Measuring Animal Welfare Part Seven: Miscellaneous Ways Of Determining Animal Well-Being
A brief series finale
Qualitative Behavioral Assessment
Asking people “does this animal seem happy?” is a bizarrely effective way of assessing animal welfare. Humans can distinguish transport-habituated and transport-naive sheep and cattle, as well as drugged and undrugged pigs. Humans generally describe the animals with the words you’d expect: transport-naive sheep are described as anxious, while undrugged pigs are described as curious. You can guess that domesticated animals evolved to have human-readable emotions.
Unfortunately, human preconceptions affect their assessments: for example, people who believe hens are from an organic farm will rate them as happier than people who believe that the same hens are from a conventional farm. Still neat.
Opiate Self-Administration
Various species of animals (e.g. rats) choose to self-administer opiates when they’re in pain and take fewer opiates when they’re no longer in pain. I find it puzzling how rarely this measure is used to figure out whether various animal species are in pain or not in various situations. Maybe there’s a good reason I don’t know, or maybe I just don’t know the right keywords.
Cognitive Biases
Unhappy humans have cognitive biases, like assuming that everything is going to be terrible forever. So do unhappy animals! Starlings removed from an enriched environment interpret ambiguous stimuli negatively; so do rats in unpredictable and stressful conditions. Unfortunately, this doesn’t enlighten us about why the animals are unhappy. The results also don’t necessarily track with a common-sense idea of welfare—starlings who never had an enriched cage didn’t have any particular cognitive biases.