant under a broad range of ethical systems. The suffering and happiness of others tend to be important considerations even when they are not the only ones. 

When researching ways to improve the lives of wild animals, differentiating mental states from related factors can make it easier to elucidate the exact relationships between welfare and things that contribute to welfare. A critical contribution of additional wild animal welfare research will be a better understanding of what genuinely makes wild animals’ lives more enjoyable to them, as opposed to what we assume will make them happy. By separating out what welfare is, precisely, from the features we believe to foster welfare in practice, we open the door to empirical assessment of our conventional assumptions, such as the idea that animals in the wild are typically happy or that leaving animals alone is the most humans can do to help them.

Relevance of other factors

Factors other than mental states remain crucially important to welfare, even when we recognize that an animal’s physical state is conceptually different from their welfare. Physical states, natural behaviors, environmental conditions, and more play large roles in producing animals’ subjective experiences in practice. Because we can’t — and may never be able to — measure subjective experiences directly (Nagel 1974, Muehlhauser 2017), understanding welfare requires understanding how to use other factors as indicators.

This approach underlies the Five Domains model of animal welfare assessment:

• “The first four domains [nutrition, environment, health, and behavior] focus attention on factors that give rise to specific negative or positive subjective experiences (affects), which contribute to the animal’s mental state, as evaluated in Domain 5 [the mental domain]” (Mellor et al. 2020).

Opportunities to further refine the definition

Although our definition is narrower than multifaceted concepts of welfare, there are several ways it could be refined even further. We have not taken a stance on what exactly constitutes subjective experiences or which animals are capable of having them. Nor do we know how to aggregate the wide variety of feelings an individual experiences over their life, or how to compare experiences across individuals or species. 

We hope researchers in wildlife welfare studies and related disciplines will continue to pursue these questions in order to better meet the needs of wild animals.

Acknowledgements

Deputy Director Cameron Meyer Shorb led the writing of this article. Research Communications Specialist Hollis Howe and Executive Director Michelle Graham contributed to the writing. Hollis led the research on sentience. 2019 Summer Research Intern Dylan Quinn led the research on conceptions of welfare in the literature. All members of the Wild Animal Initiative team as of January 2019 (Researcher Simon Eckerström Liedholm, Researcher Luke Hecht, Researcher Jane Capozzelli, Michelle, Cameron, and Hollis) contributed to discussions on how Wild Animal Initiative should define welfare and what role it should play in our mission (see our FAQ for more).

References

1. Allen, C. & Trestman, M. Animal consciousness. (2017). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/consciousness-animal/.

2. Beausoleil, N., Mellor, D. J., Baker, L., Baker, S. E., Bellio, M., Clarke, A. S., Dale, A., Garlick, S., Jones, B., Harvey, A., Pitcher, B. J., Sherwen, S., Stockin, K. A., & Zito, S. (2018). “Feelings and fitness,” not “feelings or fitness”: the raison d’´être of conservation welfare, which aligns conservation and animal welfare objectives. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2018.00296. 

3. Beausoleil, N. J., Fisher, P., Littin, K. E., Warburton, B., Mellor, D. J., Dalefield, R. R., & Cowan, P. (2016). A systematic approach to evaluating and ranking the animal welfare impacts of wildlife control methods: poisons used for lethal control of brushtail possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) in New Zealand. Wildlife Research, 43, 553–565. https://doi.org/10.1071/wr16041.

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5. Fraser, D. (2010). Toward a synthesis of conservation and animal welfare science. Animal Welfare, 19(2), 121-124. https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/conbawel/1/. 

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8. Mellor, D. J. (2016). Updating animal welfare thinking: moving beyond the “Five Freedoms” towards “a life worth living.” Animals, 6(3), 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani6030021. 

9. Mellor, D. J. (2012).  Animal emotions, behaviour and the promotion of positive welfare states. New Zealand Veterinary Journal, 60(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/00480169.2011.619047. 

10. Mellor, D. J. & Beausoleil, N. (2015). Extending the “Five Domains” model for animal welfare assessment to incorporate positive welfare states. Animal Welfare, 24, 241-253. https://www.ufaw.org.uk/downloads/mellor.pdf.  

11. Mellor, D., Beausoleil, N., Littlewood, K., McLean, A., McGreevy, P., Jones, B., & Wilkins, C. (2020). The 2020 Five Domains Model: Including Human-Animal Interactions in Assessments of Animal Welfare. Animals (Basel), 10, 1870. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10101870.

12. Mellor, D. J. & Reid, C. S. W. (1994). Concepts of animal well-being and predicting the impact of procedures on experimental animals. Improving the well-being of animals in the research environment, 3-18. https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/exprawel/7/. 

13. Muehlhauser, L. 2017 report on consciousness and moral patienthood. www. OpenPhilanthropy.org. (Updated January 2018). https://www.openphilanthropy.org/2017-report-consciousness-and-moral-patienthood. 

14. Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83, 435-450. Cornell University Press. http://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/conteudo_thumb/What-Is-It-Like-to-Be-a-Bat-1.pdf. 

15. Rollin, B. E. (1993). Animal welfare, science, and value. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 6(2), 44-50. 

16. Sharp, T. & Saunders, G. (2011). A model for assessing the relative humaneness of pest animal control methods (Second edition). Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry, Canberra, ACT. Printed by: New Millenium Print. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/sites/default/files/style%20library/images/daff/__data/assets/pdffile/0008/929888/humaneness-pest-animals.pdf.