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This post is part of the Psychology Today animal minds series.
Recently, I've published a book chapter (see here) together with the zoophilosopher Heather Browning on the relationship between health and consciousness.
Our paper is titled: "Phenomenology Applied to Animal Health and Suffering." Here a little summary from our abstract:
What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be sick? These two questions are much closer to one another than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, both raise a number of related, albeit very complex, philosophical problems. In recent years, the phenomenology of health and disease has become a major topic in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the phenomenology of animal health and suffering. This omission shall be remedied here, laying the groundwork for the phenomenological evaluation of animal health and suffering.
While disease is often involve an objective judgement (i.e., one of pathology), the concept of illness often refers to a particular subjective experience of pathological states. Here, we have a subjective awareness of something going wrong with one's body. This can involve pain, nausea, and a general sense of unpleasantness.
Can our animals suffer both from the objective and subjective side of disease? We argue that this is the case and that we should take the subjective experience of animals more seriously.
As we point out:
Animal experience is real and needs to be taken seriously—both for ethical and scientific purposes. While we cannot literally hear their voices, there are good phenomenological, yet nevertheless qualitative empirical methods, that can help us to, at least indirectly, make them heard.
But how can this be done?
We recommend a method called qualitative behavioral assessment (QBA):
QBA is a profiling method through which trained observers are able to take a whole-body approach to assess the overall experience of an animal. Observers watch an animal as it interacts with its environment, incorporating its behaviour and body language into a judgement about the animal.
Such assessments can be turned into more or less objective and quantitative scoring tools that are fairly reliably to assess something as private as subjective experience. While this is unlikely to be useful for any private pet owners, it is likely to be highly useful in animal husbandry and welfare (Browning 2020).
We say unlikely because it requires much time and training. But this does not mean that pet owners cannot possibly have a grasp of how their animals are feeling. While it is easily possible to misinterpret the signals of other species, this is a general problem, and one scientists work hard to overcome.
Future work may indeed be able to provide useful guidelines for pet owners to better assess how their animals are feeling and thus improve their welfare.
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