What Animals Want
Abstract
We now have many different ways of finding out what animals want, from offering them simple choice tests to operant conditioning and using how closely they choose to position themselves with respect to each other and to features of their environment. Animals can vote with their feet, their paws or their beaks, and, if provided with the right equipment, they can push switches, pull levers or use touch screens to indicate what they want. We can even find out how much they want something by seeing if they will ‘work’ to get what they want when it is made more difficult for them to obtain it. Recent developments have included cognitive or judgement tests and other more indirect ways of ‘asking’ animals what they want.
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By Dawkins's definition, giving animals what they want should improve their welfare.
“By Dawkins’s definition, giving animals what they want should improve their welfare.”
From The Benefits of Increased Space and Habitat Complexity for the Welfare of Zoo-Housed King Penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) (2023) · cites this paper as [54]
Cites
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Fuller, G., Jones, M., Gartland, K. N., Zalewski, S., Heintz, M. R., & Allard, S. (2023) · Animals · doi:10.3390/ani13142312 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
- Authors
- Stamp Dawkins, M.
- Venue
- The Science of Animal Welfare
- Publisher
- Oxford University PressOxford
- Published
- 2021-02-02
- OpenAlex
- W3123199188
- Cited by
- 2
- References
- 11
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Veterinary › Small Animals › Animal Behavior and Welfare Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Primate Behavior and Ecology
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Human-Animal Interaction Studies
- Keywords
- animal preferences, operant conditioning, preference test, cognitive tests, animal welfare, animal cognition
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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