Professors: Very Severe Suffering

One of my most memorable professors from last year was the one that taught the welfare component of Animal Behaviour, Handling, and Welfare (for some handling stories go here or here).

He was this little white-haired guy and the odds were against him from the start, with lectures at 8am. He seemed like a normal professor at first, but over time the offensive parts of his personally started emerging. It became clear that he was a pretty opinionated guy, but the funny part was that most of his audience disagreed with him.

I suppose the best way to explain it would be to start with one of the concepts he presented (in a very black and white, biased manner), which was the gold standard approach to welfare. There is the "incremental approach," which is the reasonable method of taking small steps, improving a little bit at a time, working up to an end goal (in this case, better animal welfare). In contrast, there's the "gold standard" approach, which is where the people setting the rules have an absolute standard and anything below it is unacceptable. The way he presented it, he also implied that these gold standards are usually completely unreasonable.

Going off of that concept, he was very much against animal rights advocates, claiming that they have a "gold standard" view of animal welfare, that no animals should ever be used for anyone's gain ever, and any food industry or research involving animals should be ended. Anyone who's for animal rights feels exactly like that, of course. Then he would argue that animal welfare advocates, like himself, were the only sensible ones, and subscribe to the incremental approach.

He took this a step farther by making a slightly derogatory statement about "liberal tree-hugging, museli-eating vegetarians." I think the oversight in that particular lecture was that in a class full of vet students, there's a pretty good percent of people that identify with that at least a little bit. I mean, are you really likely to be in vet school if you're like "screw animal rights!" and go around kicking trees and hating vegetarians?

Apart from this guy's confidence in being right, he was also amazingly patronizing on a daily basis. He had obviously rehearsed jokes that he would crack and then laugh at, and seemed to think no one else laughed because they didn't get it. An excellent example was:

"The masochist said to the sadist, 'Beat me!' And the sadist said, 'No.' ... You should look those words up in a dictionary when you go home."

It's not that joke wasn't funny, it's that we didn't know what those words meant. Definitely.

Another great example was the last lecture he gave, which was about ethics. It was extremely boring because it was all just common sense stuff that some smug person had decided to arbitrarily assign specific names and definitions. Then when you talk about it using those terms you sound all high and mighty, I guess, because you know all about ethics (and others don't). That's exactly the impression he gave, anyway. He told us four or five times during the lecture that we should hold on to these notes and take another look at them in fifth year.

He actually said that we would understand them then. He clearly didn't think we understood them at the time; I mean, after all, we were only first years so what would we know about ethics?

The last interesting points about him have to do with his actual teaching. Again, an example is the best way I can describe it. Here is a scale you can use to discuss animal welfare:

• No suffering
• Mild suffering
• Moderate suffering
• Severe suffering
• Very severe suffering

I don't think much else needs to be said.

Despite all these things I've told you about, and many interesting things we learned in class, guess what his two 20-point questions were on the final exam? 

1. List 10 pros and 10 cons of keeping layer hens in cages.

2. List 8 pros and 8 cons of keeping sows in stalls.

What made this even more dumbfounding was that this is the sort of thing that the table in the study guide said:

Disadvantages of layer hens in cages:

• Birds are not able to fly
• Birds are not able to run
• Birds are not able to stretch their wings
• Birds are not able to walk continuously
• Birds are not able to forage
• Birds have a limited ability to fly

The exam questions were pretty much lose-lose.