Is the difference between animal welfare and animal ethics only made by academics who study these topics? Below a slide from a lecture I will give today to doctoral students. In a seminal paper in 1992, @PeterSandoee laid down the difference in roughly the same terms. 1/5

But I've started to think about whether that is an academic distinction, where practitioners tend to talk about both of these concepts as animal welfare. Once a surprised farm animal scientist actually asked me if there is a difference. 2/5

For that scientist, any question that had a moral element about how animals are treated was a question about animal welfare. That would explain how in production contexts animal welfare is often described as something people have different opinions on. 3/5

In such contexts, animal welfare are often described in a way that makes it seem to be a matter of controversy, whether about what the animal feels, how the animal functions or if the animal can behave naturally. 4/5

For an animal welfare scientist, this is to be thrown back in time about 25 years. Should I tell my production colleagues to go catch up with the literature, or should we as animal welfare scientists (and animal ethicists) accept that our definition isn't the only one? 5/5