WDC8: Agricultural Bioethics
(Multistate Research Coordinating Committee and Information Exchange Group)
Status: Inactive/Terminating
WDC8: Agricultural Bioethics
Duration: 10/01/2006 to 09/30/2007
Administrative Advisor(s):
NIFA Reps:
Non-Technical Summary
Statement of Issues and Justification
Animal scientists have contributed greatly to the abundant and readily available food supply that most Americans now enjoy. However, the mechanical and chemical technologies that were employed to increase animal production levels and lessen human labor have also brought forth questions related to the appropriateness of the restrictions on animal behavior and the lessening of animal lifespan associated with the high levels of growth rate, egg and milk production, etc. These questions arise within a world where social structures are changing rapidly. There is an undoubtedly mistaken belief that all scientists typically view science as a value-free enterprise, and therefore, give little attention to the ethical implications of their work. Nevertheless, science is a social practice that supports cultural agendas. These in turn determine socio-political structures that influence who has access to goods, services, liberties, and power.
The animal and poultry sciences are particularly fraught with increasingly contentious social issues that reflect changing social values and beliefs. Ethical concerns have been raised about farm animal welfare, the impact of contemporary animal production systems on the environment, the implications of large scale animal production for human health, the structure of rural communities and family farms, and the role of science and scientists in advising food animal policies. The lack of moral deliberation apparent in those advocating the belief that science alone can address these issues coupled with the success of activists at making ethical arguments against food animal production has led to a high proportion of the citizenry losing their historic trust in science in general, and in animal production systems and animal science in particular. This posture was greatly fostered (in Europe) by the BSE saga which resulted from a technology that was designed by animal scientists (feeding rendered bovine by-products to cattle). In addition the FMD debacle in the UK horrified the public by what they saw as the unnecessary and often rushed and inhumane slaughter of 10 million animals - the vast majority of which were not infected with FMD but happened to be located on nearby farms. It may be argued that action resulted from veterinary policy. But the impact on the areas of animal science were enormous with pedigree stock being killed, long-term breeding and conservation programs destroyed and many livestock producers left in economic disability despite some compensation for lost stock. Animal scientists have to be able to speak on these and other ethical issues whereas we have largely ignored them and simply carried on with our pursuit of efficiency (Hodges, 2003, 2006).
In order to serve diverse public interests, Animal Scientists must learn to evaluate their work in a context that is broader than just the scientific or technical. We must incorporate into our scientific pursuits an ongoing critical evaluation of the cultural, social, and personal biases that guide our work, and its resultant moral, social, and political impacts.
Of the bioethical issues concerning animal agriculture, animal welfare and rights issues have received the most attention. A tremendous amount of information is being published, much of it pertaining to farm animals and ethical concerns about their welfare during production and processing. A brief list of popular and widely published examples includes:
1. On August 25, 1999 the Oregonian newspaper from Portland, Oregon published an article titled, "Legal Rights for Animals." That article begins, "More than a generation after civil rights and environmental lawyers took their battles to the courts, there are now lawyers who say they are following in those footsteps on behalf of clients with names like Freckles and Muffin and Rainbow." Also in this article: A new scholarly journal called "Animal Law" is being published. Steven M. Wise, a Boston lawyer who teaches courses in Animal Law says, "the legal work now being done on behalf of animals is paving the way for change. It is a long-term strategy to show that animals aren't just things for our use."
2. September 6, 1999 issue of Time magazine has an article which discusses the
question, "Can Animals Think?" It is composed of excerpts from a new book titled "The Parrot's Lament" by Eugene Linden, which discusses "how animals demonstrate aspects of intelligence as they escape from, cheat, and outfox humans."
3. In 1999, Angus Taylor published a new book (Broadview Press) titled "Magpies,
Monkeys and Morals: What philosophers say about animal liberation."
4. The Quarterly Review of Biology published a 1999 book called "Attitudes to
Animals: Views in animal welfare" edited by Francine L. Dolins.
5. In a 1999 book titled "Mad Cowboy: plain truth from the cattle rancher who
won't eat meat", Howard Lyman describes the ways that meat-eating kills humans
from heart disease to cancer to "mad cow disease."
A comprehensive list of publications of this type would be immense. It is expected that the amount of information that will be published in future years will continue to grow exponentially, but where are the voices of the Animal Science community? Other than publications by farm animal welfarists and behaviorists, the Animal Science community has remained largely silent on the subject. We suspect that the silence is partially due to the fact that Animal Scientists don't know how to respond, even though their perspectives should be heard and are greatly needed to inform existing debates. In contrast, the voices of contemporary authors, such as Michael Pollan, are resounding. Pollan (2006) writes in his new book, the Omnivore's Dilemma, "" Eating is an agricultural act" as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is going to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeing. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them. There are things in it that will ruin their appetites."
The proposed multi-state coordinating committee (formerly WCC 204-Animal Bioethics) is thus designed to facilitate continuation of a dialogue, established by our group during our initial existence as a coordinating committee, among members of the Animal Sciences community about the pertinent questions and the potential answers, or in other words, to help some members enter the debates in a meaningful and credible way. "They have poisoned the water you know. They have laced the very air we breathe with toxins, seeded our bodies with the chemical generators of cancer, poisoned the apples our children eat, even the very milk they drink. Who? Who, you ask? Read! Listen! Pendulums swing. What comes around, goes around. It's not the communists, this time, but the scientists, the technologists... the Dr. Frankensteins, and the transnational corporations they work for..." (Franklin, 1997).
These are pretty harsh words. In fact, infuriating words. We scientists haven't been doing these things! Rather, we have been trying to work for the public good. Our primary goals have been to increase production efficiency, and keep food prices low, so that everyone in society benefits. However, Mr. Franklin's words suggest that society may not totally appreciate the unintended consequences of many of our accomplishments, and that perhaps we need to account for some of the unanticipated side effects of our practices. Franklin made these comments at the beginning of our 1996 ASAS Annual Meeting to try to wake us up. Our unrelenting and narrow-sighted pursuit of improved production efficiency is creating problems, and many of these problems are significant. At the end of Mr. Franklin's talk, someone from the audience said "OK, but what do we do?" Mr. Franklin said that we need to broaden the scope of our inquiries: become more engaged in research in the philosophies and the social sciences, etc., and begin communicating credibly with our critics.
Framing the problems a bit differently, Bawden (1999) writes the following about agricultural bioethics: "A changing agenda is beginning to emerge with respect to the process of agricultural development with assertions about what it is that can be done - beginning to be replaced in their primacy, by questions about what it is that should be done." "What once were considered to be but technical issues are now increasingly appreciated as issues of moral concern." We animal scientists need to become more adept at working with and discussing these "moral concerns." Beginning in the 1960's with Carson's book "Silent Spring", and the 1970's with "Animal Liberation" by Peter Singer and "Animal Machines" by Ruth Harrison, the voices of our critics began to grow. The number of voices heard continues to grow exponentially. Most of these voices are not animal scientists. Are we to remain silent in this debate? If not, what do we do?
To address this concern, in 1997, the Contemporary Issues Program Committee of
ASAS sponsored a symposium called "What Should Animal Science Departments be doing to Address Contemporary Issues?" (Davis, 1999). In that session, Swanson (1999) reported the results of a survey of Departments of Animal Science showing that several departments had begun to address these issues with new undergraduate courses, but clearly more needed to be done. In addition, Paul Thompson (1998) reported on the question from a philosopher's perspective. He concludes that "staying within the boundaries of one's farm or laboratory is no longer enough. Animal agriculture must become articulate in its relations with the public. To accomplish that, he recommends several steps towards developing "A new professional ethic" in Animal Sciences. These recommendations include:
1. Create a forum in which contentious issues in animal science and agriculture may be vigorously debated.
2. Increase the number of undergraduate and graduate courses that deal with the ethics of animal sciences and animal agriculture.
3. Create "renewed attention to the philosophy of science within the animal
agriculture and veterinary disciplines."
4. Sponsor workshops / symposia which would "cover the basic patterns of argument used to justify an action in light of its consequences, in light of claims of right, consent and respect...."
5. Establish a new regional project on agricultural bioethics to encourage the development of active interdisciplinary research projects and outreach programs.
It is for this last recommendation, a regional project on bioethics that the proposal is being written. And it is through the auspices of this regional coordinating committee that his other recommendations may be addressed.
Schillo (1998) addressed the issue of diversity in the Animal Science profession, and argued that animal agriculture is driven by a world view that does not take into account the values that reflect the experiences of many people who live in our pluralistic society. He advocated a professional ethic that reflects more diverse values in order to make this profession more empirically relevant. This may require changing the ways in which we teach, conduct research, and evaluate and reward colleagues; i.e., changing the social
structure of the profession.
Although he didn't call it a "new professional ethic", Cheeke (1999) published a review of the problems facing contemporary animal scientists and animal agriculture. He also recommended that animal scientists need to move beyond the narrow focus of production efficiency. Similar ideas have been articulated for years by Rollin (1992, 1995). In his keynote speech at the 2003 ASAS meeting Rollin (2004) pointed out that animal agriculture must find ways to demonstrate the ethics reflected in animal husbandry that have diminished as a result of industrialization production techniques.
The need for a regional bioethics project was described at a 1993 meeting on food animal well being (Swanson and Thompson, 1993). In the published proceedings of this meeting, they listed and discussed several actions needed to address increased social concerns about animal sciences and production. Among these recommendations were:
1. Undertake a program to develop educational materials and curricula on food animal well being;
2. Conduct research that will support the development of alternative policies and methods of production; and
3. Create sources of funding dedicated to research and program development on
food animal well being.
This proposed regional coordinating committee should begin to address these recommendations because as stated by Rollin (2004) not only is success tied to social ethics, but even more fundamentally, freedom and autonomy are as well.
A small but growing number of Animal Scientists in the U.S. have begun the much needed process of scientifically examining certain animal welfare questions. However, as discussed previously, animal welfare is only one of the bioethical concerns associated with food animal production. Moreover, in resolving many of the issues having to do with animal welfare, appropriate use of biotechnology, environmental impact, impact of increasing scale of production on rural economy and community, etc., science alone cannot resolve the issues. The purpose of the proposed regional coordinating committee on Agricultural Bioethics is therefore to address the moral and ethical issues associated with the profession of animal sciences within the broader context of animal agriculture.
The issues that will be addressed fall into three primary categories;
1) agricultural animals,
2) the environment or ecosystem in total, and
3) humans (producers, rural communities, consumers, and the public at large).
The Bioethics group will approach these issues as questions that have to do with "what ought to be" the policy and practice of animal scientists. Thus, the group will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating the expertise of social scientists and philosophers with that of animal scientists to explore the broad range of bioethical questions associated with animal agriculture.