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Can farm animal welfare be understood without taking into account the issues of emotion and cognition?

Integrative Neurobiology, INRA-INSERM U394, 33077 Bordeaux Cedex, France

Abstract

Although the concept of welfare makes reference to feelings of individual animals, the exact nature of these feelings and their relationship to emotions and cognitive abilities of the animals under consideration are never detailed. Based on the concepts of stress and coping, an extensive list of indicators of physical health, production, behavior, and physiology has been set up for the purpose of recognizing good from bad welfare. However, these indicators do not allow us to make any inference about mental states. This issue is important because welfare considerations apply to farm animals of different species and, within a given species, to animals of different ages, which are likely to have varying degrees of emotional and cognitive capacity. In the past, disagreements about exact definitions of emotion and cognition have blurred the matter and hampered research. However, this should no longer be the case; the study of emotions and feelings has emerged as a field of active research in psychology and neuroscience over the last two decades. It is now possible to go over philosophical discussions on the nature of feelings and to set up a research agenda on emotion and cognition in farm animals that should help us to understand their welfare requirements.