Fri, 07 Oct 2005

Course puts the science into evaluating animal welfare

You know, there's nothing wrong with having academics look at issues of animal (or human) welfare and happiness - but there's something seriously flawed with the thought processes that claim to measure "happiness" scientifically, in either animals or humans. It's tough to measure what you can't define.

I see these kinds of efforts as the ultimate grasp at philosophy by an utterly materialist culture: we believe that everything can be measured, and that every state of being has a quality that can be observed by an outsider. We often forget that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is as applicable to emotional states as it is to quantum physics.

Though a tiger in the Berlin Zoo and a dairy cow in Wisconsin don't have much in common, each animal has specific welfare needs that must be addressed. But assessing those needs is by no means a simple task. Michigan State University is now one of only a handful of institutions offering training in the scientific assessment of animal welfare, bringing qualitative measurements to an area long left to the subjective, and even the emotional.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

/Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time