Dr. Ruth Newberry
Lecture 1
This lecture addresses different philosophical views that people have about the use of animals in agriculture and some reasons why the animal industry should pay close attention to animal welfare issues. These reasons include presenting a positive public image, supporting high production and ease of handling animals, avoiding stress-related disease and avoiding conditions such as lameness that are associated with housing design.
Rights-based philosophy is usually only applied to humans. Each individual person is considered to have inherent value, not to be used solely as a means to an end or harmed by being killed. We have the right not to be exploited and killed. Tom Regan, a well-known animal rights philosopher, is famous for applying rights-based philosophy not only to humans but also to some animals. His ideas are laid out in an influential book called The Case for Animal Rights, published in 1983.
In commercial animal agriculture, animals are used and killed as a means to an end. They are kept specifically for the purpose of obtaining animal products that can be sold for profit. Agricultural animals are killed to obtain products or when they no longer have economic value. They are usually viewed as commodities that are here for the use of humans rather than as beings with inherent rights to life and liberty.
According to Tom Regan, animals used in agriculture have inherent value and should not be killed or otherwise used as means to an end. Applying rights-based philosophy to animals, Regan calls for the complete dissolution of commercial animal agriculture, commercial sport hunting, commercial trapping, and the use of animals in research. Thus, animal rights philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with animal agriculture.
Another major philosophical theory is utilitarianism. According to utilitarian philosophy, decisions should be made based, not on the inherent value of the individual but rather, on the consequences of actions. The aim of utilitarianism is to maximize pleasure (benefits) and minimize suffering (costs). In order to determine what course of action should be taken, a utilitarian performs a cost benefit analysis, weighing the benefits and the costs of an action to determine the net result. An action is considered ethical if the benefits in terms of the amount of pleasure or happiness in the world exceed the costs in terms of suffering. A person's decision depends on how they weigh up the costs and benefits. Most people apply utilitarian philosophy to their decisions about animal care and use.
Peter Singer is a utilitarian philosopher well known for his book Animal Liberation, first published in 1975. Although this book is a bible of the animal rights movement, Singer does not, in fact, follow animal rights philosophy. Peter Singer thinks that current practices in animal agriculture have a high cost in terms of animal suffering. He thinks that the benefit to humans from eating animal products is small because, in his opinion, a diet lacking animal products is healthier and at least as tasty. According to him, the costs of animal agriculture exceed the benefits and, therefore, he opposes commercial animal agriculture.
Vegetarians avoid eating meat products but they usually eat dairy products and eggs. Some people consider themselves vegetarian even if they eat fish or shellfish, and some vegetarians occasionally eat poultry. Veganism is an extreme form of vegetarianism. Vegans, like Peter Singer, will not intentionally eat any animal products. They also try to avoid using any animal products for any purpose. For example, they will not wear leather shoes.
In the United States, consumer-buying habits indicate that most people place a high value on a diet containing animal products and do not consider that animals suffer to the extent that they should stop purchasing animal products. However, preferences for different animal products vary based on factors such as perceived healthfulness, taste, and animal welfare. Many people in the animal industry are concerned about animal welfare and the avoidance of suffering. Unlike animal rights, utilitarianism and concern for animal welfare are not fundamentally incompatible with animal agriculture.
Animal rights groups often emphasize animal suffering, an animal welfare concern, in their literature. Many of their members may be primarily focused on animal welfare. However, the underlying goal of an animal rights organization is to eliminate the use of animals in practices such as commercial agriculture, an animal rights position. They usually promote a vegan lifestyle. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an animal rights organization. If you read their mission statement
(http://www.peta-online.org/about/mission.html), you will see that "PETA operates under the simple principle that animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment."
By contrast, groups such as the American Humane Association (http://www.americanhumane.org) and the Animal Welfare Institute (http://www.animalwelfare.com/) are animal welfare groups. Although they oppose some animal production practices and call for less confinement, they do not promote veganism or oppose animal agriculture per se.
It is very important for individuals in animal industries to pay attention to what consumers think about methods of animal production. Common sense says that people want safe, tasty food that is reasonably priced. At the same time they have an expectation that the animals will be reasonably happy and healthy during their lifetime. This is a concept from the Judeo-Christian religion, which underlies American society. According to the Bible, people should practice stewardship of animals: it is okay to use animals but if we are going to do so, we should do it in a humane manner.
Animal producers need to be concerned about public perception. You want the public to feel that as an industry, you are taking care of the animals and providing them a reasonably good life. That way, people can eat animal products and not feel guilty about it. The vast majority of Americans are far removed from agriculture. They do not see farm animals on a day to day basis. They may not really understand where the milk in the carton came from and they may have no idea what goes on at a modern farm.
Consumers' closest associations with animals are with their pets and they view their pets as part of the family and individuals to love. They will spend a lot of money taking care of their animals and they may not be able to comprehend the economic realities of agriculture. It would be a shock to many people if they knew about some practices performed in the course of animal production. In the absence of knowledge about modern agricultural practices and the reasons for them, members of the public are also vulnerable to misinformation and misunderstanding. When you are discussing animal production methods with members of the public, you need to keep these points in mind.
Animal welfare refers to the feelings or emotions of the animal, its overall health and its ability to cope with environmental stressors. A synonymous term is animal well-being. An animal is considered to have poor welfare (i.e., to be suffering) if it is experiencing pronounced and prolonged negative emotions such as pain, hunger, thirst, fear, fatigue, nausea or frustration, or if it is feeling too hot or too cold. An animal is in a good state of welfare if it is primarily experiencing neutral or positive mental states.
Treating animals badly and causing them to suffer creates a negative perception of animal agriculture among consumers and may lead some consumers to stop purchasing some, or all, animal products. Treating animals well is good for business. Not only is public perception improved but animal production is also improved.
A recent experiment with dairy cattle demonstrates how they perceive people and how it affects their milk production. In this study, two people handled each cow. One person was the "nice person" and one person was the "nasty person". The nasty person had a plastic shovel which was used to hit the cow every so often - not hard enough to inflict an injury, just hard enough to show a nasty intention towards her. Also the "nasty person" used an electric prod on the cow every now and then. In contrast the nice person spoke kindly to the cow, brushed her and offered her some grain in his hand every now and then. To protect against bias, the nice person and the nasty person switched roles between different cows. You can imagine that people that actually take care of cattle could show this range of behaviors. It turns out that the behavior of the people toward the cows affected milk production. When the cow was being milked, it made no difference whether the nice person was there or no one was there; the milk production was the same. But if the nasty person stood next to the cow, she let down 10% less milk. Thus, there is an economic benefit to being nice to cows.
This human influence on milk production has also been shown by comparing the treatment of cattle on different farms. Up to 50% of the variation in milk production between farms that can be attributed directly to the way that different people treat the cows. It has also been shown that the behavior of care providers towards pigs affects the pigs' growth rate. So, animal treatment is directly associated with economic returns.
Animals used in agriculture can remember where they have had unpleasant experiences. If you take an animal somewhere and it has an unpleasant experience, the next time you take it to the same location you will have a harder time handling the animal and getting it to go where you want. This concept is demonstrated in an experiment on sheep. Sheep were run through a chute and either electro-immobilized, physically restrained in the chute, or just run through the chute with no intervention. The next time the sheep were brought to the chute, if they had been previously electro-immobilized there, it took 6 minutes to get them to go in the chute a second time. It took 2 minutes to get them in the chute if they had previously been physically restrained there, but only 10 seconds to get them to go in if all they had done previously was run through the chute. Animal perception of how well or badly they are treated can affect the amount of time and effort that you have to expend in handling them. Often a bit of patience and a bit of extra care the first time can make a difference for all future situations of handling of that animal.
You have already learned about shipping fever and know that stress can depress the immune system and increase the risk of disease. When an animal is stressed, corticosteroids are released from the adrenal glands. Corticosteriods depress the immune system and reduce the ability of the animal to respond to disease challenges. Epinephrine (adrenalin) is also released from the adrenal glands, causing an increase in heart rate and preparing the animal for "fight or flight".
There are many types of environmental stressors that can activate a physiological stress response. In one study, a heart rate monitor was fastened to the sheep and then they were subjected to various stressors. The heart rate increased by 14 beats per minute (bpm) during transport. Isolation from the flock caused a 20 bpm increase. Being introduced to a new flock with unfamiliar sheep was even more stressful, as indicated by a 30 bpm increase in heart rate. Finally, exposure to unfamiliar people (+45 bpm) or, especially, a person with a dog (+79 bpm), was highly stressful and caused the greatest increase in heart rate. You can image the sheep might perceive unfamiliar people and dogs as predators.
These examples illustrate that stressors can come in many forms. Stress can originate from a nasty human, or meeting strangers of their own species, or being exposed to dominant animals. Handling, isolation, and similar events can all stress animals and reduce their ability to fight disease.
If animals have economic value, there is a strong incentive for the producer to treat animals well because this is going to impact their profits. In the absence of economic value, animal welfare problems can arise. For example, at the end of a laying hen's production cycle, she no longer has economic value and is sent to a plant for slaughter. Each hen is worth only about 2 cents at the processing plant. In the process of catching and transport to the plant, there can be rough handling of the hens to the point where 20-30% of them may sustain bone fractures between the time they are removed from the cage to the time they are slaughtered. This sort of treatment would likely upset members of the public if they knew about it. This is a weak link in the system because animals that have low economic value tend to receive a lower level of care.
Another example of an unwanted animal with low economic value to the producer is the male dairy calf. In the dairy industry, half the calves that are born are unwanted because they are male. Some of these male calves are sold for white veal production. There are many discussions about the impact of housing and diet on the welfare of veal calves. However, probably the number one concern should be the high mortality that results when dairy producers fail to give the calves colostrum before shipping them for sale to veal producers. Without colostrum, the calves are highly susceptible to disease.
Another concern is when calves are shipped at a very young age. According to Dr. Temple Grandin, an animal welfare scientist, sometimes dairy calves are leaving the farm while still wet and unable to stand. When shipped this soon after birth, they are unlikely to be able to cope with the rigors of transport to the veal farm. This is another issue that seems to be related to the lack of value of these animals to the producer and that is likely to be perceived badly by the public.
Other animal welfare problems are associated with housing design and confinement on concrete flooring. Problems with housing design may result from lack of knowledge on the part of the producer or the high costs involved in providing improved housing for the animals.
Lameness is a common animal welfare problem in dairy cows that is related to their housing conditions. The most common types of lameness in dairy cattle are warts, resulting from infection of the heels, and laminitis and related lesions such as sole ulcers that are associated with inflammation of the corium inside the hoof. Both warts and inflammation inside the inflexible hoof are painful, resulting in lameness. Usually, the hind feet are affected.
Standing for long periods on dirty concrete flooring increases the risk of lameness in dairy cattle. The time spent standing in free stalls with the hind feet out on the concrete is increased by uncomfortable stall flooring/bedding and by stalls with insufficient lunge space at the front for the cow to move her head forward into while lying down and standing up. Time spent standing on concrete is also increased, especially among subordinate cows, when there are not enough comfortable stalls for all cows to lie down in at the same time. Having an adequate number of stalls is very important due to the social structure of cow herds; if stalls are limited, the more dominant animals will get the stalls and the low ranking cows will be left standing on the concrete. Insufficient feed bunk space and insufficient computerized grain feeders will also extend the time spent standing waiting on concrete by subordinate cows. Standing waiting on concrete before milking may also be a factor increasing the risk of lameness. Providing short, slightly elevated stalls with rubber mats to stand on at the feed bunk can help to reduce lameness. Then, while the cow is eating, she is standing on a cleaner, softer surface than concrete. Correcting lameness problems requires an understanding of how the housing is used by the animals and adjusting the design of the housing to the animals' behavior.
Bovine recombinant growth hormone is used in the USA to increase the milk production of the cattle. Use of this hormone has been associated with animal welfare problems such as mastitis and lameness. These problems have been invoked to support a ban on the use of this product in Canada at the present time. If you are going to increase the productivity of the cow, you have to have really good facilities to deal with the increased production demands. The animal welfare problems attributed to this product appear to be due to some producers not having adequate facilities to deal with the increased nutritional and housing needs of cows receiving the product.
The next lecture will focus on animal welfare legislation in different countries.
last edit March 03, 2000
