Sonic enrichment at the zoo: What will the zoo of the future sound like?
Abstract There is a strong disconnect between humans and other species in our societies. Zoos particularly expose this disconnect by displaying the asymmetry between visitors in search of entertainment, and animals often suffering from a lack of meaningful interactions and natural behaviors. In zoos, many species are unable to mate, raise young, or exhibit engagement […]
Ethics and Invertebrates: The Problem Is Us
Simple Summary Why do we need a collection of papers about the welfare of invertebrates, and what do we need to learn from it? The most important reason is that they make up most of the animals on the planet, so animal welfare without invertebrates simply is not the welfare of animals. Being vertebrates and […]
Human–Animal Interactions in Zoos: What Can Compassionate Conservation, Conservation Welfare and Duty of Care Tell Us about the Ethics of Interacting, and Avoiding Unintended Consequences?
Human–animal interactions (HAIs) in zoos can be rewarding for both humans and animals, but can also be fraught with ethical and welfare perils. Contact with animals can be beneficial for all parties involved, and can indeed lead to pro-conservation and respect for nature behaviours being adopted by humans after so-called “profound experiences” of connecting or […]
Bridging compassion and justice in conservation ethics
‘Traditional conservation’ customarily engages in the dismissal of individual non-human animal claims when these conflict with human interests or prevailing ideas of biodiversity. Emerging conservation paradigms, compassionate conservation (CC) and multispecies justice (MJ), concerned with the prevalence of harm to animals are challenging the normative and practical standards underlying this dismissal. We place these two […]
Welfare Implications of Zoo Animal Training
Training provides zoo professionals with a tool by which they can effectively manipulate the behaviour of animals in their care. This chapter clarifies how animal welfare science can be used to better understand the impact of training; enable zoo professionals to take an evidence‐based approach to whether training is the best tool for a given […]
An Alternative to the Orthodoxy in Animal Ethics? Limits and Merits of the Wittgensteinian Critique of Moral Individualism
In this paper, we analyse the Wittgensteinian critique of the orthodoxy in animal ethics that has been championed by Cora Diamond and Alice Crary. While Crary frames it as a critique of “moral individualism”, we show that their criticism applies most prominently to certain forms of moral individualism (namely, those that follow hedonistic or preference-satisfaction […]
Dilemmas for Natural Living Concepts of Zoo Animal Welfare
This ethical discourse specifically deals with dilemmas encountered within zoological institutions, namely for the concept of natural living, and a new term-wilding. It is agreed by some that zoos are not ethically wrong in principle, but there are currently some contradictions and ethical concerns for zoos in practice. Natural living is a complicated concept, facing […]
Compassionate versus consequentialist conservation
Ethical treatment of wildlife and consideration of animal welfare have become important themes in conservation, but ethical perspectives on how best to protect wild animals and promote their welfare are diverse. There are advantages to the consequentialist harms ethical framework applied in managing wild herbivores for conservation purposes. To minimize harms while achieving conservation goals, […]
Summoning compassion to address the challenges of conservation
Conservation practice is informed by science, but it also reflects ethical beliefs about how humanity ought to value and interact with Earth’s biota. As human activities continue to drive extinctions and diminish critical life-sustaining ecosystem processes, achieving conservation goals becomes increasingly urgent. However, the determination to react decisively can drive conservationists to handle complex challenges […]
Animal pleasure and its moral significance
This paper presents arguments for, and evidence in support of, the important role of pleasure in animals’ lives, and outlines its considerable significance to humankind’s relationship to other animals. In the realms of animal sentience, almost all scholarly discussion revolves around its negative aspects: pain, stress, distress, and suffering. By contrast, the positive aspects of […]