Understanding Animal Welfare: The Science in its Cultural Context

Academic and scientific literature continues to explode at an unprecedented rate. A student entering any scientific field must initially navigate a massive resource of information. The logarithmic growth of the current scientific knowledge base has created a significant knowledge transfer market niche between the excessive specificity of the peer-reviewed journal article and the broad, generally considered to be true, knowledge captured by the student textbook. Reflecting a growing obsolescence of the traditional hardcover textbook, I would suggest that there is an apparent need and an increasing market for the “paperback textbook” one of which is the subject of this review. David Fraser is a Canadian pioneer of animal welfare science. He has published widely on animal welfare research, its practical applications, and its philosophical basis. He is currently Professor and NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Animal Welfare at the University of British Columbia, and serves as an advisor to many international organizations including representing Canada at the Office international des epizooties, in development of international standards for farm animal welfare. His recent book, Understanding Animal Welfare: The Science in its Cultural Context is the 4th of the current 5, in the Animal Welfare Book Series, which is produced in collaboration between UFAW (The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare), and Wiley-Blackwell. Another book and author in this series, recognizable to many readers, is Animal Welfare: Limping Towards Eden, by John Webster, 2005. This series would fall into the genre of the paperback textbook. I believe the market for this genre is the academic consumer (instructors, students, and curriculum designers), the applied professional and the rare especially interested and intelligent citizen. If we adopt the premise that all knowledge is temporary and recently constructed, then the criteria to judge a paperback textbook would include the cutting-edge quality of the information, quality of writing, and utility in transitioning the relatively ignorant but interested student to a more informed and engaged academic or researcher. It should be noted that this book has a single author in a genre that usually is constructed by a compilation of experts with a senior editor. This single author organization provides both strengths such as excellent coherence and weaknesses to the final product. A primary challenge in the book is the title and the effort to link widely divergent schools of study, the life experience of the animal(s) under question, the social and cultural matrix that placed the animal in its environment and the resultant types of animal welfare questions being asked. From a historic review of the development of the speciality of animal welfare research, the book is very well organized and delivered. The historical philosophical deliberation on what is an animal and the ethical evolution of what moral consideration animals are due is well documented. The cognitive evolution of animal welfare science is supplemented by specific examples that illustrate various scientific methods of evaluating the experiences of animals. The book is divided into 3 sections: “animal welfare in context,” provides a philosophical background of animal use and the human-animal cultural evolution; section 2 “studying animal welfare” is an excellent review of the history, ideologies and methodologies of the major schools of current animal welfare research. In Section 3, “drawing conclusions about animal welfare” on the other hand, the author deals primarily with 2 separate and significantly different concepts. Chapters 11 and 12 essentially deal with the evaluation of the various schools of animal welfare science and how can animal welfare scientists best communicate new knowledge to society to effectively result in better animal welfare. The final 2 chapters bravely attempt to deal with, or at least identify, the serious epistemological problems in the field of animal welfare science. The problem that well meaning and informed people genuinely disagree on central issues of animal welfare and use, as any individual will believe some sources of knowledge are more legitimate or valuable than other sources of knowledge. This question is fairly well handled, despite the inherent resistance to be solved. There are some topics absent from discussion in this book, especially if your reader expectations lean toward an interest in the “Cultural Context” commitment in the books title. Cultural context is somewhat ambiguous as it may refer to the culture of scientific investigation or the greater culture of an evolving society. The book adequately discusses the culture of scientific investigation. There is limited recognition of cultural environments other than the dominant Anglo-American and European society where the science of animal welfare has evolved. This may be expected as the current science of animal welfare is limited to the dominant culture of the highly developed world. Promulgation of laws, the most visible evidence of cultural change, is only briefly touched upon; however, there is a discussion of how scientists can best inform this discourse. As a primer for veterinary or animal science students interested in pursing further studies in animal welfare, it is an excellent resource. A close reading will result in the veterinary audience reconsidering the application of veterinary medicine versus veterinary science in informing daily decisions. Dr. Fraser has published so widely in his long career that individuals with an intermediate knowledge of the animal welfare literature will be familiar with much of the information presented in this book. However, as an introductory reader for the undergraduate or the professional returning to academia it provides an excellent synthesis of the science and current epistemology of the questions around our concern for non-human animal welfare.