Document type : Article published in The Conversation
Author: Marie-Claude Marsolier
Preview: Our thoughts and the words we use are interdependent, a fact well-understood by agri-food professionals, who use a whole range of euphemisms and semantic misdirections to conceal the violence done to animals.
In the 19th century, slaughterhouses and skinning plants became abattoirs, and on today's livestock farms, animal care can mean filing teeth, cutting beaks or tails, or castration. Against a background of denial surrounding the suffering inflicted by humans on other animals, a particular concept has gradually come to pervade all discourse: 'animal welfare'. [...]
The welfarist movement
The concept of "animal welfare" first became visible to the general public in the 1960s in the United Kingdom. In English, welfare generally means a 'physical and mental state', whether good or bad - there is no contradiction in speaking of poor welfare.
Moreover, since the beginning of the 20th century, the term welfare has referred more specifically to the social assistance provided to the most vulnerable humans in society. Animal welfare is the core concern of the welfarist movement, which strives to improve the living conditions of non-human animals, particularly in livestock farming, but does not overtly contest the principle of their exploitation.
It is fair to assume that the movement's purpose is to extend a guarantee that their basic needs should be met to all animals, this principle now being commonly accepted for humans.
From animal welfare to animal well-being
Welfare is thus distinguished from well-being in the latter's primary sense of "a general feeling of pleasure, of fulfilment that comes from the full satisfaction of the needs of the body and/or mind ", equally applicable to humans and non-humans. In English, therefore, the distinct meanings of welfare and well-being are used in the same way for humans and other animals.
The Englishanimal welfare has been translated into French as 'bien-être animal', which has spoiled this neat symmetry. Social bien-être in French equates to to 'protection' (of children, etc.) or 'social assistance', whereas 'bien-être animal', which is supposed to express the extension of social welfare to non-humans, is intuitively associated by French speakers with well-being, with extending human well-being to other animals. In other words, it refers to fundamentally positive and pleasure-based (spas, massages, etc.) concepts, with no talk of 'poor' well-being [...].
A misleading term
Official documents define 'animal welfare' as a state that is guaranteed by the satisfaction of five needs, described as 'freedoms from' (freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, etc.).
Even in this restricted interpretation, the term 'bien-être animal' is misleading, as its systematic use seems to imply that the 'five freedoms' are guaranteed for the majority of humans.
