What Is so Positive about Positive Animal Welfare?—A Critical Review of the Literature

摘要

Positive animal welfare (PAW) is thought to have come about as a response to there being too much of a focus on avoiding negatives in animal welfare science. However, despite its development over the last 10 years, it is not clear what it adds to the study of animal welfare. To clarify this, we conduct a review of the literature on PAW. We aim to identify the characteristic features of PAW and to show how PAW connects to the wider literature on animal welfare. We find that the PAW literature is characterised by four features: (1) which highlights the capacity of animals to experience positive emotions; (2) which seeks to create a link between positive emotions and behaviours animals are motivated to engage in; (3) which acts to give PAW a role in defining an appropriate balance of positives over negatives and; (4) which brings a full life perspective to PAW. While the first two are already well situated in animal welfare studies the two last points open research agendas about aggregation of different aspects of PAW and how earlier experiences affect animals’ ability to have well-rounded lives.