Animal Behavior and Animal Welfare - Assignment Example

Critique: Fraser, David (2009). "Animal behaviour, animal welfare and the scientific study of affect," Animal population of the world is diverse and all species are unique in character and their natural habitat. Many of the wild animals have been domesticated and live in conjunction with human populations where they are exploited either for their companionship or meeting some specific human requirement such as food or entertainment. However some animals which are considered lower forms of life according to human standards are even subjected to merciless exploitation and abuse in the garb of scientific experimentation. Organizations all over the world wakened to this exploitation a few decades ago and have succeeded in eliminating most forms of cruelty to animals. But how animals perceive human behaviour and respond to it has been basically interpreted through the eyes of a human and may not reveal the true picture. This aspect has been looked into by Fraser (2009) who has tried to correlate animal behaviour and animal welfare through a scientific analysis of affective states by which animal pain, fear and distress are measured. The author has deplored the scientific and statistical inhuman evaluation of animal behaviour which he believes is the outcome of the scientific community relying more on analysis of quantitative evaluation methods which have been assigned time tested methodological approaches rather than concentrating on the philosophical considerations and individual animal behaviour idiosyncrasies which may provide a truer picture. Descriptive analysis and evaluation of animal behaviour is more appropriate instead of the abstract and quantitative measurements as are being practiced by the scientific community, according to the author (Fraser, 2009). Just like humans, animals cannot be considered as inanimate objects which follow the laws of averages and means in terms of their behaviour and responses to various stimuli in life. The author has introduced the alternative paradigm approach tried by some of the present day animal behaviour experts who have included qualitative and narrative data along with the usual quantitative approaches applied in order to arrive at a more definitive and accurate conclusion (Fraser, 2009). The author is of the opinion that further refinement of this alternative paradigm of evaluating animal behaviour is necessary in order to equip the scientific community to carry out appropriate evaluations. The author in his introduction highlights the limited purview within which the scientific community has confined its observation of animal behaviour so as to satisfy and meet its own selfish criteria in the garb of scientific research. This limited purview might permit us to obtain short term accuracies in scientific studies which measure statistical end points but do not reveal the real picture on animal behaviour. Animals depending upon their species, natural habitat and brain development level might be capable of higher levels of emotional sensitivity and response to external stimuli which cannot be measured by purely mathematical and statistical end points. The author exemplifies the nuances early in his introduction when he elaborates about the highly emotional attachment that a dog ‘Angel’ develops for the author’s family when the real owners are on a trip for a year (Fraser, 2009). On their return the dog, although middle aged, which suggests that it must be having some memory of the original owners, is reluctant to part company with the authors’ family and displays this by hiding upstairs under a bed and showing extreme reluctance to get into the real owners’ car. This shows that animals are capable of developing emotional and social relationships and not simply guided by instinct and species in their behavioural manifestations. In contrast to this example, the author cites another study in which weaning piglets are discarded by their mothers after a specific elapse of time when they are capable of handling themselves independently. In entirely two different situations the ‘sow-piglet’ relationship follows the exact pattern of predicted behaviour by the generally accepted norms of behavioural scientific data. But the author insists that the study is too limited in its analysis as it does not take the emotional aspects involved into consideration at all. The sows as well as the piglets might be experiencing emotions which are imperceptible to human eye and completely disregarded in an endeavour to satisfy the requirements of the experiment. Such standards of deductive research are almost being followed by blindly in all fields of scientific research in animals which include behavioural ecology, ethology, comparative psychology and physiological psychology (Fraser, 2009). This aspect raises concern in those involved with animal welfare as they wish to be made aware of the actual feelings of animals when they are subjected to artificial or what they consider inhuman situations. For example how the poultry birds feel on being caged, whether rodents experience any post operative pain when experiments involving surgical interventions are carried out on them and whether animals behave differently when they are housed in the zoos in the immediate vicinity of their predator species (Fraser, 2009). Such nuances of animal behaviour are completely missed by human beings who judge according to their own notions but are a matter of concern for animals’ rights protectionists and behavioural experts. According to the author the current approaches of science to label animal behaviour on the basis of abstract studies based on the law of averages which yield data about expected behaviour may not be actually true and may not achieve the ends effectively. The author defines the affective states of animals as ‘those subjective changes that are experienced as pleasant or unpleasant rather than hedonically neutral’ (Fraser, 2009). The human analysis of animal behaviour is solely based on the subjective and observational analysis of criteria used to measure these subjective changes. The role of affect in animal behaviour was studied as far back as the early 1800s when Darwin and his contemporary Romanes classified animal behaviour on the basis of expressions of emotions like fear, pain, pleasure, affection and anger and by collection of data from narratives of animal behaviour from direct observations of naturalists (Fraser, 2009). Romanes particularly shows how an elephant is capable of deductive reasoning when it is subjected to the application of a highly irritant ointment, Silver nitrate to one of its eyes which actually provides complete remission from the ailment. The elephant though struggles and shows signs of pain on the first application but when the same surgeon prepares for a similar application to the other eye a few days later, the elephant is more cooperative and braces itself for the procedure which it realizes is for its own benefit (Fraser, 2009). Similar observations are common nowadays in public life when some of the pets like dogs and cats when taken to the vet repeatedly become capable of realizing that the otherwise painful or offensive procedure is aimed to relieve their pain and misery and become more cooperative than what they were on the first visit. This displays a higher level of intelligence and capability of learned behaviour and correlation and reasoning ability for events and situations from within the animals’ psyche. Observation, reflection and insight are the capabilities of which many animal species are competent enough and this has been substantiated in behavioural experiments conducted on a number of animal species, particularly the primates who are the nearest relatives to humans (Fraser, 2009). The author has emphasized upon the emergence of a new approach in the twentieth century when the tools for systematic investigation in order to evaluate the affective states and mental experiences of animals assumed a different nature under the influence of the idea of ‘Positivism’ from the philosophical theory of a French sociologist, Auguste Comte were applied (Fraser, 2009). According to the author this was necessitated due to the need for obtain a clear demarcation between science and other fields such as metaphysics and theology in order to demarcate between the observations of the material world and immaterial souls and hypothetical entities (Fraser, 2009). The crux of this ‘Positivism’ as applied to study of animal behaviour was that emotions, feelings and other mental states of animals because of their unobservable nature were out of the scope of any scientific enquiry and therefore futile to pursue. Positivism also suggested that as all sciences followed a hierarchical pattern i.e. one fact emerging out of the other the behaviour of animals can be explained on the basis of underlying physiological and biological processes within the animal’s body. Accordingly animal behaviour was triggered by the underlying physiological processes which triggered various responses and were independent of any subjective experience. Under such circumstances the only way animal or even human behaviour can be studied on a scientific basis only under the concept of a ‘stimulus-response’ where expected behaviour can have a rational explanation only when it was expressed in response to a certain provocation. Thus ‘subjective experiences’ if any were excluded from any scientific experimental studies on animal behaviour according to the protagonists of positivism. However such assumptions were later challenged by certain thinkers in the latter half of the twentieth century who believed that there was something more which was perceptible by direct observation of an animal rather than on the basis of the underlying physiological processes alone (Fraser, 2009). As a result of lack of cohesion in the observations and ideas of various experts on animal behaviour, most of the research during the twentieth century focussed on methodological approaches applied to explore characteristic behavioural patterns in a number of animal species. The animal species under study were subjected to certain ‘law and effect’ theories and animals were categorized according to similar characteristics where generalized behavioural patterns were obtained according to the law of statistical mean. Any variations if they occurred were categorized under idiosyncrasies or ‘sampling errors’ and not incorporated into the results. Thus all studies undertaken had certain measurable numerical values which could be statistically analyzed from controlled experiments which had a high degree of internal validity but ignored the external validity such as the circumstances or the situations in which the experiments were conducted which could be quite different from the actual environment where such animal species thrived. This could have resulted in erroneous interpretations as the animals may have behaved in a particular manner within the narrow confines of an experimental setup. The author therefore believes that such research is incapable of capturing the ‘complexity and variability’ of animal behaviour which is associated with real life situations (Fraser, 2009). Thus affective experiences of animals were actually eliminated from all animal behavioural studies during this era. The concepts of animal welfare and their well being only started emerging in the latter part of the twentieth century, especially during the last two decades when experts realized the importance of designing research methods for exact targeting and measurement of affective states of animals in behavioural science. The author has give examples of observation of behaviours in piglets and chickens under varying exposure of distressing situations which evinced different responses in response to a similar stimulus provided under different conditions. This, according to the author, shows that animal behaviour is nor subject to a simple ‘stimulus-response’ pattern but involves a more complex affective behaviour which is variable according to differing circumstances. The animals can also respond differently to similar painful stimuli according to their innate perception and observation of the painful stimulus producing mode. More experiments were thus conducted by using a causal mode and measuring an affective response in the animal in the latter half of the twentieth century. Only recently, the author believes that experimenters on animal behaviour have focussed their attention on incorporating more narrative detail in their results on experiments conducted by them. Such qualitative data is a novel approach which has the scope for being incorporated into future studies on animal behaviour. Such studies can shed more light on animal behaviour in their natural habitat and emotions such as hierarchical dominance, jealousy, desire, trust, affection and fondness for other members of their species can be detected. Qualitative, narrative accounts of sequences of events which occurred in the lives of animals living in their natural environment can better explain their true behavioural patterns (Fraser, 2009). The author has provided evidence for imparting a scientific character to the evaluation of affective states in animals through the arguments of a psychologist Neal Miller who suggested that the use of ‘intervening variables’ in a stimulus-response relationship can impart a scientific character to a study (Fraser, 2009). When entirely different causal factors produce the same behaviour in an animal, an intervening variable can eliminate the need of correlating the stimulus-response independently to each causal factor. The intervening variable being common to the resultant behaviour can be categorized as an affective behaviour. The author has explained this by a graphical description of the number of stimuli producing thirst in animals. ‘Thirst’ is the intervening variable which is common to all the stimuli producing the response of increased drinking or the processes associated with facilitating availability of a drink to the animals. The same criteria is shown applied to the behaviour of distress shown by the piglets on being separated or weaned from the mother which involves an intervening variable of ‘separation distress’. The author has concluded the study by highlighting the emergence of the new approaches presently being used to study animal behaviour. These include animal welfare science, the alternative paradigm of incorporating narrative detail in explaining a particular behaviour and the methods making use of experimental physiological psychology. The study of animal behaviour thus should not involve quantitative methods alone but incorporate amore realistic and observational approaches. The fact that domestic as well as farm animals are capable of learning through teaching substantiates the fact that affective behaviour is a response to innate reasoning ability as is evident from other studies where rewarded instrumental learning was used improve care and management of zoo as well as farm animals (Manteuffel et al, 2009). The authors believe that animals too possess some degree of emotions which serve to represent their affective inner states. Therefore animals are equally capable of positive feelings associated with the accomplishment or provision of a positive stimulus. This is reflected in another study where heifers were subjected to a long term positive treatment by ‘brushing’ each animal for five minutes per week before calving which resulted in their being more cooperative after calving and during milking procedures which enhanced the farm output (Bertenshaw et al, 2008). As many animals have been domesticated now, the behavioural patterns have assumed more significance due to the necessities of increasing production and making farms more economically viable. Animal behavioural studies have therefore received attention of scientists from other fields than naturalists who deem it fit to combine an interdisciplinary approach to study animal behaviour by combining the fields of ethology, physiology and psychology (Lund et al, 2006). The authors are of the view that animal behaviour needs to be studied under a comprehensive umbrella of a combination of experts from the fields of sociology, psychology, economics and politics as well which will enable to identify issue and develop appropriate solutions. The need for a convergence between scientific and philosophical approaches in evaluating animal behaviour and their relationship with humans has been recognized which can help attain a blend between the proponents of empirical science and ethics when applied to animal behaviour (Fraser, 1999). References: Bertenshaw, Catherine, Rowlinson, Peter, Edge. Helen et al (2008). "The effect of different degrees of ‘positive’ human–animal interaction during rearing on the welfare and subsequent production of commercial dairy heifers," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 114:65–75 Fraser, David (2009). "Animal behaviour, animal welfare and the scientific study of affect," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 118:108–117 Fraser, David (1999). "Animal ethics and animal welfare science: bridging the two cultures," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 65:171–189 Lund, Vonne, Coleman, Grahame, Gunnarsson, Stefan et al (2006)."Animal welfare science—Working at the interface between the natural and social sciences," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 97:37–49 Manteuffel, Gerhard, Langbein, Jan & Puppe, Birger (2009). "Increasing farm animal welfare by positively motivated instrumental behaviour," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 118: 191-198 The Publishing Process 1. The main message intended to be delivered to the audience should be identified. 2. The target journal should be identified and its submission requirements studied and complied with. 3. Resource materials should be acquired and studied thoroughly to familiarise with and evaluate previous research. 4. Different sections should be prepared which include the title, abstract, introduction, methods employed, statistical tools used, results, analysis, discussion and conclusion. 5. In the end all references used should be cited using the recommended style for the targeted journal. Read More