Welfare biology

Welfare biology is a proposed cross-disciplinary field of research to study the positive and negative well-being of sentient individuals in relation to their environment.

Since then, its establishment has been advocated for by a number of writers, including philosophers, who have argued for the importance of creating the research field, particularly in relation to wild animal suffering.

[4] Todd K. Shackelford and Sayma H. Chowdhury, in response to Ng, argued that rather than focusing on improving the welfare of captive animals, that it would be better to not breed them in the first place, as this would "eliminate their suffering altogether".

[11] In the 2019 book, The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics, moral philosophers Catia Faria and Oscar Horta contribute a chapter on welfare biology.

They express concern over what they perceive as the minimization of animal well-being, attributed to prevalent speciesist and environmentalist beliefs among life scientists and the general public.

Faria and Horta conclude that the potential benefits of developing welfare biology are significant, given the widespread suffering of animals in the wild, challenging the idealized views of nature.

Within Ng's framework of welfare biology, beings such as kangaroos who have the capacity for perception and ability to experience pleasure or pain, are classified as "affective sentients"
Urban welfare ecology has been proposed as a subdiscipline to study the welfare of urban animals , such as feral pigeons .