Well, I don’t know if you can really measure the welfare of animals at all, seeing as they can’t tell us how they feel. It’s more like we infer how they are doing based on their behaviour, their conditions, what we know from their evolutionary history about what they are adapted to. Currently, the way I think about it is that it’s intensively reared animals that are the ones with bad lives. So factory-farmed pigs, chickens, and cows, as well as farmed fish are probably unhappy overall. But I could believe that sheep, deer, wild fish have happy lives.
I think a life can be happy even if cut short. It depends on how you think about population ethics and the badness of death, but I don’t want to get into the different options here. If you take a sort of standard ‘totalist’ view of these things, the world is better the more wellbeing there is in it, so adding a life that’s happy whilst it lasts (even if shorter than it could have been) is a good thing.
Well, I don’t know if you can really measure the welfare of animals at all, seeing as they can’t tell us how they feel. It’s more like we infer how they are doing based on their behaviour, their conditions, what we know from their evolutionary history about what they are adapted to. Currently, the way I think about it is that it’s intensively reared animals that are the ones with bad lives. So factory-farmed pigs, chickens, and cows, as well as farmed fish are probably unhappy overall. But I could believe that sheep, deer, wild fish have happy lives.
I think a life can be happy even if cut short. It depends on how you think about population ethics and the badness of death, but I don’t want to get into the different options here. If you take a sort of standard ‘totalist’ view of these things, the world is better the more wellbeing there is in it, so adding a life that’s happy whilst it lasts (even if shorter than it could have been) is a good thing.