Kerstin Weich

Was zeichnet ethisch verantwortliche Tiermedizin aus? Wie sollen Tierärztinnen und Tierärzte ihr gesellschaftlich zentrales Expertentum für Tiere erfüllen? Diese Grundfragen veterinärmedizinischer Ethik betreffen nicht nur die Kliniken, Praxen und Fakultäten, als den Kerninstitutionen für Erforschung, Diagnostik und Therapie kranker Tiere. Die Einsatzgebiete von tiermedizinischem Wissen und Handeln umfassen darüber hinaus die tierbasierte Agrarindustrie, in der Gesundheit Bedingung und Instrument zur Sicherung tierlicher Bioproduktivität ist und die Tierseuchenpolitik, in der Krankheitsdetektion und -prophylaxe nationale Handelsökonomien sichern. Auch in der Lebensmittelhygiene – vom Stall bis zum Teller –, in der tierexperimentellen Forschung, bei Tieren im Sport sowie im Umgang mit Zoo-, Heim- und Wildtieren besetzen Veterinärinnen und Veterinäre Schlüsselpositionen. Zum einen üben Tierärztinnen und Tierärzte einen direkten Einfluss auf Leben und Wohlergehen der Tiere aus, indem sie sie behandeln, ihren Gesundheitsstatus bewerten und ihre Reproduktion kontrollieren; zum anderen einen indirekten Einfluss auf die Behandlung von Tieren durch ihre Besitzer und andere Menschen, die verantwortlich mit ihnen zu tun haben, indem sie beratend tätig sind. Für verschiedenste Tierhalterinnen und Tierhalter – vom Wellensittichhalter über den Schweinemäster bis zum Pharmakonzern – aber auch in politischen Institutionen, wie in Ministerien für Gesundheit oder Agrarwirtschaft stellt die Tiermedizin zentrales Expertentum. Tierärztinnen und Tierärzte sehen sich damit vielfältigen Ansprüchen und Erwartungen ausgesetzt und üben zugleich eine gesellschaftliche Vorbildfunktion aus.

The main objective of this paper is to introduce the concept of the “animal patient” to academic debates on animal ethics, veterinary ethics and medical ethics. This move reflects the prioritization of the animal patient in the veterinary profession’s own current ethical self-conception. Our paper contributes to the state of research by analysing the conceptual prerequisites for the constitution and understanding of animals as patients through the lens of two concepts fundamental to the medical field: health and disease. The first section describes, how these concepts are inextricably entangled with the animal’s becoming a patient. The understanding of health and disease, we determine, has a great impact on the actual treatment of animals as patients. We show that a naturalistic perspective on health and disease still prevails in the veterinary field. By contrast, we use a historical study to demonstrate how a socio-historical perspective on animal diseases enriches our understanding of veterinary practice and its ethical dimensions. This perspective will prove not only able to deal with the wide variety of veterinary patients, but also to release underlying normative processes to ethical reflection and research. We elaborate on that assertion by spelling out the constructive dimension between the veterinary gaze and the objects of its experience. The final section brings veterinary medicine’s ethical relationship to the animal patient into the picture. The discipline is guided by an ethical principle of advocacy, defined as the responsibility to recognise and defend the animal patient’s interest in health. Our principle conclusion is that ethical philosophical thinking on interactions between specific notions of health and disease and animal patients makes a substantial contribution to surmounting this moral challenge. As ‘health’ and ‘disease’ determine the options for the articulation of an animal patient’s interest, investigation into the ever-changing and particular conceptualisations of these notions fosters its recognition. We conclude with a prospect resulting from those theoretical insights: meeting the animal patient’s interest could furthermore mean seeking an articulation of the specific interactions between concrete, living animal patients and veterinary concepts.

The “One Health” initiative promises to combine different health-related issues concerning humans and animals in an overarching concept and in related practices to the benefit of both humans and animals. Far from dismissing One Health, this paper nevertheless argues that different veterinary interventions are determined by social practices and connected expectations and are, thus, hardly compliant with only one single conceptualization of health, as the One Health concept suggests. One Health relies on a naturalistic understanding of health focusing on similar bodies that show a similar etiology. However, logics, normativity, and practices exhibit differences when it comes to combatting infectious diseases, maintaining productivity of livestock animals or preventing companion animals from suffering. Therefore, drawing from Charles Rosenberg’s groundbreaking texts on framing disease, we suggest to conceive of health as dispersed in different frames. Thus, this paper proposes to interpret health as complex and multi-layered concept. We distinguish and introduce an objectivist, a functional, and a sentientistic frame of health. Instead of reducing the differential veterinary practices to one paradigmatic understanding, health is seen as a model case of Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance. Different and distinct perspectives on veterinary medicine show sufficient overlapping that allows for a common conceptualization, but there is not one single underlying logic suitable to understand and ethically reflect all veterinary interventions. This differentiability promises to reduce moral stress in veterinary professionals since it allows the interpretation of various, seemingly contradicting practices as dependent on multi-layered and socially determined scopes of responsibility.