

It critiques current (Rollin’s and Hauskeller’s) accounts of telos and offers an alternative conceptualization that applies to recently proposed applications of breeding technologies. The current paper applies the concept of telos, which previously figured mainly in debates on classical genetic engineering, to genomic selection and genome editing aimed at improving animal welfare. Ethical perspectives on earlier animal biotechnologies are relevant for today’s breeding technologies and their proposed applications, but may need reinterpretation. Moreover, even if breeding technologies do improve animal welfare, they might be objected to on other ethical grounds.

#Define animal breeder how to#
Whether animal welfare will indeed improve may be unanswerable until proposed applications have been developed and tested sufficiently and until agreement is reached on how to conceptualize animal welfare.

Such applications challenge how breeding technologies are evaluated, which paradigmatically proceeds from a welfare perspective. by dehorning), or to reduce animals’ capacity for suffering. Some breeding technology applications are claimed to improve animal welfare: this includes potential applications of genomics and genome editing to improve animals’ resistance to environmental stress, to genetically alter features which in current practice are changed invasively (e.g.
