Rollin’s Theory of Animal Welfare and Its Ethical Implications

Abstract

Bernard E. Rollin has written several books on animal welfare and our moral obligation to respect it when using animals for research or for food related activities.1 Several themes run through these works. (1) Scientific agnosticism about nonhuman animal mentation is unjustified. (2) There is an emerging social ethics that increasingly sees nonhuman animals as having rights and this ethics can be given philosophical justification based on new discoveries in animal ethology. (3) Nonhuman animals have a telos or “nature” and the freedom to act in accord with this nature is an essential component of an animal’s welfare. (4) The emerging social ethics in the US has not been transferred from a concern about companion animals and animals used in research to farm animals in intensive production systems because the public has not become fully aware of these conditions and how they affect the animals subjected to them. (5) When the public does become aware that current intensive systems have replaced the husbandry systems of extensive agriculture, it will insist on regulations unless the industry begins to self-regulate (this point seems to be addressed largely to the industry). (6) The treatment of food animals in traditional husbandry systems is ethically warranted because of an implicit contract between the farmer and the animals, a contract in which both benefited equally, hence the contract model for animal use. In his earliest work, Animal Rights and Human Morality (1981), Rollin argues that non-human animals have a moral right to have their interests considered and they have a moral right to life. In subsequent works, the right to life is not mentioned. Rollin argues that animals should be admitted to the moral arena because they have needs and interests, and these should not be limited to merely pleasure and pain. What constitutes an animal’s life is its set of genetically encoded needs whose frustration and satisfaction matter to the animal and are experienced not only as pleasure and pain, but frustration, anxiety, malaise, listlessness, boredom, and anger.