Teaching animal bioethics in agricultural higher education in France

Introduction France, with a deep agricultural heritage founded on familial farming, on the diversity of the "terroirs" and of the breeds (Cavailhes et al 1987, Brun et al 1989, Limouzin 1996), has a close and rich relationship with animal. The rural depopulation and urbanisation, moving the population away from farm animals while encouraging companion animals (Bonduelle and Joublin, 1995), the productivist mutation of agriculture and the associated intensive breeding (Diry 1985, Picard et al 1994, Sébillotte 1996), the development of biotechnologies involving germinal cells and genome, altered these links and gave rise to concerns about ethics of human-animal relationship (Dantzer and Mormède 1979, Burgat 1995, Ouedraogo and Le Neindre 1999, Burgat and Dantzer 2001). The religious tradition, the influence of the Cartesian conception (cogito ergo sum, setting aside the animal away from the ethical sphere), the weak influence of the utilitarianism, the "Lumières" philosophers who, with Diderot and encyclopaedists paved the way to Claude Bernard's experimental medicine, or, with Rousseau, to sensitivity, shaped the French conscience. During the last century Albert Schweitzer, Luc Ferry, or Michel Serre contributed to a reflection on ethics of relationship between human and nature and animal (Serres 1990, Chapoutier 1992, Russ 1994), continued by Florence Burgat (Burgat 1997). Animal protection lobbies (Burgat 1994) are quite scattered and only slightly influential; their relationship with the agricultural world (breeders, industrials, ...) or other members of the population (hunters, ...) are mainly conflicting and the dialogue is difficult or impossible. In this context, the place of the animal in the French regulations, opened by the Grammont law (1850) relative to the protection of animals, relieved by the 10 of July 1976 law on nature's protection, is not really original or pronounced. European regulation on animal experimentation (Brugère et al 1992, Collectif 1995, Veissier 1999), on breeding, generally speaking or relative to porcine, poultry or calves, or on transport and slaughtering, have been transcribed in the national law without any particularity or further limitations, as done in some European countries. However, ethics of human-animal relationship is now more and more important in our society; the research community initiated an informal consultation by the way of a group named "Agri-Bien-Etre Animal", and higher education institutions are taking this subject into account.