News
Understanding animal welfare
Animal welfare standards can be a bit subjective. In some cases what one person feels is inhumane is standard industry protocol. Which is why Candace Croney, director of the newly created Purdue Center for Animal Welfare Sciences, says one of her goals at the new center is not to focus solely on what is considered the hard sciences of animal well-being. “We’re not just going to look at the physiology of animals, which is the behavior of animals,” she says. “It’s really important to look at the ethics and the value systems that really underlie why people are concerned about animals and what they consider good quality of life for animals.”
She tells Brownfield from there it becomes important to understand what those outside of the livestock industry know and think about animal welfare. “Other than what really gets highlighted in the media – are they really aware of the practices that pertain to the species that really are
Croney says the center really meant to be a comprehensive approach that bridges the sciences of animal welfare with other sciences like philosophy, social sciences, and psychology.
AUDIO: Candace Croney, Purdue University (3:30mp3)
This is an important issue, but it begs the question of another, even more important issue – does the general public understand that some of the practices they object to are directly attributable to the nature of the animals themselves and outlawing them is not only inhumane, but would make animal husbandry impossible? So many practices developed as a way of protecting animals from themselves, because animals kept in “natural” groups are not all sweet and cuddly with each other. Chicken cages were the result of industry-financed research that discovered chickens PREFER being in a small, safe cage with a few friends over the alternatives: being crowded in huge barns at the mercy of thousands of strangers who attack and pull feathers, until most are practically naked and many are pecked to death; or piling up in barn corners and suffocating by the thousands as a result the the group panics chickens are subject to; or being caught by hawks in huge numbers while “free ranging” outdoors. Pig crates protect baby pigs from being lain on by their mother and have been used for a few days before and after birth for literally thousands of years. Pail-fed calves will suck on anything in reach to satisfy their sucking instinct, damaging each other’s ears and tails or swallowing splinters from wooden housing. And so forth. It seems to me that a major push to educate the public about these things would be a big help in changing minds.