Transcriber: Nhien Nguyen Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
People manage their midlife crises in their own way.
And for me, this involved a change in career direction from being
a country vet here in Warrnambool,
where I spent most of my time driving around dairy farms to taking up
an academic position at the University of Melbourne.
Where I'm now an associate professor in cattle medicine with
a Ph.D. in animal welfare.
Specifically, in my research,
I looked at the animal welfare implications as dairy herds get bigger.
And over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time watching cows eat grass.
You may be wondering about my title to cows think grass tastes good.
Because at first glance, this seems like a really simple question with perhaps
a fairly straightforward answer. But it belies a deeper question.
What do cows want in life if they think grass tastes good?
What else do they like and what do they dislike?
So and how can we give them a life worth living as a vet coming from
a farming background, I've always been interested in
the relationship that we have with the animals in our custody.
How do we reconcile the fact that we want to be good to them
and we want to look after them and we want them to be happy?
With the fact that we also eat them.
As an animal welfare scientist,
I'm interested in what we need to do to give our cows
the best life that it's possible for them to have.
Behavior is a product of evolution.
There are things that are instincts that we all need to do,
we have behaviors that we are motivated to express.
And so I'm interested in looking at what those things are about cows that they
want to do, what do they like, how can we give them what they want?
Humans often make sacrifices to achieve outcomes that make them feel good.
Anyone who plays sport, works,
studies or saves up for a trip for a holiday to a place like Warrnambool.
Well, understand this. The interesting thing is that in
the sphere of human world,
the magnitude of the sacrifice that is made is often proportional to
the respect that humans get or the reward that they get.
We think it's fantastic when humans make big sacrifices.
But in the animal welfare space, this is not the case,
we were aiming to minimize the sacrifices that animals must make.
So whilst it might seem obvious to anyone who has watched cows graze that they
like the taste of grass. It's important that we also look at
the sacrifices that they make in order to do so and whether they're worth it.
So today, I'm going to talk about animal welfare.
We know that animal welfare is important to most people.
Can you put your hand up if animal welfare is important to you?
Now, who was game not to put their hand up and living in
a place like Warrnambool where we are,
where more than half of our households own a pet.
We've got a thriving racing industry and we're surrounded by
a big farming community. Animal welfare is very important,
but what is animal welfare and how do we measure it?
There's two concepts that I'd like to talk about today.
Animal welfare and animal ethics. OK, let's start with animal welfare.
The reason that we worry about animal welfare in the first place is
because we want animals to be happy.
The reason we worry about animal welfare in the first place is
because we want animals to be happy. And that's an important thing.
Animal welfare is about how the animal feels.
And it's a science, it's about how the animal perceives its own condition,
good animal welfare, how do we measure it?
Because we can look at cows at one point in time and see whether they seem happy
or not. But what animal welfare scientists do is to add up
the sum of life experiences.
And see whether or not animals have had a life worth living overall and there's
a scale at one end, we can have a good life, a life worth living.
Or we could have a point of balance.
Or we could have a life not worth living.
Or indeed, we could have a life worth avoiding.
So animal welfare science is all about measuring things about animals,
understanding how the animal feels and how
the animal perceives its own condition, and it's a science.
This is different from animal ethics,
which is how humans feel about what we do to and with animals.
Animal ethics is our beliefs,
and they're based on our life experience and our cultural norms.
Some people think it’s OK to eat horses. Or dogs. Or Whales.
Some people think it's not OK to eat any of those things,
and indeed some people think it's not OK to eat cows in places they're sacred
or pigs or indeed, for some people,
it's not okay to eat the products of any living being.
It's interesting, the classical view of
the animal welfare scientist is that we don't really give much thought
as to why an animal is where it is. It's all about how the animal feels.
So as an example, a dog being bred for food in Vietnam has
the same animal welfare requirements as a pet dog in Warrnambool.
What they need is a good life and a humane death,
whether or not we should be breeding dogs for food is an ethical issue.
Now ethical or cultural beliefs are just their opinions,
albeit that they're often very strongly held.
And in a civilized society,
we require a certain tolerance towards people who believe things differently
than us. This is very obviously seen in the area of religion, for example,
I think society is getting much better at letting people worship
whoever they wish to.
And I think we’re reasonably good at in the sporting sphere,
we're quite happy to barrack for opposing teams,
even though none of us has any logical basis for doing so.
It's interesting to me, though, that when it comes to food choice,
there seems to be this thing where it's like a religion,
everybody wants to convince others to their way of thinking.
And I wish that were not the case.
I think we would be better off if we were able to respect each other's beliefs.
So animal welfare, science about how the animal feels,
animal ethics about how we feel. Both of these are important.
Let’s talk about animal welfare.
Arguments in the animal welfare space often center around
the extent to which we should avoid suffering, and indeed,
most of the cruelty laws in Australian states are about exactly that,
the prevention of unnecessary suffering.
There's an important word there, unnecessary.
Because in life, some suffering is necessary.
When I look at my own life, I have moments I've had moments of great anguish.
I've had moments of terrible sadness. I've had moments of extreme pain.
And suffering, but I've also had moments of great joy and pleasure and happiness,
and just for the record, I do think that my life thus far has been very well
worth living.
So a good life, a life worth living will likely include some terrible moments.
In some respects, I think that
the farm animals in our care are often luckier than wild animals
and indeed humans when it comes to having humane death because we have euthanasia.
Look at nature, there are not many ducks that die in their nest surrounded by
their loving family. Animals in nature die of starvation, predation, disease,
injury, or some horrible combination of those things,
and if they were in our care, we would not consider it to be humane.
But of course, animal welfare is much more than avoiding suffering
if we want animals to have a good life.
We need to understand what it is they want from life.
We all know how to make a dog happy. Don’t we, give it a pat.
I know how to make my cat happy
ignore it.
Humans know how to make each other very happy,
but I don’t think we’ll go down that path.
But how would you make a cow happy?
How would you take your favorite cow and give it a moment of pleasure?
What I'd like to do is just to look at some of the behaviors that cows have
and that they wish to express and see whether or not we're able to provide that
for them.
There are some aspects of cow behavior that I really relate to,
cows like to spend most of the day eating,
but there are three instincts that they have
which are very well ingrained.
The first is that they are herd animal.
Now, instincts and the need to express behavior are evolutionary things,
humans have been around 2 or 3,00,000 years,
but herd behavior in our ancestral animals has likely been around 200 million years.
And you can see why it evolved, can’t you?
that there’s safety in numbers.
Cows like to be in a herd,
they get comfort from belonging to have a herd and having
an important place within it.
There's great mental anguish when a cow is separated from the herd
and farmers in the room will understand that
a cow that’s off by itself will behave irrationally,
run through fences,
run through people completely irrationally.
Similarly, humans disconnected from the herd suffered great mental anguish.
People have been known to kill themselves as a result of being disconnected
from the herd.
And the desire to have herd approval is
so strong that it can override our good judgment and reason.
And some of the terrible things that have happened in the world
have happened
because of a desire for herd approval.
Interestingly, there’s two types of animals in the world as
prey animals and hunter animals
and cows are prey animals,
they tend to form big groups for protection.
Humans are hunter animals.
They tend to form tribes which often fight each other.
One of the things I really like about cows is that they don't fight each other
or become aggressive just because a cow comes from a different herd
or looks different.
The second instinct that’s important is agency.
Animal welfare scientists give
the name agency to what we would probably call freedom,
the ability to choose what you are doing to have some control over your own life.
And whilst cows in a paddock, I think,
do get some agency in that they're able to choose when they sit and stand
and who they walk around with and who they interact with
and when they're going to eat and those sorts of things.
But true agency, the ability to decide who they're going to have children with,
that's a sacrifice that they do make.
But they make that sacrifice in return for being fed well, looked after,
and provided with a humane death.
And I actually think that sacrifice is probably one that's well worth making.
They don't get agency, for example, when they come in to be milked twice a day.
In those times, but the third thing is that cows like us are creatures of habit,
they love a routine, and once they get used to the milking routine,
one of the ways that we can provide good welfare for them is to provide a nice,
consistent routine. I think we see it in people, too, don't we?
Resistance to change is a reasonably common thing.
I think it was Betty Friedan who when someone said,
you can't have everything you want.
He replied, Well, actually, you can have everything you want,
you just can't have it all at the same time.
So in some senses, cows are able to express some of their normal behaviors,
but animal welfare science is not just about suffering,
and it's not just about being able to have some naturalness.
It’s also about having a humane death,
a good life and a humane death.
How do we reconcile the idea that we provide animals with good animal welfare,
but we also kill them and eat them?
This is interesting because from an animal welfare science point of view,
a humane death with unnecessary suffering is a good thing.
And from an animal welfare science point of view, the timing of death,
is not an animal welfare issue, if the abattoir rings up and says, I’m sorry,
we can't take your cattle this week like we planned, it'll have to be next week.
There's no great celebration about
the amazing animal welfare outcome that has come as
a result of those cows living another seven days.
The timing of death is not an animal welfare issue. It's the nature of it.
Whether or not the death should happen is an ethical issue.
Now, from my own point of view, I'm reasonably comfortable with that,
I think I might feel different
if I thought that cows had an expectation of the future
but I don’t think they spend their day looking forward to
the day when their granddaughter joins the herd or indeed worrying about what
the future holds for her.
Cows
Remember the past, but they live in the present and
I think many of us humans will be happier if we did a bit more of that as well.
People anthropomorphize death more than anything,
it’s been a theme of poets through the ages
that our need to prevent suffering
and death in others may well come from a fear of our own death.
Killing an animal is so close and so real,
so some people live their lives through a philosophy
of causing as little death as possible.
And some people, for example,
choose to have margarine over butter
for what they consider to be ethical reasons or almond milk.
But it's more complicated than most people think because
the ethics are not always clear.
If you grab a canola crop.
And use insecticide to kill the insects.
Are you morally responsible for the birds and animals that starve
as a result of that?
The beautiful yellow flowers that give us good feelings about
a canola crop are present for one month of the year
and then absent for 11 months of the year,
and there are huge tracts of land without a single flower.
So the bees die.
And then the stubble is burnt
and everything that could live there is killed.
How is that human?
Take an almond crop and almond trees,
magpies cannot nest in almond trees.
If you grow an orchard of almond trees with
a bird's cannot nest and use water in such a way that wildlife cannot share it.
Have you been good for the world?
So how do we produce food ethically?
I don’t know, I’m an animal welfare scientist,
(Laughing)
So the cows like the taste of grass.
Yes, they do, and I'm glad they get the chance to eat it.
I think that our farmers should celebrate the animal welfare outcomes and
the biodiversity that can come from pasture based farming.
I love that our farms can co-exist with birds and snakes and trees
and all manner of wildlife, albeit at lower levels,
than they would be if there were no farms.
And I'm content with the effects of farming,
where cows can choose to walk or sit for most of the day,
where they can be members of a herd and they can feel
the satisfaction of social interaction.
Where they can experience moments of pleasure,
albeit that they may well also be moments of pain and suffering.
And where they can experience contentment,
even if it’s not 100 percent of the time.
Where they can have a life worth living.
And whilst I respect their right to hold them,
I disagree with the people who hold the view that we should not farm animals,
particularly those that hold the view that because we have to kill them,
we should not have had them in the first place.
I worry that this philosophy is misguided because death
and suffering still happen
with food crops and with plant based fiber,
but they're just one step further out of sight.
I think the world would be
a better place if we all spent our time trying to maximize happiness
and minimize suffering. And we didn't try simply to avoid death.
And in my world, this includes letting cows enjoy the taste of grass.
Thank you.
(Clapping)