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Freedom in Captivity: Managing Zoo Animals According to the ‘Five Freedoms’

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Abstract

Animal welfare is a complex matter that includes scientific, ethical, economic and other dimensions. Despite the existence of more comprehensive approaches to animal welfare and the obvious shortcomings of the ‘Five Freedoms’, for zoological gardens the freedoms still constitute the general guidelines to be followed. These guidelines reflect both, an ethical view and a science based approach. Analysis reveals that the potential ineptitude of the ‘Five Freedoms’ lies in the manifold perceptions that people have of other animals. These perceptions are biased by our own (mammalian) umwelt, which is intertwined with different cultural attitudes towards other species (e.g. humanistic, moralistic, ecologistic). Perceptions of animals may be held simultaneously by different interest groups and may often be incompatible, thus often making it difficult to follow the ‘Five Freedoms’ in practice. We aim to recognise and consider the multiplicity of factors that, besides animal subjectivity, are relevant in understanding this hybrid environment. The moral value and practical applicability of the ‘Five Freedoms’ are sometimes undermined by prioritising some freedoms over others and by species bias. Both are characteristic phenomena of the zoo as a hybrid environment where other species are managed by humans. Given deficiencies are further amplified by humanistic and moralistic attitudes that people hold.

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Notes

  1. Before that time, there were mostly animal protection acts against cruelty, not welfare acts per se (see Kohn 1994).

  2. The year 1979 was the first time that the written reference to the ‘Five Freedoms’ designed by United Kingdom Farm Animal Welfare Council could be found (see Farm Animal Welfare Council 1979).

  3. The currently known form of the ‘Five Freedoms’ was refined in 1993 (Webster 2005).

  4. Available at URL: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/37/pdfs/ukpga_19810037_en.pdf.

  5. For a more detailed overview see e.g. Nordenfelt (2006); Fennel (2013).

  6. See Association of Zoos and Aquariums 2017 URL: www.aza.org/animal_welfare_committee.

  7. Behaviourists usually equate ‘normal behaviour’ with ‘species-specific behaviour’, which means comparing animal’s behaviour with in situ conspecifics behaviour and also taking into consideration the age, gender and other specific conditions of the animal (Fedigan 1992).

  8. Extreme abolitionists would even like to extinguish carnivores from the Earth altogether or reprogram them to stop them from hurting their prey (see e.g. Simmons 2009).

  9. It is interesting to note that the Animal Welfare Act applies only to vertebrates (other than man), thus excluding all other animals (see United Kingdom Acts of Parliament (2006)).

  10. However, it is true that most of the animals that are managed with the intention to be reintroduced have as little contact with people as possible (AZA 1992).

  11. See New Scientist (2004).

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Acknowledgments

The research for this paper was supported by the institutional research grant IUT02-44 and by the individual research grant PUT1363 “Semiotics of multispecies environments: agencies, meaning making and communication conflicts” from the Estonian Research Council.

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  1. Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Jakobi 2-311, 51014, Tartu, Estonia

    Nelly Mäekivi

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Mäekivi, N. Freedom in Captivity: Managing Zoo Animals According to the ‘Five Freedoms’. Biosemiotics 11, 7–25 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9311-5

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