The Science of Animal Welfare: Understanding What Animals Want
Marian Stamp Dawkins
Apr 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Esther Wane
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5 hr 12 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
What is animal welfare? This concise and accessible guide is for anyone who is interested in animals and who has wondered how we can assess their welfare scientifically. It defines animal welfare as "health and animals having what they want," a definition that can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike, expresses in simple words what underlies many existing definitions, and shows what evidence we need to collect to improve animal welfare in practice. Above all, it puts the animal's own point of view at the heart of an assessment of its welfare. Defining welfare as "health and what animals want" allows us to distinguish between measures that are simply what an animal does when it is alert, aroused, or active and those measures that genuinely allow us to distinguish between situations the animals themselves see as positive or negative. Sentience is for many people the essence of what is meant by welfare, but studying consciousness is notoriously difficult, particularly in non-human species. These difficulties are discussed in the context of our current-and as yet incomplete-knowledge of human and animal consciousness. Finally, the book highlights some key ideas in the relationship between animal welfare science and animal ethics and shows how closely the well-being of humans is linked to that of other animals.
About the author
Marian Stamp Dawkins is professor of animal behavior in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. She is the author of numerous research papers and books, including Through Our Eyes Only?: The Search for Animal Consciousness and Why Animals Matter: Animal Consciousness, Animal Welfare, and Human Well-Being.
Esther Wane is a British actor and voice-over artist who has narrated audiobooks in a variety of genres, including memoir, politics, romantic fiction, and children's literature. She has a lifelong passion for literature and can often be found browsing bookshops at any spare moment.
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