WBI Studies Repository (WellBeing International)
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The UK Badger Cull: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
Get PDFIn England, so often dubbed a nation of animal lovers, close to 177,000 native badgers, a protected species under UK law, have been shot under license since 2013, ostensibly to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis in cattle. There is no doubt that bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is a severe problem for cattle, farmers, and taxpayers. In 2021, over 72,000 herd tests, covering more than 9 million individual cattle, were performed across Great Britain. Almost 39,000 reactor cattle and their direct contacts were slaughtered under the compulsory test and-slaughter program. More than 3.500 new herd incidents of bovine TB were recorded in 2021, and nearly 9% of cattle herds in the ‘High-Risk Area’ covering the West and South-West of England were affected and subject to movement and trading controls. The cost to the taxpayer of bTB testing and compensating farmers over the past decade is estimated to be more than £500 million (US$630 million). A typical bTB breakdown costs a farmer many thousands of pounds, not forgetting the associated disruption to their herds and businesses.
However, the licensed killing of badgers as a means of controlling bTB, introduced in 2013, has been steeped in controversy, with veterinarians, epidemiologists, animal welfare experts, farming representatives, politicians, government scientists, officials, and the wider public arguing over the ethics and effectiveness of the policy
Sentience in decapods: Difficulties to surmount
Get PDFIn the target article Crump et al. present 8 criteria to assess whether decapods experience pain. Four of these -- sensory integration, motivational trade-offs, flexible self-protection, and associative learning -- could be used to assess sentience in general. In this commentary I discuss difficulties with using these criteria to provide evidence of sentience in decapods, particularly if this evidence is to change public opinion and policies. These difficulties are lack of evidence, the potential to eventually explain the neurobiological basis of the behaviors chosen as criteria, thereby eliminating any explanatory work for sentience, and the reluctance to bring animals that are not cuddly under our moral umbrella
Emotional component of pain perception in the medicinal leech?
Get PDFCrump et al. have provided a series of criteria to assess animal sentience that is focused on the perception of pain, which is known to have both sensory and emotional components. They also provide a qualitative scoring system to assess data that address the eight criteria and apply this paradigm to decapod crustaceans. The criteria laid out have the potential to be applied to other invertebrates typically thought to have sensory response to tissue damage, but no emotional component to pain perception
Defining and assessing sentience
Get PDFPrecisely what is meant by the term sentience and how does it overlap with being conscious? We accept that animals have feelings but how do we know what they are and can we measure them? It is important that we clarify the terminology underlying these difficult concepts. Over the last 50 years a scientific discipline has developed to tackle these questions in a systematic way. We have to avoid thoughtless anthropomorphism yet we have to try to relate sentience in animals, as appropriate, to corresponding experiences in humans
Independence, weight and priority of evidence for sentience
Get PDFThis commentary maps out relationships of dependency between the criteria proposed in the target article (Crump et al. 2022), identifying the criteria that carry most of the weight of the evidence, and suggesting which criteria should have priority in research on sentience
Generalizing frameworks for sentience beyond natural species
Get PDFCrump et al. (2022) offer a well-argued example of an essential development: a rigorous framework for assessing sentience from the perspective of moral concern over an agent’s welfare. Current and forthcoming developments in bioengineering, synthetic morphology, artificial intelligence, biorobotics, and exobiology necessitate an expansion and generalization of this effort. Verbal reports (the Turing Test) and homology to human brains are utterly inadequate criteria for assessing the status of novel, unconventional agents that offer no familiar touchstone of phylogeny or anatomy. We must develop principled approaches to evaluating the sentience of (and thus, our responsibility to) beings of unfamiliar provenance and composition
Wild animal welfare
Get PDFRowan et al’s article provides an overview of developments in the science of animal sentience and its links to animal welfare policy, especially regarding farm animals. But changing ideas of animal sentience and welfare are also important for managing wild and other free-living animals. We ask how the welfare of these animals differs from that of farmed animals, especially how the ability to make autonomous choices may matter. We suggest that more research into wild animal welfare is needed to make informed policy decisions, for example, about using animals in rewilding projects and choosing between policies of culling and fertility control
Cities, Nature and Human Well-being
Get PDFWilliam H. Whyte (1917-1999) may be best remembered as the author of The Organization Man. This 1956 bestseller described a corporate America in which, he argued, our esteemed sense of rugged individualism had been replaced by a softer ethos of conformity and “groupthink” (Whyte took this term from George Orwell). Amplified through other outlets such as the popular movie The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the image of legions of corporate males complemented by their domestic female home builders came to define the America of the 1950s
Sentience as part of emotional lives
Get PDFIt is high time to explore the sentience of invertebrate animals, but this topic cannot be discussed without also exploring their emotional lives, including positive emotions. Sentience probably evolved to allow the regulation of emotions by endowing them with feelings
Animal sentience science and policy
Get PDFAnimal sentience research cannot be divorced from its ethical and political implications. For example, discovering which animals are sentient is vital for deciding which require welfare protection. Two legal case-studies illustrate the importance of scientists in such debates: the UK Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 had input from animal sentience researchers, whereas the US Animal Welfare Act 1966 did not. The former defined sentient animals much more plausibly than the latter. I accordingly argue that sentience researchers should inform policy, and that this is achievable without sacrificing scientific integrity