Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: This essay deals with the recognition of non-painful emotional experiences in animals, how they relate to animal wellbeing and animal welfare, and how they can be assessed, monitored and mitigated. While it is written often from a mammalian perspective, the general principles will apply to all animals that are sentient. Definitions and descriptions The impact of poor health, pain, distress and other adverse states on animals will often have a direct effect on their welfare and their quality of life. The question is how do we know that it is having this effect and how can we measure its degree of impact? The umbrella term used to describe such adverse states in the USA research regulations is “pain and distress ” whereas in Europe the equivalent phrase is “pain, suffering, distress and lasting harm”. Perhaps the US Congress, when it approved those words, was interpreting the word “distress ” as ‘any adverse state other than pain’. After all, pain is a common, well-defined experiential phenomenon, well understood by the public, well characterized in terms of its anatomy, physiology, neurology and pathology, and several modalities are available for its treatment and avoidance. Distress, on
Source: WBI Studies Repository
Author: David B. Morton
Language: English
Subfield: Animal Science and Zoology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W95173034