This book challenges the accepted distinction between animal welfarists and animal liberationists. It provides a unique and hitherto undocumented history of the animal care and animal welfare movement.

Members of the animal welfare science community, which includes both scientists and philosophers, have illegitimately appropriated the concept of animal welfare by claiming to have given a scientific account of it that is more objectively valid than the more sentimental account given by animal liberationists. This strategy has been used to argue for merely limited reform in the use of animals. This strategy was initially employed as a way of sympathetically responding to the abolitionist claims of anti-vivisectionists, who objected to the use of animals in research. It was subsequently used by farm animal scientists. The primarily reformist (as opposed to abolitionist) goals of this community make the false assumption that there are conditions under which animals may be raised and slaughtered for food or used as models in scientific research that are ethically acceptable. The tendency of the animal welfare science community is to accept this assumption as their framework of inquiry, and thus to discount certain practices as harmful to the interests of the animals that they affect. For example, animal welfare is conceptualized is such a way that death does not count as harmful to the interests of animal, nor prolonged life a benefit.

Inhalt
The Science of Laboratory Animal Care and Welfare.- The Roots for the Emerging Science of Animal Welfare in Great Britain.- The Historical Roots of the Science of Laboratory Animal Welfare in the US.- Laboratory Animal Welfare Issues in the US Legislative and Regulatory History.- Mandated Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees.- Do Regulators of Animal Welfare Need to Develop a Theory of Psychological Well-Being?.- Conclusion.- The Emergence of the Science of Food Animal Welfare Mandated by the Brambell Commission Report.- Rollin's Theory of Animal Welfare and Its Ethical Implications.- Duncan and the Inclusion of Subjectivity.- Fraser on Animal Welfare, Science, and Ethics.- Appleby-Sandøe and the Human Welfare Model.- Nordenfelt and Nussbaum on Animal Welfare.- Conclusion to Part II.- Giving Animals What We Owe Them.- to Part III.- The Fair Deal Argument.- A General Theory of Our Moral Obligations to Nonhuman Animals.- Conclusion: Competing Conceptions of Animal Welfare.