Equine Welfare

C. Wayne McIlwraith, Bernard E. Rollin, Bernard E. Rollin, C. Wayne McIlwraith

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444397819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Veterinary Medicine

A rational exploration of the ethical and welfare issues in all areas of equine use. This book addresses controversial and emotive issues surrounding these iconic creatures, providing a reliable source of information to support informed debate. It will enable all those with an interest in horses and the uses they are put to gain an awareness of the problems and abuses that occur. The book draws on the expertise of a range of acknowledged leaders in equine health and welfare. The first part of the book explores general issues of the horse's needs and nature. The second part contains chapters each covering a specific human use of horses and the abuses that arise as a result.

This book is part of the UFAW/Wiley-Blackwell Animal Welfare Book Series. This major series of books produced in collaboration between UFAW (The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare), and Wiley-Blackwell provides an authoritative source of information on worldwide developments, current thinking and best practice in the field of animal welfare science and technology. For details of all of the titles in the series see www.wiley.com/go/ufaw.

Part I
Respecting the Horse’s
Needs and Nature

1 Equine Welfare and Ethics

Bernard Rollin

There is an ancient curse that is most appropriate to the society in which we live: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ From the point of view of our social ethics, we do indeed live in bewildering and rapidly changing times. The traditional, widely shared, social ethical truisms that gave us stability, order, and predictability in society for many generations are being widely challenged by women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, the handicapped, animal rights advocates, internationalists, environmentalists, and more.

It is very likely that there has been more and deeper social ethical change since the middle of the twentieth century than occurred during centuries of an ethically monolithic period such as the Middle Ages. Anyone over forty has lived through a variety of major ethical changes: the questioning of IQ differentiation, the rise of homosexual militancy, the end of ‘in loco parentis’ in universities, the advent of consumer advocacy, the end of mandatory retirement age, the mass acceptance of environmentalism, the growth of a ‘sue the bastards’ mind-set, the implementation of affirmative action programs, the rise of massive drug use, the designation of alcoholism and child abuse as diseases rather than moral vices, the rise of militant feminism, the emergence of sexual harassment as a major social concern, the demands by the handicapped for equal access, the rise of public suspicion of science and technology, the mass questioning of animal use in science and industry, the end of colonialism, the rise of political correctness – all provide patent examples of the magnitude of ethical change during this brief period.

It is arguable that morally based boycotting of South African business was instrumental in bringing about the end of apartheid, and similar boycotting of some farm products in the USA led to significant improvements in the living situations of farm workers. It is de rigueur for major corporations to have reasonable numbers of minorities visibly peopling their ranks, and for liquor companies to advertise on behalf of moderation in alcohol consumption. Cigarette companies now press upon the public a message that cigarettes kill and extol their involvement in protecting battered women; forestry and oil companies spend millions (even billions) to persuade the public of their environmental commitments. The news station, CNN, reported that ‘green’ investment funds grew significantly faster than ordinary funds, and reports of child labor or sweatshop working conditions can literally destroy product markets overnight. Monitoring such societal ethical changes and operating in accord with them is essential for all professions, businesses, and governmental agencies.

Not only is success tied to social ethics, but even more fundamentally, freedom and autonomy are as well. Every profession – be it medicine, law, or agriculture – is given freedom by the social ethic to pursue its aims. In return, society basically says to professions it does not understand well enough to regulate: ‘You regulate yourselves the way we would regulate you if we understood what you do, which we don’t. But we will know if you don’t self-regulate properly and then we will regulate you, despite our lack of understanding.’ For example, some years ago, the US Congress became concerned about excessive use of antibiotics in animal feeds and concluded that veterinarians were a major source of the problem. As a result, Congress was about to ban extra-label drug use by veterinarians, a move that would have killed veterinary medicine as we know it. However, through extensive efforts to educate legislators, such legislation did not proceed to law. In the same vein, it is much more difficult to be an accountant, post-Enron, because of the proliferation of regulatory restrictions.

One major social ethical concern that has developed over the last three decades is a significant emphasis on the treatment of animals used by society for various purposes. It is easy to demonstrate the degree to which these concerns have seized the public imagination. According to both the US National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Institutes of Health (the latter being the source of funding for the majority of biomedical research in the USA), neither group inclined to exaggerate the influence of animal ethics; by the early 1990s, the US Congress had been consistently receiving more letters, phone calls, faxes, emails, and personal contacts on animal-related issues than on any other topic (C. McCarthy, NIH, personal communication; NCBA, 1991).

Whereas twenty years ago, one would have found no bills pending in the US Congress relating to animal welfare, the last decades has witnessed 50 to 60 such bills annually, with even more proliferating at the state level (A. Douglas, American Human Association, Washington, DC, personal communication). The federal bills range from attempts to prevent duplication in animal research, to saving marine mammals from becoming victims of tuna fishermen, to preventing importation of ivory, to curtailing the parrot trade. State laws passed in large numbers have increasingly prevented the use of live or dead shelter animals for biomedical research and training and have focused on myriad other areas of animal welfare. Eight states have abolished the steel-jawed leghold trap (HSUS, 2003). When Colorado’s politically appointed Wildlife Commission failed to act on a recommendation from the Division of Wildlife to abolish the spring bear hunt (because hunters were liable to shoot lactating mothers, leaving their orphaned cubs to die of starvation), the general public ended the hunt through a popular referendum. Seventy percent of Colorado’s population voted for this as a constitutional amendment (Denver Post, 1994). In Ontario, the environmental minister stopped a similar hunt by executive fiat in response to social ethical concern (Animal People, 1999). California abolished the hunting of mountain lions, and state fishery management agencies have been taking a hard look at catch-and-release programs on human grounds (Laitenschloger and Bowyer, 1985).

In fact, wildlife managers have worried, in academic journals, about ‘management by referendum.’ According to a speech given by the Director of the American Quarter Horse Association, the number of state bills related to horse welfare filled a telephone book-sized volume in 1998 alone (Houston Livestock Show, 1998). Public sentiment for equine welfare in California carried a bill through the state legislature making the slaughter or shipping of horses for slaughter a felony in that state. Municipalities have passed ordinances ranging from the abolition of rodeos, circuses, and zoos to the protection of prairie dogs and, in the case of Cambridge, Massachusetts (a biomedical Mecca), the strictest laws in the world regulating research. There were in fact some 2100 state bills relevant to welfare promulgated in 2004, and everyone in the equine community is aware of how the public forced an end to equine slaughter. Britain has passed a quality-of-life law covering pets that went into effect in 2007. Ever-increasingly, horses are being viewed as companion animals, rather than as livestock.

Perhaps even more dramatic is the worldwide proliferation of laws to protect laboratory animals. In the USA, for example, the US Congress passed two major pieces of legislation (the Animal Welfare Act and the Health Research Extension Act) regulating and constraining the use and treatment of animals in research in 1985, despite vigorous opposition from the powerful biomedical research and medical lobbies. This opposition included well-financed, highly visible advertisements and media promotions indicating that human health and medical progress would be harmed by implementations of such legislation. There was even a less-than-subtle film titled ‘Will I Be All Right, Doctor?’ with the query coming from a sick child. The response from a pediatrician was, in essence, ‘You will be if “they” leave us alone to do as we wish with animals.’ With social concern for laboratory animals unmitigated by such threats, research animal protection laws moved easily through the US Congress and have been implemented at considerable cost to taxpayers. In 1986, Britain superseded its pioneering act of 1876 with new laws aimed at strengthening public confidence in the welfare of experimental animals (UK Home Office, 2003). Many other European countries have moved or are moving in a similar direction, despite the fact that some 90% of laboratory animals are rats and mice, which are not often considered the most cuddly and lovable of animals.

Many animal uses seen as frivolous by the public have been abolished without legislation. Toxicological testing of cosmetics on animals has been truncated by public aversion to it driving the science of alternatives (companies such as the Body Shop have been wildly successful internationally by totally disavowing such testing), and free-range egg production is a growth industry across the Western world. Greyhound racing in the USA has declined, in part for animal welfare reasons, with the Indiana veterinary community spearheading the effort to prevent greyhound racing from coming in to the state. Zoos that are little more than prisons for animals (the state of the art during my youth) have all but disappeared, and the very existence of zoos is being increasingly challenged, despite the public’s unabashed love of seeing animals. And, as Gaskell and his associates’ work has revealed (Gaskell et al., 1997), genetic engineering has been rejected in Europe – not, as commonly believed, for reasons of risk, but for reasons of ethics, in part for reasons of animal ethics. Similar reasons (i.e., fear of harming cattle) have, in part, driven European rejection of bovine somatotropin (BST). Rodeos such as the Houston Livestock Show and the Calgary Stampede have, in essence, banned jerking of calves in roping, despite opposition from the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, who themselves never show the actual roping of a calf on national television. Some jurisdictions have banned rodeo altogether.

Agriculture has also felt the force of social concern with animal treatment. Indeed, it is arguable that contemporary concern in society with the treatment of farm animals in modern production systems blazed the trail leading to a new ethic for animals. As early as 1965, British society took notice of what the public saw as an alarming tendency to industrialize animal agriculture by chartering the Brambell Commission, a group of scientists under the leadership of Professor Sir Roger Brambell, who affirmed that any agricultural system failing to meet the needs and natures of animals was morally unacceptable (Brambell, 1965). Though the Brambell Commission recommendations enjoyed no regulatory status, served as a moral lighthouse for European social thought. In 1988, the Swedish Parliament passed, virtually unopposed, what the New York Times called a ‘Bill of Rights’ for farm animals, abolishing in Sweden the confinement systems currently dominating North American agriculture in a series of timed steps (New York Times, 1988). Much of northern Europe has followed suit, and the European Union is moving in a similar direction. For example, sow stalls must be eliminated by 2011 (European Union, 2001). Recently, activists in the USA have begun to turn their attention to animal agriculture and have begun to pressure chain restaurants and grocery chains to purchase only ‘humanely raised’ animal products. In 2007, Smithfield Foods, the largest US pork producer, announced it was phasing out gestation crates, and the US and European veal industries are eliminating confinement veal crates. Key referenda and legislative initiatives have abolished these procedures in a number of states, notably, Colorado, Arizona, and Oregon, with a very major initiative abolishing veal cages, sow stalls, and battery cages for laying hens passed in California in 2008. In a report released in May of 2008, the prestigious Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (www.PCIFAP.org) urged that all high-confinement agricultural systems be abandoned within ten years.

In what follows, I will explain the nature of the ethic informing these activities as well as what implications that ethic has for the equine industry. First, however, it is necessary to explain the concept of animal welfare.

There is one monumental conceptual error that is omnipresent in the animal industries’ discussions of animal welfare – an error of such magnitude that it trivializes the industries’ responses to the ever-increasing societal concerns about the treatment of agricultural animals. That error is the failure to recognize that the concept of animal welfare contains both empirical and ethical elements.

Societal concerns about animal welfare are emerging as non-negotiable demands by consumers. Failure to respect such concerns can essentially destroy the economic base for animal use. Whether one discusses farm animal welfare or equine welfare with industry groups or with the American Veterinary Medical Association, one finds the same response – animal welfare is solely a matter of ‘sound science.’

Those of us serving on the Pew Commission, better known as the National Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, encountered this response regularly during our dealings with industry representatives. For example, one representative of the pork producers, testifying before the Commission, answered that, while people in her industry were quite ‘nervous’ about the Commission, their anxiety would be allayed were we to base all of our conclusions and recommendations on ‘sound science.’ Hoping to rectify the error in that comment, as well as educate the numerous industry representatives present, I responded to her as follows: ‘Madam, if we on the Commission were asking the question of how to raise swine in confinement, science could certainly answer that question for us. But that is not the question the Commission, or society, is asking. What we are asking is, ought we raise swine in confinement? And to this question, science is not relevant.’ Judging by her ‘Huh?,’ I assume I did not make my point.

Questions of animal welfare are at least partly ‘ought’ questions, questions of ethical obligation. The concept of animal welfare is an ethical concept to which, once understood, science brings relevant data. When we ask about an animal’s welfare, or about a person’s welfare, we are asking about what we owe the animal, and to what extent. Thus, when the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) report on animal welfare, first published in the early 1980s, discussed animal welfare, it affirmed that the necessary and sufficient conditions for attributing positive welfare to an animal were represented by the animals’ productivity (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Respecting the Horse's Needs and Nature
• Part II Human Uses and Abuses - Welfare Issues
• Index