Validating Indicators of Subjective Animal Welfare

Applying ethological and health indicators to practical animal welfare assessment.

There is a growing effort worldwide to develop objective indicators for animal welfare assessment, which provide information on an animal's quality of life, are scientifically trustworthy, and can readily be used in practice by professionals. Animals are sentient beings capable of positive and negative emotion, and so these indicators should be sensitive not only to their physical health, but a...

Validating indicators of sheep welfare through a consensus of expert opinion.

A consensus of expert opinion was used to provide both face and consensual validity to a list of potential indicators of sheep welfare. This approach was used as a first step in the identification of valid welfare indicators for sheep. The consensus methodology of the National Institute of Health, using pre-meeting consultation and focus group discussions, was used to ascertain the consensus op...

Indicators of poor welfare.

The welfare of an individual is its state as regards its attempts to cope with its environment. Coping can sometimes be achieved with little effort and expenditure of resources, in which case the individual's welfare is satisfactory . Or it may fail to cope at all, in which case its welfare is obviously poor . Or, if the individual does cope with the conditions it encounters, this may be easy, ...

Subjective Economic Welfare

Validating Animal Models

This paper responds to a recent challenge for the validity of extrapolation of neurobiological knowledge from laboratory animals to humans. According to this challenge, experimental neurobiology, and thus neuroscience, is in a state of crisis because the knowledge produced in different laboratories hardly generalizes from one laboratory to another. Presumably, this is so because neurobiological...