Animal Welfare Science: Why and for Whom?

Abstract

There are, in the literature, distinct ways to approach animal welfare. The objective of this work was to study the value attributed to farm animals in the scientific papers published in animal welfare and animal production journals at three different points in time, separated by a decade each. The first ten papers mentioning “animal welfare” or “animal well-being” in their objectives or hypotheses from each journal and each focus year were selected. The 180 papers were blindly scored by five assessors between 1 and 10, according to the degree of intrinsic value attributed to animals. The overall mean score and standard deviation were 5.60 ± 2.49, with 6.46 ± 2.29 and 4.74 ± 2.40 for AW and AP journals, respectively, and 5.37 ± 2.44, 5.68 ± 2.52 and 5.75 ± 2.41 for the focus years of 2000, 2010 and 2020, respectively. There was an interaction between focus year and publication area: papers from AW journals scored better over time, in contrast with papers from AP journals, for which scores remained similar over decades. The inter-assessor agreement is moderate, which may reflect the subject complexity, as the language used in the papers studied was ambiguous in relation to why and for whom it is performed. The low overall mean score evidenced that the animal welfare scientific publications are, on average, not prioritizing the interests of the animals. Thus, our results evidenced the presence of animal welfarism in animal welfare science, a problem that seems not to be intrinsic to animal welfare science itself, but rather to the way research is frequently conceived, conducted, interpreted, summarized and applied. Therefore, it seems urgent to further study the motivation for animal welfare research. The statement of the main justification for animal welfare papers, with an explicit declaration of the motivational priorities that constitute each scientific animal welfare study, may be an interesting recommendation for the improvement of animal welfare science.