FRANKLIN D. MCMILLAN AND JAMES W. YEATES Best Friends Animal Society, Kanab, Utah, USA; Cats Protection, Haywards Heath, UK Suppose you were given the task of looking at one nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) and measuring that animal’s welfare, well-being, quality of life (QOL), and happiness. But time and funding constraints allow you to measure only one of these. If you pick one, would there be anything important to the animal that you would miss by not being able to measure the others? Would your answer be the same no matter which concept you chose to measure? If you wanted that animal to have the best life, would any of the four concepts be the best one to look at? An individual’s judgment of how their own life is faring can vary widely in the cognitive complexity of that evaluation. We aren’t certain whether and how such judgments are made by different animals, or by humans – particularly those lacking verbal capacity to convey their thoughts. For many, it may be that such judgments consist simply of feelings based on time frames as short as each moment, or possibly based on the animal’s experiences over several hours or even days prior to the judgment. At the other end of the cognitive spectrum, judgments of how one’s life is faring can involve not just feeling states but also complex cognitive appraisals (e.g., comparisons with others, having meaning or purpose in one’s life, and a sense of personal accomplishments) and incorporate an extensive time frame dating back decades and a vision forward to one’s life goals. Furthermore, in terms of complexity of emotional processing, some animals might experience relatively simple feelings of momentary enjoyment and suffering, while others’ assessments may be based, at least partly, on more complex emotions such as relief, hope, jealousy, achievement, and self-worth. We are far from being able to determine where individual humans and animals fall on these scales of complexity in their evaluations of how things are going for them, but evidence suggests that all conscious beings have some conceptualization of judging how their lives are faring – by affective and cognitive processes – as going well or not so well, whether the ‘life’ is this moment or over the last several years. For example, Kahneman and Riis (2005) suggested that a measure of momentary well-being in humans could consist of asking the person to indicate whether they feel impatient for their current situation to end, or would prefer for it to continue. When this measure is repeated over a period of time, the average summing of the momentary preference for continuing or stopping ‘identifies well-being with the extent to which individuals live their lives in a state of wishing for the present to extend, as against wishing they were somewhere else—or not caring one way or the other’ (p. 292). Behavioral research, in particular preference and aversion studies, have indicated that the capacity to signal a desire for one’s current situation to continue or end is exhibited in a wide range of animal species (Kirkden and Pajor, 2006). How an individual perceives his or her own life to be faring, on a scale of good to bad, is currently described by an indistinct and confusing number of terms. In the human and animal literature alike, limited agreement has been reached about the meaning of well-being, welfare, quality of life, happiness, and subjective well-being (SWB) (Novak and Suomi, 1988; Clark et al., 1997; Hetts et al., 2005; Nordenfelt, 2006; Green and Mellor, 2011). While all of these concepts refer in some way to how much one likes the life one is leading, at present authors frequently – but in different ways – equate or differentiate terms, use terms interchangeably, and define terms by using other similar ill-defined terms. Different studies often use the same terms to refer to different phenomena or different terms to refer to the same or very similar phenomena. Factors as immaterial as geographical preferences contribute to the confusion, as, for instance, in the animal literature where ‘welfare’ is the European term for the North American ‘well-being’ (Jones, 2004; Nordenfelt, 2006). Moreover, certain languages may not contain terms for concepts which bear different terms in other languages (e.g., French uses bien–être with no obvious equivalent for ‘welfare’). To illustrate the terminology problem, Table 2.1 presents reference citations from the animal literature in which different terms have been equated (stated explicitly as equals or used interchangeably as synonyms). The human literature is equally if not more problematic while also including additional terms such as emotional well-being (Diener and Lucas, 2000) and life satisfaction (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). The first challenge in scrutinizing this field is deciding on a term to use to refer collectively to these similar concepts – that is, to give a name to the overall topic under discussion. To date no single agreed-upon term (or conceptualization) has emerged to describe the different evaluations individuals (human and nonhuman) make regarding their lives, the events happening to them, their bodies and minds, and the circumstances in which they live – in short, how much one views his/her own life as ‘the good life’ (Diener, 2006; Brülde, 2007; Yeates, 2017). For the purposes of the present chapter this umbrella term will be Well-being 1 – capitalized to distinguish it from the use of ‘well-being’ as an individual concept – and ‘Well-being concepts’ will refer collectively to the terms welfare, well-being, QOL, happiness, and SWB. As we will see, some interpretative discrepancies among these terms are difficult to reconcile. One of the most important reasons for this challenge is rooted in a fundamental difference regarding what the terms are referring to. The Well-being concepts may be about (i) the quality of one’s life conditions, or (ii) the quality of one’s life experiences. The former include physical health, biological functioning, and environmental factors; the latter include only conscious experiences. The two can be strongly linked, as when an individual is being chased by a predator, or they may be uncoupled from one another, as when an individual has an undetected cancer. Adaptation can also disconnect life conditions and life experiences such as after one loses their vision or the use of one or more limbs; in these cases disability causes permanent functional impairment but after adaptation the individual often regains very high levels of Well-being with positive life experiences (humans: Duggan and Dijkers, 2001; Diener et al., 2006; animals: Bauer et al., 1992; Dickerson et al., 2015). We will return to this conundrum later. On the basis of their usage in the scientific literature, the different Well-being concepts can be found to have extensive similarities as well as some dissimilarities. This approach provides an important starting point in understanding the entanglement that has evolved between these terms. However, no matter how meticulously we analyze the terms, they will not come out at the other end as clearly the same or clearly distinct. The following discussion will focus primarily on the animal literature while including relevant information from human literature where it can help provide some explanatory clarification. The first feature shared broadly among Well-being concepts is that it is, at the minimum, based largely if not solely on a view from within, of how the individual perceives and appraises aspects of his/her own life. This means it is not something given to the individual (Broom, 1996). One could bestow the same exact objectively described living conditions to ten different humans or animals – e.g., shelter, food, social companionship, stimulation/entertainment, and even health – and because of vast differences in preferences, likes, dislikes, etc., the result could be ten different levels of Well-being, from very low to very high. The individual’s perspective and perception has been described in the literature in animals for welfare (Sandem et al., 2002; Bracke, 2007; Green and Mellor, 2011) and QOL (Wiseman-Orr et al., 2006; Bracke, 2007; Scott et al., 2007; Taylor and Mills, 2007), and in humans for QOL (Diener, 2006; Peterson, 2006; Scott et al., 2007; Taylor and Mills, 2007), well-being (Kahneman and Riis, 2005), and SWB (Diener, 2006; Peterson, 2006). In discussions of definitions and principles of Well-being concepts in animals, welfare, well-being, and QOL often share the same (or at least seemingly similar) philosophical bases. One approach has been to categorize welfare definitions (Barnard and Hurst, 1996; Duncan and Fraser, 1997) or concepts (Appleby and Stokes, 2008) into three types: (i) functioning- and health-based; (ii) feelings-based; and (iii) natural living-based. Another approach has been to separate QOL (Duncan and Fraser, 1997; Fraser et al., 1997; Sandøe, 1999; Taylor and Mills, 2007), well-being (Appleby and Sandøe, 2002), and welfare (Appleby and Sandøe, 2002) into three theoretical foundations, the first one being solely objective, the second one containing both objective and subjective elements, and the third one being solely subjective: (i) perfectionism and other forms of objective list theories, which hold that there are things that are objectively good for an individual whether or not he/she realizes it and focus on objectively measurable factors, such as health, biological functioning, basic resources, and living conditions; (ii) desire or preference satisfaction, which holds that satisfying one’s preferences or desires is what improves one’s Well-being; and (iii) hedonism, in which Well-being is based on pleasant and unpleasant affective states. Notwithstanding some of the philosophical approaches above that do not focus on feelings (e.g., objective list theory), a large body of literature on Well-being concepts emphasizes the role of affective states in animal Well-being. More specifically, it has been suggested by many authors that it is the balance of pleasant feelings over unpleasant that corresponds to the level of welfare (Dawkins, 1990, 2006; Mench, 1998; Sandem et al., 2002; King and Landau, 2003; Broom, 2007; Kirkwood, 2007; Robinson et al., 2016), QOL (Mench, 1998; Broom, 2007; Kendrick, 2007; Taylor and Mills, 2007; Green and Mellor, 2011; Yeates, 2011), well-being (Mench, 1998), SWB (King and Landau, 2003; Gartner and Weiss, 2013; Robinson et al., 2016), and happiness (King and Landau, 2003; Robinson et al., 2016). The Affect Balance Model was first proposed by Bradburn (1969) to explain psychological well-being in humans. Since then, the model has been applied to other Well-being concepts in humans, including most recently to happiness. Lyubomirsky et al. (2005) concluded that ‘happiness is best regarded as a state in which people feel a preponderance of positive emotions most of the time’. Happy people, said the researchers, do not experience positive affect 100% of the time, rather, they also experience infrequent – though not absent – negative emotions, such as sadness, anxiety, and anger. Current evidence suggests that in both animals and humans, an increase in the positivity of the affect balance is linked to increases in all Well-being concepts (Fig. 2.1). The nature of biological and psychological phenomena may be dichotomous or a continuum. The dichotomous structure works as an all-or-nothing process using a threshold above which the individual ‘has’ the condition; for the continuum the individual experiences progressive degrees of the condition. It is not uncommon to encounter language in the literature that implies Well-being concepts are threshold phenomena, such as to ‘not have quality of life’, ‘for welfare to exist’, ‘to reach quality of life’, and ‘preserving or ensuring well-being’. However, because there now appears to be a consensus that all Well-being concepts exist on a continuum (Nordenfelt, 2006; Broom, 2007), it appears the language implying Well-being concepts to be a threshold phenomenon is likely nothing more than a bit of careless locution. But why, then, would it be correct to say that one can ‘achieve’ happiness? A key problem involved with the continuum-threshold question becomes evident when the issue of polarity is added in. If it is agreed that Well-being concepts are continuum phenomena, then it needs to be clarified whether the continuum is unipolar (all positive or all negative) or bipolar (both positive and negative). Empirically as well as intuitively, judgments of one’s own life can range from very good to very poor (Galtung, 2005; Diener, 2006; Broom, 2007), constituting a bipolar nature. The problem is one of terminology, and the clearest example is the term happiness (see Fig. 2.2). The word happiness refers to a positive state, so the only way to conceive a bipolar continuum for the happiness concept is to create a separate term to represent the negative counterpart of happiness, i.e., unhappiness, which includes such affects as sadness, misery, and the like. Less commonly, the same has occurred in the human literature for well-being, where ‘ill-being’ has been used as the negative counterpart (Galtung, 2005; Diener, 2006; Nordenfelt, 2006). In contrast, welfare has no separate term for the negative side of the continuum and has a history of different emphases. Prior to the twentieth century, welfare referred primarily to the positive side of the continuum (Merriam-Webster, 2018), then during the twentieth century it reflected more the negative side (Nordenfelt, 2006), and presently it is viewed as balanced between the two sides. For example, Nordenfelt (2006) noted that ‘welfare covers the whole area of positive human and animal experiences’. The reason at least some of the Well-being concepts can seem to be both a bipolar continuum (e.g., happiness to unhappiness) and a unipolar threshold phenomenon (e.g., one can ‘reach’ happiness) can be attributed to the ambiguous terminology. In animals, the individual’s ability to cope successfully with challenges (internal as well as external) has been connected to welfare (Broom, 1986; Hubrecht, 1995; King and Landau, 2003; Broom, 2007; Green and Mellor, 2011; Robinson et al., 2016), QOL (Wojciechowska and Hewson, 2005; Broom, 2007), SWB (King and Landau, 2003), and happiness (King and Landau, 2003). For example, Hubrecht (1995) states that welfare problems arise when coping ability is exceeded. Coping refers to the animal’s ability to lessen the negative psychological impact of a stressful stimulus; the degree of success thereby dictates the level of psychological discomfort experienced. Evidence suggests that Well-being is promoted by successfully coping with life’s problems, not from experiencing no problems that demand coping behavior (Boissy et al., 2007). This is consistent with the research mentioned earlier that people who report being the happiest do occasionally experience negative emotions (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). Coping has been considered so important to Well-being that some researchers regard it to be the central determinant of Well-being concepts, such as Broom’s (1986, p.524) definition that ‘the welfare of an animal is its state as regards its attempts to cope with its environment’. As shown in Fig. 2.1, all Well-being concepts rise and fall with, respectively, improvement and deterioration in the individual’s ability to cope (Hubrecht, 1995; King and Landau, 2003; Broom, 2007; Green and Mellor, 2011). Another common feature shared by the range of Well-being concepts was touched on briefly in the section above on philosophical frameworks, and that is the meeting of needs. Broom (2007) notes the connection between needs and feelings (unpleasant feelings are often associated with unsatisfied needs, whereas pleasant feelings occur when needs are satisfied). He further suggests that when needs are not satisfied, welfare (and QOL, which he considers the same) will be poorer than when they are satisfied (see Fig. 2.1). Taylor and Mills (2007) include the fulfillment of health, social, and environmental needs in their definition of QOL. The measurement of Well-being concepts in humans and animals is far from perfected. In animals, many literature reports have described methods for measuring aspects of the various Well-being concepts: welfare (Mendl, 1991; Mason and Mendl, 1993; Wojciechowska and Hewson, 2005; Broom, 2007; Robinson et al., 2017), QOL (Wojciechowska and Hewson, 2005; Broom, 2007; Hewson et al., 2007; Taylor and Mills, 2007; Timmins et al., 2007), SWB (Weiss et al., 2011b), and happiness (Robinson et al., 2017). Importantly, the overlap of these methods across the Well-being concepts is extensive. Lists of the factors being assessed include physiologic measures (e.g., concentrations of glucocorticoid levels, leukocyte count, and heart and respiratory rates), health parameters, level of physical and social functioning, and behavioral indices (e.g., documentation of abnormal behavior such as stereotypies, subjective mood assessment, preference and motivation testing, operant tests, aversion techniques, cognitive bias testing, consumer demand theory tests, and success in achieving goals). Furthermore, it is widely accepted that for all Well-being concepts none of these methods of measurement is sufficient by themselves; measurement should be performed using a combination of different methods. In all, the resemblance of assessment methods across Well-being concepts is such that if one were to be given only a description of the factors being measured but not which Well-being concept is entailed, it would be exceptionally difficult to deduce which concept is being measured. While less scientific, general descriptions of ‘the good life’ (Yeates, 2017) in animals are, in general, equally appropriate for all Well-being concepts. Consider, for example, the following description of an animal faring well: The animal is free from distress most of the time, is in good physical health, exhibits a substantial range of species-typical behaviors, and is able to deal effectively with environmental challenges. There are few, or brief, unpleasant feelings, and a predominance of pleasant feelings. (Modified from McMillan, 2004, p.1143)
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Similarities and Differences Between Well-being Concepts in Animals
2.2.1 Common attributes among Well-being concepts in animals
Represents the individual’s perspective and perception
Based on the same philosophical frameworks
Based on a balance of pleasant versus unpleasant affect
A bipolar continuum phenomenon
Coping ability
Meeting of needs
Methods of measurement
General descriptions
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