Can farm animal welfare be understood without taking into account the issues of emotion and cognition?

ABSTRACT Although the concept of welfare makes reference to feelings of individual animals, the exact nature of these feelings and their relationship to emotions and cognitive abilities of the animals under consideration are never detailed. Based on the concepts of stress and coping, an extensive list of indicators of physical health, production, behavior, and physiology has been set up for the purpose of recognizing good from bad welfare. However, these indicators do not allow us to make any inference about mental states. This issue is important because welfare considerations apply to farm animals of different species and, within a given species, to animals of different ages, which are likely to have varying degrees of emotional and cognitive capacity. In the past, disagreements about exact definitions of emotion and cognition have blurred the matter and hampered research. However, this should no longer be the case; the study of emotions and feelings has emerged as a field of active research in psychology and neuroscience over the last two decades. It is now possible to go over philosophical discussions on the nature of feelings and to set up a research agenda on emotion and cognition in farm animals that should help us to understand their welfare requirements.

Implications

Research on farm animal welfare has become very conventional. The quest for indicators of welfare is the norm and sets the pace for elaboration and revision of recommendations and regulations. In the near future, progress in deciphering the genome of farm animal species is likely to result in the replacement of behavioral indicators by molecular markers of cellular damage and death. However, what all these indicators mean in terms of well-being will remain elusive as long as there is little or no research on the basic components of well-being: perceptions, representations, and feelings. It is certainly time for agricultural research to address this question directly, especially because suitable strategies are now available as a result of recent advances in psychology and neuroscience.

Key Words: Cognitive Development, Domestic Animals, Emotions, Neurology, Stress

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J. Anim. Sci. 80(E. Suppl. 1):E1-E9