Introduction

In modern, intensive housing systems, animals develop a wide variety of abnormal behaviour patterns. The general public has become increasingly aware of this. With growing urgency, people wonder what it must be like to be a hen in a battery cage, or a chimpanzee in a laboratory testing-pen. This formulation, to ask ‘what it feels like’ to be a certain animal, is how members of the general public perceive and formulate the problem of animal welfare. In day-to-day, common-sense interaction with animals, we use a type of language which is inherently subjectivistic, psychological in character; that is, a language which indicates that we share the world with active, independent individuals who have their own, personal perspective on that world, and accordingly, their own needs, feelings and thoughts. A technical philosophical term for such a kind of language, such a level of discourse, is ‘first-person-perspective’ (Nagel, 1986). To describe behaviour in first-person-perspective terms is to assess what that behaviour means from the other individual's perspective. For example, one may say an individual likes to do this, or wants to do that. Generally, animals are accepted into that level of discourse, assuming that they too have their particular point of view. We say the cat wants to get out of the house, or the pig expects to be fed. And, upon witnessing an animal's abnormal, highly repetitive behaviour, we presume that the animal finds its situation unmanageable and highly distressing.