Animal Welfare: Neuro-Cognitive Approaches

Many people maintain a naive belief that non-human animals consciously experience pain and suffering in similar ways to humans. Others tend to assume a more sceptical or agnostic attitude. Drawing on recent advances in research on animal cognition and neuroscience, the science of animal welfare is now beginning to address these issues empirically. We describe recent advances that may contribute to the main questions of animal welfare, namely whether animals are conscious and how we can assess good and bad welfare in animals. Evidence from psychology is described which demonstrate that many complex actions in humans can be carried out quite unconsciously and that human patients with certain sorts of brain damage can behave and manipulate objects properly while at the same time o consciously denying experience of them. The relevance of these findings with respect to the issue of animal consciousness is discussed. Evidence from animal cognition is described concerning the possibility that animals monitor the state of their own memories, show episodic-like knowledge and exhibit self-medication. Evidence from neuroscience concerning brain lateralization in non-human animals and its relevance to animal welfare is described. It is argued that in animals raised for economic purposes (milk and meat production) differences in cognitive abilities and brain lateralization can affect adaptive behavioural, physiological and immune responses to environmental stressors.