Abstract
Animal
welfare science has a potentially paradoxical attitude to animal
consciousness. On the one hand, the belief that animals are conscious is
what draws people to want to study animal welfare, but on the other,
consciousness remains ‘the hard problem’ and seems currently to be
beyond the usual methods of science. This article asks whether the study
of animal welfare that includes ‘feelings’ can be truly scientific by
examining changing scientific attitudes to studying consciousness that
have taken place over the last 50 years. Human psychologists have a
similar problem in studying human consciousness and their findings
provide a framework for studying feelings in nonhuman animals. Animal
welfare scientists have at least four different ways of dealing with the
potential paradox of animal consciousness. These are the following: (1)
To argue that there are no problems and so there is no paradox (2) To
admit the difficulties of studying consciousness and to settle for the
next best thing—the likely (but not certain) behavioral correlates of
consciousness (3) To admit the difficulties but then try to find ways of
studying consciousness more directly (4) To ignore the problem
altogether and concentrate on studying animal welfare in ways that are
independent of assumptions about animal consciousness. I conclude that
it is possible to have a science of animal welfare that avoids being
paradoxical and is able to make a genuine contribution to the greatest
remaining mystery in biology—why suffering, pleasure, and pain feel like anything at all.
Keywords
- Animal consciousness;
- Animal minds;
- Pain;
- Sentience;
- Suffering;
- Welfare
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
