Making Sense of What Animals Need
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Jessica Pierce, PhD
May 2018

The peril and promise of a "sensory approach" to animal welfare... Unfortunately, we can “take care” of animals—attending to their biological needs—without really “caring” about them.

rat
Source: Charles J. Danoff/Flickr

All animals, human and nonhuman alike, experience the world through the perceptive lens of their senses: seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling. But we humans often fail to take in just how different the sensory experiences of other animals are from our own. We tend to be human-centered in our thinking—and who can blame us? But in our interactions with other animals, we can increase our understanding and empathy if we learn to think imaginatively, going beyond our human experiences to get inside the sensory worlds of other creatures. This imaginative work forms the groundwork for an ethics of human-animal relationships. It also has important practical implications for how we take care of the animals around us.

One of the core tenets of the modern animal welfare movement is that providing appropriate care to animals we hold captive involves trying to “see” the environments we provide from the animals’ point of view, as much as this is possible. In other words, we need to attend to sensory worlds which are different from our own. Applying this in the realm of companion animals, for example, we may not think much about high-pitched sounds made by our home appliances, simply because we cannot hear them. But our dogs can, as can our cats. And these noises may be a source of stress.

A new review article in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, by Birte Nielsen, argues that our handling and housing of animals still often fails to take into consideration the unique sensory modalities of animals and that many animals, as a result, are suffering. In "Making Sense of it all: the importance of taking into account the sensory abilities of animals in their housing and management," Nielsen focuses particularly on animals who humans “manage” (which is a nice way of referring to animals we hold in captivity and use for human “benefits” such as food production and research data points). This isn’t revolutionary. Scientists have been studying the sensory modalities of other animal species for centuries. But directly asking how we can and ought to take these senses into account in our interactions with animals is an approach that deserves more attention.

Indeed, the “sensory approach” is exactly the one Marc Bekoff and I chose to use in our most recent book (Unleashing the Dog: A Field Guide to Freedom, which will be published by New World Library in 2019). We explore how dogs experience the world through smell, sight, hearing, taste, and touch and help readers understand how dogs’ sensory worlds overlap with our own, but also extend beyond ours. In particular, we explore what a sensory approach means for dog owners who want to increase the level of freedom and happiness experienced by their companions, by letting dogs really be dogs. How can we use our knowledge of the dogs’ sensory world to make their lives better?

What I found particularly valuable about Nielsen’s review is how she brings into focus (without meaning to, I’m sure) the difference between using what we know about animal senses to pursue our own ends, and using this knowledge in the service of animals themselves. The sensory approach can be a way to empathize with animals and more clearly understand their needs (which is what Dr. Bekoff and I at least try to accomplish); it can also become a tool used to refine human exploitations and manipulations of other animals.

Most of the examples presented by Nielsen show a sensory approach being applied in the service of human industry.

As Nielsen notes, we can manipulate animal sensory capabilities to produce behaviors that we find useful or desirable. For example, Temple Grandin’s work capitalizes on the sensory world of animals in food production systems to make these systems more efficient. Her design of curved chutes in slaughterhouses builds upon the sensory experiences of cattle, subtly shifting the environment of the CAFO so that it is more “cow friendly.” Grandin exploits the visual field: in the curved chute, the cattle can see ahead a little, but not far enough that they get scared, as they do in straight chutes where their “future” lies clearly in wait for them. By having enough light to ensure that there are no shadows and by eliminating novel objects from their visual trajectory, we convince the animals to move forward with less fear and resistance. This may be a welfare improvement because the cows experience slightly lower levels of stress. It is also a cruel exploitation of cow’s sensory world, making them less resistant to our manipulation and allowing production to proceed at a more efficient pace so that more cattle can be killed more quickly.

Captive settings such as zoos, research labs, and CAFOs are unnatural and uninteresting, so that the sensory capacities of animals are simply unused and sensory needs go unmet. If we can find a way to meet a greater range of the animals’ sensory needs, we can thus offer improvements to their “management” and “handling.” (I put these words in scare quotes because they are euphemisms for “doing things that impose suffering on sentient beings.”) A “touch” example comes from farmed mink. Many minks bred for and living on fur farms display stereotypic behaviors, such as pacing back and forth and other repetitive non-purposeful movement. They are often housed alone, in small, barren cages, and this is thought to at least partly explain their poor welfare. Researchers examined whether doubling the cage size would reduce stereotypies. It had no detectable positive effect. Researchers subsequently experimented with providing each mink a hollow cardboard tube—allowing him or her the security of hiding in a narrow space. This adjustment led to fewer observed stereotypic behaviors and greater activity levels and, it was assumed, somewhat better (or at least less compromised) welfare. This kind of intervention is often referred to in the welfare literature as an “enrichment.” The more enrichments we can provide animals in our care, the more we can engage their senses, the better.

On the other hand, many captive settings compromise animal welfare by overstimulating one or another sensory system. Animals suffer from sensory overload, particularly overload from sensory stimuli that are intrusive and unnatural, where meaningful auditory stimuli are drowned out by noise. As an example, Birte notes noise levels on pig farms can be as high as 110 decibels. This is equivalent to the noise of a jackhammer. Not surprisingly, noise disrupts the feeding behavior of piglets, because they cannot hear the vocalizations of their mother. In the same way, the olfactory system of animals can be overwhelmed in captive environments by strong and ever-present aversive smells, such as the ammonia stench from a densely packed room full of chickens. Under the onslaught of excessive olfactory “noise,” important olfactory information is often lost. Crucial olfactory information is made unavailable to animals in other ways, too. In rodent labs, for instance, the frequent cleaning of cages removes olfactory cues that male mice provide each other through their urine. The removal of this socially important information can lead to social disruptions within the group, provoking unnatural levels of aggression between the males (adding another source of stress for the animals)

As you will notice, each of the above-mentioned examples are “welfarist,” offering slight improvements within a setting or system that imposes profound challenges. These are all incremental improvements that help us feel better, but don’t actually do all that much for the animals, who would likely rather be removed from these challenging settings altogether. We can “take care” of animals—attending to their biological needs—without really “caring” about them. (Marc Bekoff and I explore welfarism and caring for animals in our 2017 book The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion and Coexistence in the Age of Humanity, Beacon Press.)

Reference

Birte L. Nielsen (2018). Making sense of it all: The importance of taking into account the sensory abilities of animals in their housing and management. Applied Animal Behaviour Science (in press).

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