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Can natural behavior be cultivated? The farm as local human/animal culture

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Abstract

Although the notion of natural behavior occurs in many policy-making and legal documents on animal welfare, no consensus has been reached concerning its definition. This paper argues that one reason why the notion resists unanimously accepted definition is that natural behavior is not properly a biological concept, although it aspires to be one, but rather a philosophical tendency to perceive animal behavior in accordance with certain dichotomies between nature and culture, animal and human, original orders and invented artifacts. The paper scrutinizes the philosophy of natural behavior as it developed in the organic movement in response to a perceived contrast between industrialized and traditional agriculture. There are two reasons for focusing on the organic movement: (i) the emphasis on “the natural” is most accentuated there and has a long history, (ii) everyday life on organic farms presupposes human/animal interplay, which conflicts with the philosophical tendency to separate nature from culture. This mismatch between theory and practice helps us see why, and how, the philosophy of natural behavior needs to be reconsidered. The paper proposes that we understand farms as local human/animal cultures, and asks what we can mean my natural behavior in such contexts. Since domestic animals adapt to agricultural environments via interaction with caretakers, such interplay is analyzed as “hub” in these animals’ natural behavior.

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Acknowledgements

The research was financed by the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning, and was carried out at the Centre for Bioethics at Karoliska Institutet and Uppsala University. I wish to thank my co-investigator Linda Keeling and the network instituted for this project – Bo Algers, Mats G. Hansson, Bengt Meyerson, and Kerstin Olsson – for very helpful comments on a draft of the manuscript and for valuable suggestions for improvements of the text. Thanks also to Carl Reinhold Bråkenhielm, Kathinka Evers, Maud Gustafsson Fahlbeck, Gert Helgesson, Henrik Lerner, Niels Lynöe, Rurik Löfmark, Lilianne Nyberg, Carl-Magnus Stolt, Ewa Axelsson, and Lena Strand Bergström for constructive comments on drafts of the paper; and to Josepine Fernow for designing the two figures that occur in the text. I also want to thank two anonymous referees whose criticism spurred me to sharpen my ideas and avoid overemphasizing the differences between organic and non-organic production.

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  1. Department of Public Health and Caring Sciences, Center for Bioethics at Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University, Uppsala Science Park, SE-751 85, Uppsala, Sweden

    Pär Segerdahl

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  1. Pär Segerdahl
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Correspondence to Pär Segerdahl.

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Segerdahl, P. Can natural behavior be cultivated? The farm as local human/animal culture. J Agric Environ Ethics 20, 167–193 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-006-9028-3

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