scholarly journals Nonhuman Animal Experiments in the European Community: Human Values and Rational Choice

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Peggs
Keyword(s):  
Impact Assessment ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
European Community ◽  
Animal Experiments ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
The Impact

AbstractIn 2008, the European Community (EC) adopted a Proposal to revise the EC Directive on nonhuman animal experiments, with the aim of improving the welfare of the nonhuman animals used in experiments. An Impact Assessment, which gauges the likely economic and scientific effects of future changes, as well as the effects on nonhuman animal welfare, informs the Proposal. By using a discourse analytical approach, this paper examines the Directive, the Impact Assessment and the Proposal to reflect critically upon assumptions about the morality of nonhuman animal experiments. Because nonhuman animal welfare is so prominent in the Proposal, it appears that the EC position advances beyond human self-interest (orthodox rational choice) as the sole motivator for such experiments, to ethical questions about the welfare of nonhuman animals (which can be better explained by a multidimensional approach to rational choice). In examining this contention, this paper concludes that, even given concerns about nonhuman animal welfare, nonhuman animal experimentation in the EC is firmly grounded in a morality that focuses on human benefit goals rather than on the wider moral issues associated with the means of achieving such goals.

Future Animal: Environmental and Animal Welfare Perspectives on the Genetic Engineering of Animals

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
LYLE MUNRO
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Engineering ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Invention ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Case Basis ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Genetic engineering is a social invention as much as a biological one. Ordinary citizens interested in the well-being of life on the planet should therefore be involved in the ethical debates concerning the future of nonhuman animals. The creations of genetic engineers ought to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis by what the American philosopher R. G. Frey calls “a jury of concerned individuals.” Frey is an advocate for putting animals in perspective, which means that animals matter, but not as much as humans. He therefore supports the prevailing moral orthodoxy, which currently in the West means that animals can be eaten, dissected, hunted, and exhibited, provided that these things are done humanely and that the benefits to humans outweigh the harms to the animals. The “concerned individual,” he suggests, would have no objection to humans killing animals as long as the animals do not suffer. In the present paper, my aim is to raise some of the ethical, welfare, and social issues from an animal-protectionist perspective which ordinary citizens would need to consider if they were ever asked to vote on the benefits or otherwise of the impact of genetic engineering on animal welfare.

What Can a Farm Animal Biography Accomplish? The Case of Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf

2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Tsovel
Keyword(s):  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Farm Animal ◽  
Emotional Attachment ◽  
Young Calf ◽  
Nonhuman Animals

AbstractAgricultural reports and guides, nonhuman animal welfare studies, and animal rights reports attempt to document and convey the condition of nonhuman animals in agriculture. These disciplines tend to resist a prolonged and methodically versatile examination of individual animals. In his pioneer work, Lovenheim (2002), The author produced such a biographical documentation of calves in the dairy and meat industries. He provided an exceptionally prolonged and detailed tracing of their lives as individuals, establishing an emotional attachment in both documenter and reader. Yet, sentiments for the farmers, typical urban conceptions of communication with nonhuman animals, and difficulties in obtaining the relevant information limit Lovenheim's success and imply similar difficulties in other cases.

In It for the Nonhuman Animals: Animal Welfare, Moral Certainty, and Disagreements

2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Missionary Zeal ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
The World ◽  
Good For ◽  
Moral Certainty ◽  
Welfare Workers

AbstractBased on three years' ethnographic research with animal sanctuary workers, this paper argues that a level of moral certainty drives and justifies many of the workers' actions and beliefs. Similar to the "missionary zeal" of nonhuman animal rights activists, this moral certainty divides the world into two neat categories: good for the animals and bad for the animals. This overriding certainty takes precedence over other concerns and pervades all aspects of sanctuary life, resulting in the breakdown of different facets of that life into good and bad homes, good and bad animals, and good and bad workers. The paper, therefore, argues that animal welfare workers may be as "radical" as animal rights activists in one respect—their adherence to the overriding principle of being "in it for the animals."

“[A]s if some animal were dying in a slow but exquisite anguish”

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
Jeanne Dubino
Keyword(s):  
Guinea Pigs ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Cutting Out ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Impact

Throughout her writing, Woolf includes brief descriptions of the killing, torture and trauma of individual animals: Peggy’s experimentation, presumably on guinea pigs, in The Years; Bob Brinsley pulling the wings off of a fly in “The Introduction”; Macalister’s boy cutting out a piece of a live fish and throwing it back into the water in To the Lighthouse; a kidnapped giant cockatoo shrieking in terror in Flush, and a dog’s flashbacks on witnessing this scene; and Giles stomping on a snake choking on a toad stuck in its mouth in Between the Acts. In these scenes, Woolf highlights animal suffering. By addressing human-animal encounters in the research lab, “pests” in the home, the fishes we eat, the pets we keep and the snakes we meet in a walk, Woolf, as Dubino shows, makes visible the impact of our human presence in the nonhuman animal world. Within these brief glimpses she reminds us of the toll that humanity, but especially patriarchy, as it is inflected by science, capitalism and war, takes on its fellow nonhuman creatures. This essay explores how comprehensively and feelingly Woolf portrays the ways that nonhuman animals suffer and how humans both inflict and perceive that suffering.

College Students’ Experiences of Nonhuman Animal Harm in the United States and The Bahamas

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 752-775
Author(s):  
William J. Fielding ◽  
Travis W. Cronin ◽  
Christina Risley-Curtiss
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
College Students ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Companion Animals ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Societal Implications ◽  
The Bahamas ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Teaching Animal

Abstract This study compares and contrasts experiences of harm to nonhuman animals in the lives of 830 college students in The Bahamas and the United States. Overall, students in The Bahamas were more likely to have been exposed to seeing animals harmed (65%) than those in the United States (16%), and they were more likely to have seen an animal killed (22% in The Bahamas and 12% in the United States). Bahamian students reported a higher rate of participation in harming animals than United States students. Stray animals were at greater risk of harm than animals designated as companion animals. The occurrence of coerced harm to animals including zoophilia was low. Participants were indirect victims of animal harm at older ages than the ages at which they had first witnessed or participated in harming animals. Cross-societal implications of harming animals are discussed in the context of teaching animal welfare.

Animal Welfare Promotion as a Mechanism of Moral Certification: Microhistorical Evidence From 19th Century Switzerland

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Geoffroy Legentilhomme
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract How do nonhuman animal welfare campaigns influence the institutional use of nonhuman animals? This article narrates an episode of nineteenth century history of Geneva, pertaining to the use of nonhuman animals in science, to argue that welfare advocacy is a risky, and indeed sometimes counterproductive, endeavor. In the late nineteenth century, the mainstream Genevan animal welfare group (SGPA) refused to condemn vivisection, and decided to side with Moritz Schiff, a controversial physiologist, provided that he later accepted respecting certain welfare standards in his experiments. The SGPA defended Schiff against the charges of the Genevan abolitionists, and thus provided a metaphorical certificate of “humane treatment” to the vivisector. Behind this moral shield, the laboratory could expand its practices, undisturbed by the need to legitimize them. This episode illustrates the phenomenon of “capture” of the welfarist group by the institutions from which animals are supposed to be protected in the first place.

Attitudes of Australian and Turkish Students of Veterinary Medicine toward Nonhuman Animals and Their Careers

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 580-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serdar Izmirli ◽  
Ali Yigit ◽  
Clive Julian Christie Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Veterinary Medicine ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Career Aspirations ◽  
Companion Animals ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Veterinary Students ◽  
Program Satisfaction ◽  
Attitudes Toward Animals ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Predominately Female

We examined attitudes toward nonhuman animal welfare and rights and career aspirations in Australian and Turkish veterinary students. A representative university was selected in each country, with 190 first- and third-year students sampled in each. Survey questions addressed attitudes toward nonhuman animal welfare/rights, and intended career. Australian and Turkish students were predominately female and male, respectively, but attitudes were similar between sexes. Australian students rated keeping companion animals and hormonal desexing more acceptable, and food and rest deprivation, pain during slaughter, and using animals in experiments less acceptable than Turkish students. Keeping companion animals related strongly with students’ moral values, their decision to study veterinary medicine, and program satisfaction. More Australian than Turkish students wanted to enter clinical practice. Thus veterinary students of these two culturally contrasting countries demonstrated both differences and universalities, such as companion animal keeping, which influenced their attitudes toward animals and career aspirations.

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