Animal welfare

I have many clients who tell me that they have been advised to get their pet a companion in order to solve the problems of the first.
This is particularly true in the case of dogs that are said to ‘get bored’ when left alone at home (separation anxiety and the behavioural problems that result from it are NOT related to boredom…), but also for exotic pets, particularly parrots and rabbits.

In addition to completely ignoring the function of the behaviour itself (the famous ‘why?’) and giving blind advice, as if the key were to be found in a miracle solution, this type of off-the-cuff advice can be particularly destructive.

Each species has its own specific needs. Based on ethological studies of the behaviour of species in their natural environment, it is fairly easy to determine what is best for your animal in order to get as close as possible to the ideal conditions in captivity.

But here’s the thing: we don’t live in the wild, and many of our pets, especially highly social exotic pets such as parrots and rabbits, have often endured long years of captivity that is unsuited to their basic needs. So, while I am the first to say that yes, your rabbit absolutely needs a companion, as does your parrot, in order to satisfy its basic needs and avoid social deprivation (see the article I wrote on this subject), it is a completely different matter for an animal that has endured many years of loneliness (by loneliness, I mean the absence of other animals of the same species. Humans do not count here). Introducing a companion without lengthy rehabilitation or re-socialisation can even be particularly destructive.

▶️ Do you know what flooding is? It is immersing an animal in an unfamiliar/anxiety-inducing/frightening environment. By environment, I mean, in the broadest sense, everything that surrounds the individual, including the appearance of other living beings in that environment. This is precisely what we risk doing with this type of advice.

Imagine being locked up for 30 years, from the age of 5 to 35. You know nothing but the routine of your prison. You are perfectly familiar with the social codes that apply there, and there is little or no technology. Meals are distributed at fixed times. Water always comes from the same place. You know where to sleep. You have your routines. It’s not perfect, far from it, but… you get used to it. Unfortunately, that is.

Now imagine that you are suddenly taken out of there, told that freedom is better for you. And that you are thrown into a noisy world, you have never learned to drive, to manage your accounts, you know nothing about politics, the challenges of life, finding a job, managing your money, getting around town. You don’t know how to find your way around the underground. The people you want to talk to seem in a hurry and ignore you. You don’t know how to use a mobile phone. Social media? Unknown. Friends? You don’t know the concept. Even if you feel like reaching out to others, they scare you. They don’t understand your distress. You feel out of place. You are alone. You don’t understand anything. You don’t know what you’re doing wrong. And you don’t understand what you should be doing right. You almost regret your peaceful, routine life before.

So when we focus on animal welfare, we tend to stop at satisfying their known physiological needs.
Has it been living in a tiny cage? Give it freedom!
But what if he no longer knows how to fly, not because he is physiologically incapable of doing so, but because he has become helpless through living in a cage?

He has lived alone and has many problems? Offer him a companion, he will find a companion to help him flourish.
But what if he doesn’t know how to communicate healthily with this companion? What if it scares him?

Because yes, animal welfare is not just about ticking boxes to satisfy ethological needs on paper. Animal welfare is above all about how animals perceive the events that happen to them. This psychological concept tends to be largely overlooked.

So if this animal, which has had absolutely no time to learn, is thrown ‘in with the others’ without rehabilitation, without desensitisation, without differential learning, it simply risks accumulating bad experiences and ending up, at best, prostrate, at worst reactive, and exacerbating the problems that already exist.

Removing an animal from its environment and placing it in another that appears better (in our eyes, not those of the individual in question) without a case study (on a case-by-case basis) or rehabilitation is not a rescue.

✅ Animal welfare is infinitely complex and certainly cannot be reduced to ticking boxes on a piece of paper. A case study is absolutely necessary and vital because each animal will have its own experience and feelings about the same situation. The ideal to be achieved is well known: to get as close as possible to the behaviours that can be observed in nature, but the path to achieving this must be forged with the individual’s background.

Remember that we are not in the wild, so observable behaviours are necessarily biased, and that ensuring the well-being of an individual who has suffered from inappropriate captivity will necessarily require real therapy and rehabilitation before we can hope to achieve this ideal.

Resilience has no limits other than those we impose on it.

©️Marion Nicolas, FFCP
Animal Behaviour Consultant