Veterinary ethics and companion animal euthanasia: what can we learn from critical disability studies?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within veterinary ethics and practice around companion animal end-of-life and euthanasia, the political and cultural dimensions of death and dying are rarely addressed. This reduces the ability to engage with questions like: what future potential goods (positive affective states, meaning) could an animal experience by continuing to live; what constitutes a life worth living; and how can we make this decision for another being? These are questions that have been subject to extensive dialogue within Critical Disability Studies. The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of how core considerations from Critical Disability Studies could be useful in veterinary ethics when considering companion animal end of life and euthanasia. First, critiques of the dis/ability binary and associated hierarchies raise questions about how animal disability and illness are understood, and around challenging questions like psychological illness and behavioural euthanasia. Second, nuanced engagements with questions of a life worth living and Quality of Life emphasise the importance of individual animal experiences, personality, and the foregrounding of ‘what is important for the animal’. Third, dialogues around choice and agency critique the tendency to focus on owner choice, rather asking what opportunities there are to listen to the preferences of animals themselves. Finally, engaging with care and power highlights the ambivalent nature of caregiving, of euthanasia as a practice of care, and the power intrinsic to making End of Life decisions on behalf of another. Overall, perspectives from Critical Disability Studies allow us to engage with challenging questions of veterinary ethics and end-of-life care in companion animal practice with more nuance and complexity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".