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Veterinarians and the best interests of animals

By Charles Foster

English law has traditionally, for most purposes, regarded animals as mere chattels. There is now animal welfare legislation which seeks to prevent or limit animal suffering, but provided that legislation is complied with, and that no other relevant laws (eg those related to public health) are broken, you are free to do what you want with your animal.

Veterinary surgeons are in an interesting position. The UK regulatory body for veterinarians, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (‘RCVS’) publishes a Code of Professional Conduct. This provides, inter alia:

‘1.1  Veterinary surgeons must make animal health and welfare their first consideration when attending to animals.’

‘2.2  Veterinary surgeons must provide independent and impartial advice and inform a client of any conflict of interest.’ 

‘First consideration’ in 1.1 is a rather weasly formulation. Does it mean that it is the overriding consideration, trumping all others, however weighty those others might be? Or the one that veterinarians ought to consider first, before moving on to other criteria which might well prevail?Read More »Veterinarians and the best interests of animals

Should vegans eat meat to be ethically consistent? And other moral puzzles from the latest issue of the Journal of Practical Ethics

Should vegans eat meat to be ethically consistent? And other moral puzzles from the latest issue of the Journal of Practical Ethics

By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp)

The latest issue of The Journal of Practical Ethics has just been published online, and it includes several fascinating essays (see the abstracts below). In this blog post, I’d like to draw attention to one of them in particular, because it seemed to me to be especially creative and because it was written by an undergraduate student! The essay – “How Should Vegans Live?” – is by Oxford student Xavier Cohen. I had the pleasure of meeting Xavier several months ago when he presented an earlier draft of his essay at a lively competition in Oxford: he and several others were finalists for the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics, for which I was honored to serve as one of the judges.

In a nutshell, Xavier argues that ethical vegans – that is, vegans who refrain from eating animal products specifically because they wish to reduce harm to animals – may actually be undermining their own aims. This is because, he argues, many vegans are so strict about the lifestyle they adopt (and often advocate) that they end up alienating people who might otherwise be willing to make less-drastic changes to their behavior that would promote animal welfare overall. Moreover, by focusing too narrowly on the issue of directly refraining from consuming animal products, vegans may fail to realize how other actions they take may be indirectly harming animals, perhaps even to a greater degree.

Read More »Should vegans eat meat to be ethically consistent? And other moral puzzles from the latest issue of the Journal of Practical Ethics

The Moral Significance of Animal Suffering

Recently I attended a fascinating Society for Applied Philosophy lecture by Shelly Kagan, entitled ‘What’s Wrong with Speciesism?’. Kagan began the lecture by explaining how, while teaching a course involving some of Peter Singer’s writings on non-human animals, he had begun to doubt the view, defended by Singer, that other things equal the suffering of animals matters no less than that of human beings.Read More »The Moral Significance of Animal Suffering

Dogs on drugs

drogs, by weegeeboredThat people in all cultures around the world use plant drugs to heal, intoxicate, or enhance themselves is well known. What is less well known – at least to me – is that many cultures give drugs to their dogs to improve hunting success. A new paper in Journal of Ethnopharmacology by B.D. Bennett and R. Alarcón reviews the plants used in lowland Ecuador, Peru and elsewhere.

They find a wide variety of drugs used. Some are clearly medicinal or just hide the dog’s scent. Others are intended as enhancers of night vision or smell. Some are psychoactive and intended to influence behaviour – make it walk straight, follow game tenaciously, be more alert, understand humans, or “not become a vagrant”. Several drugs are hallucinogenic, which may appear bizarre – how could that possibly help? The authors suggest that in the right dose they might create synaesthesia or other forms of altered perception that actually make the dogs better hunters by changing their sensory gating. Is drugging dogs OK?Read More »Dogs on drugs

Principles for the Legalization of Trade in Rhino Horn

Last Wednesday night in Kenya, on a private ranch near Nanyuki, armed gangs killed four rhinoceroses for their horns. According to a representative from the Kenyan Wildlife Service, this could be the worst rhino-poaching incident the country has seen in 25 years. 22 rhinos have been poached in Kenya this year. There are only 1,037 now left in that country, and fewer than 25,000 left in the world. The Western Black Rhino was declared extinct in 2011.

Read More »Principles for the Legalization of Trade in Rhino Horn

“Puppy Farm” or “Commercial Breeder”?

As the diverse range of topics on this blog testifies, philosophical questions concerning practical ethics crop up every day, in a variety of circumstances. Today, I had my own ethical dilemma – this time regarding puppies. Having just moved into my new house, I am now searching for a puppy. When I saw an advert for some puppies for sale in a small village in South Oxfordshire, I became excited: could this be the one?

This morning, after I had arranged an appointment to visit the pups, I began searching online for more details. Specifically, the pups were being sold by what is known as a “commercial breeder”: a business that breeds and sells puppies, primarily for profit. To me, this sounded almost identical to the oft-maligned “puppy farms”, or “puppy mills”. As one website (www.dogstuff.info) describes it, a puppy farm is

 A business that mass-produces dogs for a profit with little or no regard for the health and well-being of the puppies and dogs.   It is a facility where puppies are sold to brokers, pet stores or individuals without regard for the puppy.  They usually have many breeding animals in many different breeds and often, but not always, substandard health, living and socialization conditions.Read More »“Puppy Farm” or “Commercial Breeder”?

Can we Have an Interest Theory of Rights for Animals, and a Will Theory for Humans?

By Luke Davies

Follow Luke on Twitter.

 

A recent article in the New York Times has advocated extending the notion of personhood, and the rights associated with that status, to dogs. Gregory Burns, the author of the article, argued for this position on the basis of the structural and functional similarity between the caudate nucleus of dogs and humans. The caudate nucleus, Burns tells us, is that part of the brain responsible for our feeling of anticipation of things we enjoy. More than this, the activity of the caudate nucleus is so consistent in MRI scans that he claims we may be able to use our monitoring of its activity to predict our tastes for certain things (he lists music, food and beauty). Importantly for Burns, activity in the caudate increased in dogs in response to positive stimulus: a gesture signaling food, or the appearance of the owner. The tentative conclusion to these findings is that the MRI images signal the possibility of canine emotion. Burns makes clear that without the capacity to communicate with us, which dogs certainly do not possess, the findings are still quite limited.  However, he views the existence of emotion as sufficient for personhood, and personhood as sufficient for being a possessor of rights. This leads him to conclude that dogs should be recognized as having the rights persons have.

 

Though there is good reason to doubt the argumentative moves Burns makes in his short article, that’s not what I’d like to do here. (A Letter to the Editor sent to the NTY regarding the article warns, for example, against assuming that complex emotional states–such as love, which Burns mentions–can be reduced to physical states. This alone should give us pause before asserting any larger similarities between human and canine consciousness.)  Rather, I would pose a question that came to me after reading the article: Is it possible that the rights animals possess have a different function the rights humans possess? Read More »Can we Have an Interest Theory of Rights for Animals, and a Will Theory for Humans?

Why pet owners know as much as neuroscientists about animal minds

by Rebecca Roache

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There has recently been a spate of news stories about animals grieving. The Huffington Post features a video of a dog burying a dead puppy, New York Daily News reports a dog and a cat mourning the death of a dog, and a video entitled ‘Bella (dog) mourns death of Beavis (beaver)’ recently went viral. There are great contradictions in the way in which we, as a society, view the capacity of animals to experience mental states comparable to those enjoyed by humans. On the one hand, many of us love and share our lives and homes with animals (I am currently battling for space on my keyboard with our black and white cat, Wellie). On the other hand, we humans very often treat animals as nothing more than tools to serve our own ends—and even the UK, a country with relatively strict animal welfare legislation, permits animals to be subjected to conditions akin to a hell on earth in the name of scientific research, intensive farming, and pest control.

Scepticism about the capacity of animals to experience conscious mental states like suffering—let alone more complex ones like grief—is most often associated with the influence of Descartes. Optimists may have reason to hope that scientific evidence about the mental lives of animals will soon extinguish such scepticism: last year a group of eminent neuroscientists published the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which proclaims that humans are not alone in possessing consciousness (for a discussion of the Declaration, see here). Science, it seems, may hold the key to improving the way animals are treated.Read More »Why pet owners know as much as neuroscientists about animal minds

Why slaughterhouses should welcome CCTV

by Rebecca Roache

Covertly filming shocking animal abuse in the meat industry (and other industries involving animals) is a common tactic of animal welfare charities such as the Humane Society, Mercy for Animals, Animal Aid, and PETA. The footage is generally obtained by workers for the charities who gain employment at slaughterhouses, farms, laboratories and the like; and it has been instrumental in prosecuting abusers and applying pressure on meat producers to improve welfare standards, as the New York Times reported at the weekend.

The same article also reports a disturbing response to this practice by several US states:

They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms.

Those who flout this so-called ‘ag-gag’  legislation may, among other things, be placed on a ‘terrorist registry’.

Read More »Why slaughterhouses should welcome CCTV