9 The Invention of the “Stressed Animal” and the Development of a Science of Animal Welfare, 1947–86

Abstract

This chapter explores how stress provided a language capable of structuring dynamic and always-active relations, rendering them comprehensible and thereby opening them up to intervention and management. The argument is developed through three parts, beginning with an analysis of the introduction of Selye’s concept of the general adaptation syndrome into the regulatory landscape of British animal-dependent science. Here, it is shown how ecological investigations of population decline challenged the regulatory definition of “pain” by invoking stress as an explanatory concept. Regulatory understandings of animal pain, which were conventionally restricted to surgical interventions into the body, were subsequently widened so as to include mental suffering, a condition of possibility for the emergence of the “stressed animal.”

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