Contributed by Alina Lilova
I am writing an article about recent discoveries in the field of animal welfare and animal psychology. The wealth of new information is staggering; scientific papers are being churned out by the dozen every month. I just have to pick out a few juicy bits here and there: nothing easier than that. And yet, the moment came when I stopped dead in my tracks. “Wait a minute. What if people find this silly? You know, the way you shrug your shoulders at the millionth newspaper article which proclaims that 2+2=4 and calls it science?”
A pause for reflection is in order, then. I have to admit that in animal welfare science, a lot of the new evidence hardly amounts to a discovery but is mere validation of truths we know intuitively – or knew once but have forgotten in our post-industrial age. It is a little sad that we need statistical measurements of heart rates and cortisol levels to accept that cows have friends in their herd and get stressed when the farmer separates them, as reported in the Daily Mail. Another study which measured the heart rates of dairy cows showed that when one cow licks the face of another, the effect is profoundly calming.1
