Fischer Bob
Department of Philosophy, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, United States.
Front Vet Sci. 2025 Mar 6;12:1556475. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1556475. eCollection 2025.
Animal welfare is typically assessed using ordinal scales. That is, standard welfare assessment tools rank conditions relative to one another without claiming that one condition is worse than another by some specific magnitude. However, there are some practical purposes for which ordinal scales are insufficient, such as accounting for animal welfare in policy analysis. Here, I argue that insofar as we want standard policy analysis tools to capture impacts on animal welfare in a way that is scope sensitive-that is, in a way that properly recognizes differences in the number of animals affected-we need ways of representing animal welfare on ratio scales, not merely ordinal ones. Then, I briefly explain how some economists, who play important roles in policy analysis, are beginning to do this without the assistance of animal welfare scientists, veterinarians, and others. So, this perspective article serves as a call to those stakeholders, inviting them to collaborate with economists and policy analysts to improve existing methods or develop better alternatives that meet current needs.
动物福利通常使用序数尺度进行评估。也就是说，标准的福利评估工具对各种状况进行相互比较排名，但并不声称一种状况比另一种状况差某个特定的程度。然而，在某些实际应用中，序数尺度并不足够，比如在政策分析中考虑动物福利。在此，我认为，就我们希望标准的政策分析工具以一种对范围敏感的方式来捕捉对动物福利的影响而言——也就是说，以一种能恰当认识到受影响动物数量差异的方式——我们需要用比率尺度而非仅仅是序数尺度来表示动物福利。然后，我简要解释一些在政策分析中发挥重要作用的经济学家是如何在没有动物福利科学家、兽医及其他人员协助的情况下开始这么做的。所以，这篇观点文章是向那些利益相关者发出的呼吁，邀请他们与经济学家和政策分析师合作，以改进现有方法或开发出满足当前需求的更好的替代方法。
