What Is Animal Welfare and Why Is It Important?

Posted on July 22th, 2022.

We hear words get thrown around all the time that sound good, but what do they really mean? "Animal Welfare" sounds great and all, but what is it, and why did a group of veterinarians create a nonprofit in Oklahoma to help?

Animal welfare refers to the quality of life experienced by an animal and encompasses how well the animal is coping with his or her current situation and surroundings.  

Animal welfare is affected by the relationships human beings have with animals and it is our duty to ensure all animals are treated humanely, responsibly, and with respect.  

This includes consideration for all aspects of animal well-being, such as the Five Domains. Animal welfare should be at the forefront of every human action involving animals. 

What are the Five Domains of animal welfare?

• Nutrition – factors that involve the animal’s access to sufficient, balanced, varied, and clean food and water.
• Environment – factors that enable comfort through temperature, substrate, space, air, odor, noise, and predictability.
• Health – factors that enable good health through the absence of disease, injury, impairment with a good fitness level.
• Behavior – factors that provide varied, novel, and engaging environmental challenges through sensory inputs, exploration, foraging, bonding, playing, retreating, and others.
• Mental State – by presenting positive situations in the previous four functional domains, the mental state of the animal should benefit from predominantly positive states, such as pleasure, comfort, or vitality while reducing negative states such as fear, frustration, hunger, or pain.

Why is animal welfare important?

These are the basic needs of animas as defined by scientific evidence. Every animal deserves to have a good life where they enjoy the benefits of the Five Domains. 

How does the ORCA Foundation work to improve animal welfare?

The Oklahoma Rehabilitative Care for Animals Foundation is partnering with organizations that need support in these discussed domains. Every one of these components of animal welfare are critical, but most organizations do not have the resources to provide them all. Nutrition (food and water) and Environment (shelter) are the most common assistance available, but those are only a small part of animal welfare requirements.

We provide the opportunity for Health, Behavior, and Mental State to be improved through education, providing services, and raising money for behavior modification and physical rehabilitation for the animals in our community.

To accomplish all of this, we need your help! We would be able to do so much more for the animals around us, if we had the funding to move forward with achieving Federal 501(c)(3) status. Unfortunately is a costly upfront process that is required by the government to receive much needed tax relief and grants to further our work. Please consider donating to help this nonprofit be able to do the good it is trying to provide!

Source 

Note: Donations made on this site via checkout cart are secure through a nonprofit PayPal account, but at this time, are not tax deductible due to being a state nonprofit but not 501(c)(3) Federally.

For direct donations that you would like to be tax deductible once 501(c)(3) is achieved, there is a retroactive process that we are happy to discuss. For larger donation or sponsor inquiries, please contact us: [email protected]