Welfare biology is the study of living things considered as moral patients. The discipline’s main purpose is to determine the circumstances affecting wild animal welfare. Applied welfare biology, in turn, is the application of welfare biology to identify interventions that affect the welfare of wild animals.[1] The field was established by economist Yew-Kwang Ng in a seminal 1995 paper.[2]
Further reading
Animal Ethics (2018) Welfare biology, Animal Ethics, September 30 (updated 10 December 2021).
Carpendale, Max (2015) Welfare biology as an extension of biology: Interview with Yew-Kwang Ng, Relations, vol. 3, pp. 197–202.
Faria, Catia & Oscar Horta (2019) Welfare biology, in Bob Fischer (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics, New York: Routledge, pp. 455–466.
Groff, Zach & Yew-Kwang Ng (2019) Does suffering dominate enjoyment in the animal kingdom? An update to welfare biology, Biology and Philosophy, vol. 34, pp. 1–16.
Ng, Yew-Kwang (2016) How welfare biology and commonsense may help to reduce animal suffering, Animal Sentience, vol. 7, pp. 1–10.
Pearce, David (2016) Compassionate biology: How CRISPR-based “gene drives” could cheaply, rapidly and sustainably reduce suffering throughout the living world, BLTC Research (updated 2021).
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Faria, Catia & Oscar Horta (2019) Welfare biology, in Bob Fischer (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics, New York: Routledge, pp. 455–466.
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Ng, Yew-Kwang (1995) Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering, Biology and Philosophy, vol. 10, pp. 255–285.