What makes a desert tortoise happy? Before you answer, we should be more specific: We’re talking about a Sonoran desert tortoise, one of a few species of drab, stocky tortoises native to North America’s most arid landscapes. Adapted to the rocky crevices that striate the hills from western Arizona to northern Mexico, this long-lived reptile impassively plods its range, browsing wildflowers, scrub grasses and cactus paddles during the hours when it’s not sheltering from the brutal heat or bitter cold. Sonoran desert tortoises evolved to thrive in an environment so different from what humans find comfortable that we can rarely hope to encounter one during our necessarily short forays — under brimmed hats and layers of sunblock, carrying liters of water and guided by GPS — into their native habitat.
This past November, in a large, carpeted banquet room on the University of Wisconsin’s River Falls campus, hundreds of undergraduate, graduate and veterinary students silently considered the lived experience of a Sonoran desert tortoise. Perhaps nine in 10 of the participants were women, reflecting the current demographics of students drawn to veterinary medicine and other animal-related fields. From 23 universities in the United States and Canada, and one in the Netherlands, they had traveled here to compete in an unusual test of empathy with a wide range of creatures: the Animal Welfare Assessment Contest.
That morning in the banquet room, the academics and experts who organize the contest (under the sponsorship of the American Veterinary Medical Association, the nation’s primary professional society for vets) laid out three different fictional scenarios, each one involving a binary choice: Which animals are better off? One scenario involved groups of laying hens in two different facilities, a family farm versus a more corporate affair. Another involved bison being raised for meat, some in a smaller, more managed operation and others ranging more widely with less hands-on human contact.
Then there were the tortoises. On screens along the room’s outer edge, a series of projected slides laid out two different settings: one, a desert museum exhibiting seven Sonoran specimens together in a large, naturalistically barren outdoor enclosure; the other, a suburban zoo housing a group of four tortoises, segregated by sex, in small indoor and outdoor pens furnished with a variety of tortoise toys and enticements. Into the slides had been packed an exhausting array of detail about the care provided for the tortoises in each facility. Only contestants who had prepared thoroughly for the competition — by researching the nutritional, environmental, social and medical needs of the species in question — would be able to determine which was doing a better job.
“Animal welfare” is sometimes misused as a synonym for “animal rights,” but in practice the two worldviews can sometimes be at cross purposes. From an animal rights perspective, nearly every human use of animals is morally suspect, but animal-welfare thinkers take it as a given that animals of all kinds do exist in human care, for better or worse, and focus on how to treat them as well as possible. In the past half century, an interdisciplinary group of academics, working across veterinary medicine and other animal-focused fields, have been trying to codify what we know about animal care in a body of research referred to as “animal-welfare science.”
The research has unlocked riddles about animal behavior, spurred changes in how livestock are treated and even brought about some advances in how we care for our pets: Studies of domestic cats, for example, have found that “puzzle feeders,” which slow consumption and increase mental and physical effort while eating, can improve their health and even make them friendlier. The discipline has begun to inform policy too, including requirements for scientists receiving federal grants for their animal-based research, regulations governing transport and slaughter of livestock, accreditation standards for zoos and aquariums and guidelines for veterinarians performing euthanasia.
Contest organizers hope to help their students, who might someday go into a range of animal-related jobs — not just as vets but in agribusiness, conservation, government and more — employ data and research to improve every aspect of animal well-being. Americans own an estimated 150 million dogs and cats, and our policies and consumption patterns determine how hundreds of millions of creatures from countless other species will live and die. The Animal Welfare Assessment Contest tries to introduce students to that enormous collective responsibility, and to the complexity of figuring out what each of these animals needs, especially when — as in the case of reptiles living in a shell — their outlook differs radically from our own.
The effort to improve the lives of America’s animals began more than 150 years ago. As it happens, a hundred or so turtles figured in one of the most important events in the early history of animal activism in America. It was May 1866 — the heyday of turtle soup, a dish so beloved at the time that restaurants in New York would take out newspaper ads, or even maintain special outdoor signage, declaring the hour at which the day’s batch would be ready. And so this group of unlucky sea turtles, after being captured by hunters in Florida, was brought to New York upside down on a schooner. To further immobilize them, holes were pierced through their fins with cords run through them.
The turtles would have assumed a tranquil, passive demeanor under such conditions, perhaps making it possible for the ship’s crew to believe that the creatures weren’t suffering. But there is every reason to believe they were. Evolution has equipped the marine turtle for a life afloat, with a large lung capacity filling the space beneath the shell, to enable long dives. When the turtles were on their backs, the weight of their organs would have put pressure on these lungs, forcing their breathing to become deliberate and deep.
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals started up the month before. Its president and founder, a Manhattan shipbuilding heir named Henry Bergh, spent its early weeks focusing on domestic species — above all, horses, the rough treatment of which in 19th-century streets was the main inspiration for his activism. But when he became aware of these suffering sea turtles for sale at Fulton Market, he decided to extend his campaign to a wildlife species that then barely rated more consideration than a cockroach, if not a cabbage.
Bergh made a case that the infliction of prolonged pain and distress upon sea turtles bound for the soup pot was illegal as well as immoral. As with other “mute servants of mankind” providing labor, locomotion, meat or milk to human beings, the turtle was entitled to be treated with compassion. But when Bergh hauled the ship’s captain in front of a judge, the defense argued (successfully!) that turtles were not even “animals,” but rather a form of fish, and thereby did not qualify under the new animal-cruelty law that Bergh succeeded in passing earlier that year.
Still, the case became a media sensation — and signaled to New Yorkers that Bergh’s campaign on behalf of animals was going to force them to account for the suffering of all animals, not just the ones they already chose to care about.
It’s perhaps no accident that Bergh turned to activism after a failed career as a dramatist. There’s something irreducibly imaginative in considering questions of animal welfare, regardless of how much science we marshal to back up our conclusions. George Angell of Boston, his fellow titan of that founding generation of animal advocates, pirated a 13-year-old British novel called “Black Beauty” and turned it into one of the century’s best-selling books, touting it as “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the Horse” — though its real innovation was its use of an animal as a first-person narrator, thrusting readers into a working horse’s perspective and forcing them to contemplate how the equines all around them might see the world differently.
But how far does imagination really get us? The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously explored this problem in an essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” which took up that question only to dramatize the impossibility of answering it to anyone’s satisfaction. “It will not help,” he wrote, “to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves.”
In the case of chelonians like turtles — and their encarapaced brethren, the tortoises — we may know even less about how they experience the world than we do about bats. Take their vision, for example: Among those species that have been studied, scientists have found evidence of broad-spectrum color vision, sometimes including ultraviolet wavelengths invisible to the human eye. And while chelonians can see well beyond their pointed beaks, where edible vegetation or predators may await notice, their brains process these visual signals slowly — a quality of certain animal brains that might, some experts have theorized, result in a sped-up perception of time. (In chelonian eyes, do grasses wave frenetically in the breeze and clouds race across the sky?)
Next to vision, smell is probably the sense turtles and tortoises rely upon most. Their sensitive nasal epithelium, distributed between two chambers, can detect odors diffused in a warm desert breeze or dissolved in a cold ocean current. Chelonian ears are where you’d expect them to be, but buried beneath their scaled reptilian skin. They hear well at low frequencies, even if they don’t register the high notes of twittering birds, humming mosquitoes or the whistling wind. Some chelonians seem to have the power of magnetoreception, which means that somewhere in their anatomy — perhaps their eyes, or their nervous systems, or elsewhere — there are chemicals or structures that allow them to sense the earth’s geomagnetic field and navigate by it.
The chelonian sense of touch presents fewer mysteries. Specialized receptors in the skin and on the shell detect mechanical, temperature and pain stimuli and send messages to the nervous system — just as they do in humans and a wide variety of other species. Recognition of pain, in particular, is considered a primordial sense, essential to the survival of animals on every limb of the evolutionary tree. But even here, there are differences separating species: What does the nervous system do with signals from its nociceptors? Does the desert tortoise withdraw its foot from the scorpion’s tail only reflexively, or does it consciously register the pain of the sting? What suffering does a turtle endure when its shell is struck by the sharp edges of a boat propeller?
As Nagel argued, there is no way to meaningfully narrow the gulch in understanding that exists around “what it is like to be” such a creature. The strategy of animal-welfare science is to patiently use what we can observe about these other kinds of minds — what they choose to eat and to do, how they interact with their environments, how they respond to certain forms of treatment — looking for objective cues to show experts what imagination cannot.
Upstairs from the banquet hall, student competitors nervously milled around carpeted corridors. One by one they were called into conference rooms to face a judge, who sat at a table beside a digital chronograph. In one room, a neatly dressed young woman in owlish glasses took a breath as the display began counting up hundredths of seconds in bright red digits. Catherine LeBlond, a second-year student at Atlantic Veterinary College at Canada’s University of Prince Edward Island, began her presentation about the bison scenario.
She was allowed to refer only to a single 3-by-5 index card, which she had packed with information based on a “summary sheet” of takeaways that she and her teammates worked up together, with key phrases emphasized and sources cited, all of it broken down by category: social behavior (“Bison are a very social species with strong matriarchal divisions”), handling guidelines (“Prods should not be used to move bison unless safety is an issue”), facility design (“Ensure that there is a sufficient number of gates within facilities to slow the animals”), euthanasia (“The recommended euthanasia method of a bison is gunshot”) and more.
LeBlond began by declaring her choice: The wilder facility provided a more humane environment for its animals. She felt it was helping bison “live a more natural life”: The more spacious grounds would support wallowing behavior, she reasoned, and allow the animals to choose their social grouping, an important policy given bisons’ strong sense of social structure. She also praised the operation for enabling bison to avoid “aversive life events,” by using drones, rather than ranchers on horseback, to monitor the animals in the field, and also by slaughtering the animals on-site to avoid the distress they experience in transport. As she ran through her presentation, she took care to hit two important rhetorical notes that judges look for: “granting” some areas in which the other institution excelled and offering positive advice about how it might improve.
One way to think about her reasoning is through the lens of “the five freedoms,” a rubric that animal-welfare thinkers have long embraced to consider all the different obligations that humans have to the animals in their care. They are: 1. the freedom from hunger and thirst; 2. the freedom from discomfort; 3. the freedom from pain, injury or disease; 4. the freedom to express normal behavior; and 5. the freedom from fear and distress. In fact, it was arguably the articulation of these five freedoms — in the Brambell Report, a document put out by a British government committee in 1965 to assess the welfare conditions of the nation’s livestock — that inaugurated the whole field of animal-welfare science.
What made this list of “freedoms” so influential, in retrospect, was that it created a context for other, more targeted thinking about how a species might experience each freedom or its violation. What sort of environment will offer “freedom from discomfort” to a beef steer, on the one hand, and a freedom “to express normal behavior” on the other? Trying to answer such questions in a rigorous way involves considerations of veterinary medicine but also of evolutionary history, behavioral observation, physiology (scientists have begun using proxies like cortisol levels as an indication of animal stress), neuroscience and more.
In her bison presentation, by citing “a more natural life” and avoiding “aversive life events,” LeBlond was emphasizing Freedoms 4 and 5, the freedom to express normal behavior and the freedom from distress. In the scenario about tortoises, though, Freedoms 4 and 5 seemed to be at odds. When LeBlond addressed the judge for that category, she awarded the edge to the zoo — weighing its better health outcomes and stimulating enrichments over the more naturalistic setting at the museum. She zeroed in on the zoo’s visitor program, which gave the tortoises a novel method of choosing whether or not they wanted to interact with humans: Staff put out a transport crate, and over the course of 20 minutes, tortoises could decide to climb into the crate to be taken to the human guests, and later receive a special biscuit for their service.
And she linked this to a behavioral difference, illustrated by a set of charts comparing how readily each set of tortoises moved toward a “novel object” (like an enrichment toy) or a “novel person” in their midst. The numbers showed that the zoo’s tortoises were far more drawn to interactions with people. “This indicates that they have less fear of humans,” LeBlond pointed out, “which could be because they are given a choice about whether or not they get to participate in educational programs, and those that do are positively reinforced with high-value rewards.”
Most of the students followed a similar logic and chose the zoo. The judges, however, disagreed. As one of them explained later at the awards ceremony — at which LeBlond took second place among vet students — the facility may have seemed to be offering their tortoises a consensual choice, but it was more accurate to see it as heavy-handed operant conditioning, which lured them into submitting to human contact with the promise of a biscuit. In scenarios involving domestic animals, a documented comfort around humans is a sign of positive treatment, but when it comes to wild animals, the goal is the opposite: to acclimate them as little to human contact as possible. Another way of putting it is this: Biscuits might make a desert tortoise “happy,” insofar as we can even imagine what that means, but happiness isn’t ultimately what humane treatment is about.
Each year at the contest, competitors are asked to perform one “live” assessment: a situation with real animals in it. This time, the species of choice was the laboratory rat. We joined Kurt Vogel, head of the Animal Welfare Lab at University of Wisconsin-River Falls, on a tour of the scenario that he and a colleague, Brian Greco, had constructed in a warren of rooms a few buildings over from the competition site.
They had brought a great deal of brio to the task. In the first room, where several rats snoozed in containers, Vogel and Greco had left a panoply of welfare infractions for eagle-eyed students to find. One cage was missing a water bottle, while others housed only a single rat, a violation of best practices (rats prefer to be housed in groups). Feed bags sat on the floor with detritus all around, and a note in a lab journal indicated that pest rodents had been observed snacking on it.
In subsequent rooms, the horrors became more baroque. A euthanasia chamber had the wrong size lid on it, and a nearby journal described a rat escaping in the middle of its extermination. Paperwork in an office laid out the nature of the study being performed, which involved prolonged deprivation of food and water, forced swimming and exposure to wet bedding. Diagrams showed that the rats’ brains were being studied through physical implants, and students could see that the operating room was a nightmare, littered with unsterile implements and the researchers’ food trash (the remnants of Vogel’s bagel sandwich, deliberately left behind). None of the abuse was real — Vogel and Greco were even taking care to cycle the rats in and out of the fake scenario, in order to avoid undue stress from the parade of students who came through taking notes.
Happiness isn’t ultimately what humane treatment is about.
Rodents did not always play the role in labs that they do today. In the late 19th century, experiments were carried out on a whole host of species, including a high proportion of dogs — a fact that animal-welfare activists publicized to turn the “vivisection” debate into a political issue, to the point that even some prominent doctors became galvanized to restrict or ban the practice. In the 20th century, as research shifted to carefully bred rats and mice, optimized for predictability and uniformity, animal experimentation receded as an issue in the public discourse. Today animal-welfare advocates struggle to motivate their base on the matter of rodents: the Humane Society’s website illustrates its section on “Taking Suffering Out of Science” (which sits at the very end in its list of the group’s current “fights”) with a picture of a beagle in a cage, despite the fact that roughly 95 percent of all lab mammals are now rats or mice.
Lab rodents are maybe the most vivid example of a species whose suffering is hard to know how to weigh against the benefits it provides us. Studies using rat and mouse models have sought to answer basic scientific questions across diverse fields of inquiry: psychology, physiology, pathology, genetics. Look into any new advance in human health care, and you’re likely to find that it’s built on years of experimentation that consumed the lives of literally thousands of rodents. We may now be on the cusp of innovations that could allow that toll to be radically reduced — by essentially replacing animal models with some combination of virtual simulations and lab-grown tissue and organs — but it’s hard to imagine a world anytime soon where human patients would be subject to therapies that have never been tested on hundreds of animals. No one even reliably counts how many rodents are killed in U.S. labs every year, but the estimates range from 10 million up to more than 100 million.
This question of scale especially haunts the problem of livestock, which is an area where many of the contest’s student competitors will eventually find jobs. America is currently home to roughly 87 million cattle and 75 million pigs: populations that exceed those of dogs and cats in scale, but the welfare of which commands so much less of our moral attention.
When the practice of centralized, industrialized livestock management began in earnest after the Civil War, the treatment of the animals, especially during slaughter, could be barbaric. Pigs were simply hoisted up and their throats cut, and after some point were assumed to be dead enough to dump into boiling water so that the sharp bristles on their skin could be scraped away. There was little doubt that some of them were still conscious at the point that they were plunged into the water, as was reported in a broad exposé in 1880 by The Chicago Tribune: “Not infrequently,” the reporter noted, “a hog reaches the scalding-tub before life is extinct; in fact, they sometimes are very full of life when they reach the point whence they are dumped into the seething tub.”
After 1906, when Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” exposed the industry’s unsanitary practices, a series of reforms did lead to significant improvements in the lives and deaths of American livestock. Thanks to the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, federal law now requires that animals be “rendered insensible to pain” before the act of killing; with pigs, this is generally done either with electrocution or by suffocation in a carbon-dioxide chamber, while with cattle, the method of choice is the captive-bolt gun. And since the 1970s, animal-welfare science has led to some considerable reforms. Perhaps the most transformational work has been done by Temple Grandin, the animal behaviorist whose research into how food animals experience and respond to their environment — particularly during transport and slaughter — has changed the way that meat and dairy producers operate.
Still, despite years of promises to end the practice, many sows are still kept almost permanently in 7-feet-by-2-feet “gestation crates,” too small to turn around in. And the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) has doomed millions of pigs, cattle and chickens to lives spent cheek to jowl in the stench of their own waste — waste that also threatens the health of nearby communities and ecosystems.
At the contest, many attendees were excited about the gains that artificial intelligence could bring to the animal-welfare field. Pilot studies have indeed shown great promise: For example, with A.I. assistance, 24-hour video surveillance can help pinpoint sick or injured animals much more quickly so they can be pulled out for veterinary care. Last year, a group of European researchers announced that based on 7,000 recordings of more than 400 pigs, they had made significant progress in understanding the meaning of their grunts. “By training an algorithm to recognize these sounds, we can classify 92 percent of the calls to the correct emotion,” one of the scientists remarked.
That well may be, but given what we know about pigs — specifically, their remarkable intelligence, which rivals (if not exceeds) that of a dog, to the point that a group of scientists recently trained some to play video games — there is no amount of A.I.-driven progress that can reconcile their short, crowded life as an American industrial food animal with any definition of what a “good” life looks like for such brainy creatures, all 75 million of them.
The laying hen, among the four species considered at the contest, is the one that lives among us in the largest numbers: There are an estimated 308 million of them in the United States alone, or nine for every 10 Americans. In a backyard flock, these hens could be expected to live six to eight years, but a vast majority of them toil in industrial operations that will slaughter them after only two to three years, once their productivity (six eggs a week) declines — and chickens, notably, are not covered by the Humane Slaughter Act. Poor air quality, soiled litter, nutritional stress and conflict with other chickens can contribute to dietary deficiencies, infectious diseases, egg-laying complications, self-mutilation, even cannibalism. And even in the best laying-hen operations, including the “cage-free” ones imagined in the contest scenario, these are short lives spent under 16 hours a day of artificial lighting in extremely close quarters with other birds.
More than in the other scenarios, the organizers had made the laying-hen choice a straightforward one. The corporate farm offered fewer amenities for the birds, which were also observed rarely to use the dirt-floored, plastic-covered “veranda” that was supposed to serve as a respite from their long hours laying in the aviary. The more commodious verandas of the family farm, covered with synthetic grass, proved more popular with their chickens, and in warm weather, its birds made use of a screened “garden” as well.
In her presentation, Catherine LeBlond correctly picked the family farm, for many of the same reasons that the judges did. Again, she “granted” some positive qualities of the corporate farm and offered it some advice — reflecting, after all, the values of the veterinary profession that she was training to enter, a field that takes on the advising of everyone who has animals in their care, not only the most conscientious.
Even so, at the very end, LeBlond briefly stepped back to ask a true ethical question, one that troubled the entire premise of a multibillion-dollar global industry: “whether or not it is ethical to keep these hens for the sole purpose of egg-laying, only to have them slaughtered at the end.” Among the scores of students we watched over the course of a weekend, LeBlond and her teammates from the Atlantic Veterinary College were the only ones who, in the final seconds of their talks, raised deep questions about the scenario’s entire premise — about whether, in the end, these fictional animals should have been put in these fictional situations in the first place.
It was a question that the judges of the Animal Welfare Assessment Contest had no doubt considered, but it also was one that seemed to lie outside the contest’s purview: In its either-or structure, the contest is helping train future professionals how to improve, rather than remove, the ties that bind animals into human society. Unless the day arrives when there is no need for laboratory rats, or poultry barns, or facilities to house desert tortoises and other captive wildlife, the animals of North America will be in the hands of veterinarians and animal scientists like LeBlond and her classmates, to help shape their situations the very best way they can.
Parts of this article are adapted from “Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals,” by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, published this month by Knopf.
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