When is an animal an animal? What does it really mean to be a pig? And is a pig conscious that it is a pig?

It might seem a touch strange that, among the scientists working on practical and down to the earth things like animal nutrition, health and behaviour at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences there is someone who can actually ask questions like that.

Nevertheless, at the Department of Animal Health, Welfare and Nutrition you can currently meet a philosopher who is posing these metaphysical questions.

Jes Harfeld from the Centre for Bioethics and Nanoethics at the University of Aarhus has submerged himself in a PhD thesis that aims to shed light on these concepts. He is looking at the relationship between society’s attitudes to animals and society’s ways of managing farm animal production, in order to focus on the ethics of animal-based food production.

- Production of food is something other than production of Lego blocks. Farm animal production is managed and controlled not only by market values, but also by ethical, aesthetical and societal values, says Jes Harfeld. He explains that, as a practical philosopher, he wants to relate his knowledge to the practical world.

- With a starting point in animal ethics, I would like to investigate what and how the state should manage animal-based food production, he says.

Ethics influence legislation

People – including farmers and consumers – elect politicians who make laws that control animal production. Part of the decision-making process is based on ethical values. Therefore, an important part of Jes Harfeld’s thesis will deal with articulating the various concepts and communicating his ideas to farmers, consumers, voters and politicians.

- I will take a look at what it means to call things by certain names and which concepts we use in the welfare debate. For example: What is actually meant by welfare? Welfare can mean ”to fare well” – and that is a process, not just a condition of the moment. To take another example: When you call a cow an animal unit, you turn it into an object on the same footing as other consumer products in our society. But a cow is not a Lego block. It is a living creature with five senses and should be treated and managed differently from the Lego block.

In the first part of the project Jes Harfeld will be working on philosophical ethology.

- I will investigate and write about what it actually means to be a pig or another farm animal destined for food production - for example, if a pig or a cow can have a role in a social context. It can be a mother, an offspring, a sibling, a penmate, a mating partner. There can be social hierarchies. We know that a pig can think. In other words, it is an animal with certain cognitive abilities - but how? Does it think about itself and its piggy companions and in what way? Is it conscious of being a pig and how it wants to live its porcine life?

- Being part of a herd is part of being a pig, cow, sheep or hen. Does that mean that in order to have a good life as a farm production animal you need to be a member of a herd? When a pig enjoys snuffling around with its snout, does that mean that it absolutely has to have good snuffle opportunities to have a good pig life? We cannot always extrapolate from ”is” to ”should be”. For centuries, human society has been male-dominated, but that does not mean we can conclude that that is the way it should be, Jes Harfeld points out.

- However, at the same time it would also be wrong to flatly separate ”is” and ”should be” in the animal welfare debate. How the animals actually are – physically, cognitively, socially etc. – says a lot about which opportunities they have to live a good life and thereby how we humans should act towards them, says the philosopher.

Jes Harfeld will use the philosophical approach to farm animal production to separate emotions, ethics and reality from each other so that the choices taken by consumers, politicians and farmers can be better founded.

- Using the concepts ”to feel pain or suffering” at one end of the animal welfare scale and ”to be happy” at the other end of the scale as the only measurements for what is ethically right or wrong is to oversimplify the whole subject and does not include the complexity of animal life. My goal is to reveal the complexity, says Jes Harfeld.

For further information please contact: PhD fellow, MA in philosophy, Jes Harfeld, Department of Systematic Theology, Faculty of Theology, University of Aarhus, telephone: +45 8942 6854, mobile: 3026 6607, e-mail: jeh@teo.au.dk

Head of research unit Birte Lindstrøm Nielsen, Department of Animal Health, Welfare and Nutrition, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, University of Aarhus, telephone: +45 8999 1373, e-mail: Birte.Nielsen@agrsci.dk

Text and photo: Janne Hansen