Core Concepts: Welfare
This piece is part of our Core Concepts series, which introduces key topics in wild animal welfare.
March 8, 2023
At Wild Animal Initiative, we use “welfare” to mean the aggregate quality of subjective mental experiences, at a given point in time or over a given period of time, for an individual or a group of individuals.
“Subjective experiences” are good or bad feelings. We use “sentience” to mean the capacity to have such mental states. Note that this use of “sentience” doesn’t require the ability to reflect on or report those experiences; a sentient individual could have positive and negative feelings without being able to communicate to themselves or to someone else, “I feel this way.”
Other definitions of welfare
This definition reflects the way “welfare” is commonly used in scientific discourse (Mellor et al. 2020, Mellor 2017,Beausoleil 2018, Mellor & Beausoleil 2015, Fraser et al. 1997, Duncan 1993). However, it differs from some definitions of welfare in that it only describes mental states. Others also consider physical health (Sharp & Saunders 2011) or the expression of natural behaviors (Rollin 1993) to be components of welfare. We agree that health and natural behavior are major factors that affect mental states, but because they don’t wholly determine mental states and because any effects they have on welfare will be reflected in an individual’s mental state anyway, we prefer to clearly differentiate the outcome from the inputs. This is consistent with the approach used by the Five Domains model of animal welfare assessment:
“The first four domains [nutrition, environment, health, and behavior] focus attention on factors that give rise to specific negative or positive subjective experiences (affects), which contribute to the animal’s mental state, as evaluated in Domain 5 [the mental domain]” (Mellor et al. 2020).
Research needed
While the meaning of welfare is relatively simple in theory, there are many open questions about how it works in practice.
That starts with questions about who has welfare. Which species are sentient? At what point in those animals’ development does sentience emerge? How does the quality or intensity of sentience differ across species and life stages?
The next set of questions deals with how to assess welfare. Given that we can’t measure subjective experiences directly (Nagel 1974, Muehlhauser 2017), what physiological or behavioral metrics can serve as proxies for welfare? What are the relevant baselines, ranges, and benchmarks we can use to interpret that data within and across species? How can we collect that data in the field: remotely, at scale, and in uncontrolled conditions?
Finally, responsible wildlife welfare management will require understanding how to compare and combine different experiences. At the individual level, how do acute feelings compare to chronic feelings, or positive ones to negative ones? How can we estimate welfare at the population level, especially when quality of life varies greatly across individual members of the population? Similarly, how can we compare welfare across species in order to estimate total welfare at the community level?
Research on questions like these can advance the field of wild animal welfare science and ultimately inform responsible welfare-driven wildlife management.
Further reading
Our previous blog post “Definition of welfare” goes into more detail on the various uses of “welfare” in the literature and the considerations behind the definition we use.
Mellor et al, (2020) describe the Five Domains model of welfare (first introduced in 1994) and recent updates to it.
The Welfare Footprint Project has proposed a framework for estimating the relative welfare impacts of different negative experiences. Their method focuses on quantifying the duration of time an animal is in each level of estimated pain intensity.
