Here's a second story on animal ethics for the month of February. In this journalist's report, you can read about the Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY, USA. The sanctuary has a "new, in-house research team" that is doing a special kind of research on its animal residents. One thing that makes the research special is its view of the autonomy of its animal participants. Each animal only participates in a study if it chooses to.
According to the journalist, it's been rare to do research on farm animals:
Chickens can anticipate the future, goats appear to solicit help from humans, and pigs may pick up on one another’s emotions.
But scientists still know far less about the minds of chickens or cows than they do about those of apes or dogs, said Christian Nawroth, a scientist studying behavior and cognition at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. “I’m still baffled how little we know about farm animals, given the amount or the numbers that we keep,” he said.
The farm hopes its data will help change people's minds, convincing them that animals have emotions and personalities. Indeed, farm animals are sentient, as argued by the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. At the Farm Sanctuary, research guidelines for their animal work explicitly forbid human dominance and control over them:
Among other stipulations, the guidelines prohibit invasive procedures — forbidding even blood draws unless they are medically necessary — and state that the studies must benefit the animals. And participation? It’s voluntary.
“Residents must be recognized as persons,” the guidelines state, “and always be provided with choice and control over their participation in an experimental study.”
As an example, the researchers at Farm Sanctuary were studying whether chickens enjoy learning. They created an experimental setting which invited chickens to learn to knock a lid off of a bowl. No chicken was forced to participate in the study; instead, the researchers slowly introduced the setting to the flock, and enticed individual chickens to enter the arena over time with snacks. The journalist reports:
So far, the researchers have tested eight chickens, half of whom were in the control group, and it is too early to draw firm conclusions about chickenkind. (The original group of recruits dwindled after one bird died, another failed to meet the study criteria, and three others dropped out — in one case, to spend time in the nest box instead. “I think she really just was highly motivated to sit on some eggs,” Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast said.)