Applied Animal Behaviour Science 118 (2009) 105–107
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/applanim
Editorial
The state of ethological approaches to the assessment of animal suffering
and welfare§
Advances in the neurosciences, in ethology and animal
cognition have told us to expect at least some of our fellow
creatures to be capable of experiencing affective states
such as pain, fear, anxiety, or pleasure. Although covering a
wide range of discrete emotional experiences, affective
states may all be categorized into states of suffering and
well-being. From an ethological perspective what seems to
be important in terms of animal welfare is whether or not
an affective state is unpleasant enough for an animal to
want to get out of it (Dawkins, 2008). If it is, it is considered
to reflect suffering, if not, it is considered to reflect well-
being. This conception provides us with a behavioural way
of recognising animal suffering, and has put ethology at the
front of animal welfare sciences.
However, the assessment of animal welfare is not a
matter of the natural sciences only. Thus, whether or not a
particular behavioural measure is relevant to the assess-
ment of animal welfare critically depends on the ethical
criteria according to which animals are to be protected.
These ethical criteria are developed by philosophers and
agreed on by society as a whole. They determine the legal
means by which animal protection is implemented, but also
the kind of scientific evidence that counts in the assessment
of animal welfare. Animal ethics is hotly debated, for
example between utilitarian animal welfarists and deonto-
logical animal rights advocates (Singer, 1975; Regan, 1983).
This debate is, however, not the focus of this special issue.
Instead, this special issue is aimed to provide an overview of
the state of ethological approaches to the assessment of
animal suffering and welfare, based on the ethical principles
underlying current animal welfare legislation. The focus is
placed on concepts and methods that allow us to assess
animals’ affective states in view of reducing animal suffering
and improving animal well-being. For one thing: what
animals need for their welfare needs to be justified
biologically by the animals’ own values.
Whether animals do indeed have the capacity to
experience feelings of suffering and well-being, still ranks
among the hardest and most controversial questions in
§
This paper is part of a special issue entitled ‘‘Animal Suffering and
Welfare’’, Guest Edited by Hanno Würbel
0168-1591/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.applanim.2009.02.021
biology (Koch, 2004). Feelings of suffering and well-being
are subjective experiences that cannot be assessed directly
by scientific methods, since the natural sciences strictly
adhere to a third person perspective. Therefore, biology has
long dismissed subjective experiences as a target worthy of
scientific investigation, which probably explains why we
still know rather little about them. In addition, based on an
epistemological fallacy – what cannot be investigated
cannot exist – animals were simply denied the capacity for
subjective experiences by many scientists.
This is actually surprising, given that pain and suffering
have long been assessed and successfully treated not only
in humans but also in veterinary medical practice. More-
over, not even in humans is there a direct way of assessing
subjective experiences. There is no fundamental difference
between animals and humans with respect to the scientific
assessment of suffering and well-being. Not even language
makes a fundamental difference. Although verbal com-
munication is a useful tool for medical doctors in the
diagnosis of human pain or suffering, it is neither
unambiguous, nor applicable to all patients.
In September 2007, in an attempt to leave this arbitrary
distinction between humans and other animals in the
attribution of affective states behind, the International
Society of Livestock Husbandry (Internationale
Gesellschaft für Nutztierhaltung, IGN) together with the
Chair of Animal Welfare and Ethology of the Justus-Liebig-
University of Giessen (Germany) held a scientific sympo-
sium entitled ‘Animal Suffering and Well-Being—Interna-
tional Symposium on the State of Science’. The aim of this
symposium was to present and discuss recent advances in
the study of animal suffering and well-being. The present
special issue is based on contributions to this symposium.
The issue starts with a review by David Fraser on the
history of the study of affective states of animals, showing
how this concept varied throughout human history, but
also between ethnic groups and – not least – between
different schools of thought within the natural sciences.
Based on pioneers such as Jane Goodall, Barbara Smuts and
others, his paper concludes with a plea for the collection of
qualitative, narrative data in addition to quantitative data
in view of understanding the unique features of individual
animals. He argues that such data almost require scientists
106 Editorial / Applied Animal Behaviour Science 118 (2009) 105–107
to involve affect in order to achieve plausible explanations
of behaviour.
Not only how animals ought to be protected, but also
why we want to do this, may be an ethological question.
After all, animal protection is human behaviour. In the first
part of his paper, Hanno Würbel thus takes an ethological
perspective on animal protection with a view to better
understanding how our own behavioural biology shapes
our attitude towards animals. This may be crucial in view
of avoiding unjustified anthropocentrism and uncritical
anthropomorphism. In the second part of the paper, he
then reviews concepts and methods used to assess animal
welfare in terms of their significance for ethical decision-
taking, and proposes ethologically meaningful measures of
‘behavioural integrity’ as potentially powerful indicators of
animal welfare.
Due to the sentientist conception of current animal
welfare legislation, one of the main targets of animal welfare
science is to determine the boundary between sentient and
non-sentient animals. Most welfare regulations are
restricted to vertebrates, and even among vertebrate
scientists, there is debate as to where to draw that boundary.
Bob Elwood and colleagues review evidence that crusta-
ceans might experience pain and stress in ways that are
analogous to those of sentient vertebrates. They conclude
that there is considerable similarity of function, although
different systems are used, and thus there might be a similar
experience in terms of suffering. In light of their findings, the
treatment of crustaceans – and possibly other invertebrates
– may need to be reconsidered. Based on a similar case made
for fish in the recent past, Nicola Brydges and Victoria
Braithwaite examined whether environmental enrichment
of housing conditions for fish can have similar effects on
learning, memory and temperament behaviours as found in
rodents and many other captive mammals.
In contrast to invertebrates and fish, the assumption
that pigs can experience pain has been unchallenged for a
long time. Nevertheless, we still know very little about
nociceptive processes in pigs. Therefore, Mette Herskin
and colleagues set out to validate a laser-based method to
measure thermal nociception in pigs. Their findings
suggest that behavioural responses to nociceptive cuta-
neous laser stimulation provide valid measures of noci-
ception that can be applied in group-housed gilts, with
minimal disturbance of the daily routines.
One of the most influential concepts in applied ethology
is the concept of motivational strength based on measures of
demand. The interpretation of measures of demand in the
assessment of animal welfare is based on several underlying
assumptions. Lucy Asher and colleagues have tested two
critical assumptions underlying most studies using mea-
sures of demand to assess animals’ preferences for different
resources. Using European starlings, they demonstrate that
presenting costs on an ascending order may yield valid
measures of demand, but that random order presentations
should be used to check for order effects. In contrast, they
found that the concept of a finite energy budget may not be
useful in the measurement of captive animal’s preferences,
and that a different approach might therefore be needed.
The most exciting additions to the toolbox of animal
welfare scientists since the introduction of measures of
demand are undoubtedly measures of cognitive or judge-
ment bias. These measures are known from human
cognitive psychology to reflect affective states, especially
emotional valence. Together with colleagues, Mike Mendl
and Liz Paul present a comprehensive review of studies on
rats, dogs, rhesus monkeys, starlings and humans that have
since been conducted, and discuss the strengths and
weaknesses of different affect manipulation treatments,
and other aspects that may affect the observed effects and
their interpretation in terms of affective states. One problem
with current cognitive bias studies is that they require
extensive training to establish the necessary positive and
negative associations. Brilot and colleagues present an
experiment using European starlings’ (Sturnus vulgaris)
responses to eyespot stimuli that are naturally aversive to
many bird species, and require no explicit associative
training. Although their present approach was unsuccessful
in determining cognitive bias, it may provide important
guidance for the future search of measures of cognitive bias
that do not depend on extensive associative training.
The past years of animal welfare research have also
witnessed an extension of focus in the assessment of
animal welfare from using measures of negative affect (i.e.
suffering) to using measures of both negative and positive
affect. Manteuffel and colleagues present a review of their
development and applications of rewarded instrumental
learning as a form of cognitive enrichment, which enables
farm animals to acquire instrumental behaviour that may
improve their well-being. They conclude that this
approach may have the potential to enhance not only
animal welfare but also product quality in animal farming.
This is followed by a paper by Reefmann and colleagues
who studied whether ear and tail postures in sheep can be
used as measures of emotional valence from negative to
positive states. They found that frequent ear-posture
changes were most clearly associated with situations
inducing negative states, while a high proportion of
passive ear postures was associated with situations
inducing positive states. Thus, ear-posture changes repre-
sent a promising indicator of emotional valence in sheep.
To conclude this section on positive affective states,
Jonathan Balcombe reviews the evidence in the literature
for animal pleasure and discusses its moral significance
with respect to animal welfare legislation.
The final section of this special issue deals with an
important new development in farm animal production,
breeding for disease resistance. Even under the most
favourable housing and management conditions, infectious
diseases remain a constant threat to farm animals, and a
serious one as infectious diseases are ranked among the
major sources of suffering in animal production. In the first
paper, Gerald Reiner introduces the approaches taken to
genetic disease resistance in pigs. Using Sarcocystis
miescheriana resistance in pigs as a parasitic disease model,
he highlights the difficulties in identifying carriers of
favourable gene variants, and novel tools and technologies
emerging from recent advances in genomics to tackle these.
In the final paper, Reiner and colleagues then present a
detailed behavioural analysis of the course of this parasitic
model disease. By relating the behavioural changes to
various clinical and clinical–chemical measures, they were
 Editorial / Applied Animal Behaviour Science 118 (2009) 105–107
able to identify behavioural indicators of disease even at
sub-clinical stages, suggesting that even sub-clinical con-
ditions may compromise the pigs’ welfare.
Taken together, the papers compiled in this special
issue reveal the high degree of sophistication by which
ethologists are now able to infer affective states and make
convincing scientific cases for feelings of suffering and
well-being in animals. The ethological study of animal
suffering and welfare has thus great potential to add
objectivity to animal welfare debates, and may be crucial
in facilitating the implementation of the ethical goals
as stated in animal welfare legislation. However, the
papers compiled in this special issue should also reveal
existing gaps in our knowledge and research, thereby
contributing to the future advancement of ethology
applied to animal ethics and to the improvement of
animal welfare.
107
References
Dawkins, M.S., 2008. The science of animal suffering. Ethology 114, 937–
945.
Koch, C., 2004. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neuroscientific Approach.
Roberts & Company Publishers, Englewood.
Regan, T., 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. University of California Press,
Berkeley.
Singer, P., 1975. Animal Liberation. Harper Collins Publishers, New York.
Hanno Würbel*
Division of Animal Welfare and Ethology,
Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen,
35392 Giessen, Germany
*Tel.: +49 641 99 38750; fax: +49 641 99 38759
E-mail address: hanno.wuerbel@vetmed.uni-giessen.de
Available online 17 March 2009