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Why animal suffering isn’t the whole story

Animal suffering matters and we should always call it out when we see it. But if our only question is how to reduce suffering, we end up narrowing the way we think about animals and their inner lives.

When we talk about animal suffering, it’s likely we’re picturing animals who are frightened, hurting, or confined. These images matter but they can also narrow the way we think about animals and their inner lives. 

An animal can be physically comfortable and still be profoundly deprived. That’s because animals’ interests go beyond the avoidance of pain. They can be well-fed and healthy, while still being denied the freedom to make choices, explore their surroundings, or simply have a say in their own lives.  

What matters to them is what also matters to us: the chance to live with autonomy, dignity, and agency. 

Autonomy means having a say over your own life: where you go, who you spend time with, and how you use your body. It’s not necessarily total independence or unlimited freedom, but the ability to make meaningful choices.  

For animals, these choices might be choosing who to greet and who to ignore; choosing where to build a nest; choosing which members of the flock to spend time with. These aren’t trivial preferences; they’re expressions of autonomy that make life worth living. 

Yet most animals are denied their ability to make meaningful choices. Their bodies are controlled through breeding, confinement, and various procedures; their movements are restricted; their families and social bonds are disrupted; the course of their entire lives is decided for them, including when and how they die. Even when these systems are made less cruel to avoid animal suffering, they still leave an important question unanswered: whether an individual has any autonomy over their own life. 

Dignity is a difficult concept to define, but we recognise its violation easily. It’s about being treated with respect, not because of what you can offer someone else, but because you are worthy just as you are. For animals, this means that our treatment of them should reflect more than how ‘useful’ they are to us.

Yet animals are stripped of their dignity every day. They are numbered, processed, displayed, trained, imprisoned, bought and sold. They’re even renamed: a fish becomes a catch, a fox becomes a pest, a mouse in a laboratory becomes data. Each examples goes beyond animal suffering, stripping them of their individuality – and their dignity. 

Agency is the freedom to play an active role in life, rather than simply having things happen to you. Historically, people thought animals were unfeeling biological “machines” driven purely by instinct – but today we know better. 

Animals make choices and solve problems; they communicate and form friendships; they explore and seek out the things they enjoy. They respond to their surroundings and, in doing so, shape them. Anyone who has lived with an animal knows this intuitively. A dog doesn’t simply get taken on a walk, they look forward to it, decide which scents are worthy of investigation, and choose who to say hello to. 

This is true for all animals, yet industries routinely turn ‘agents’ into ‘objects’, causing animal suffering but also denying them the opportunity to play an active role in their own lives.  

Horses run freely in a natural, sanctuary space. The image accompanies an article that proposes we must look beyond animal suffering to other attributes, like affording them agency, autonomy, and dignity.

Photo Advocacy / We Animals: Rescued horses run freely through at Skydog Ranch and Sanctuary, where they enjoy the freedom to choose.

A life worth living is more than a life without suffering 

Suffering matters and we should always call it out when we see it. But if our only question is how to reduce suffering, we can end up designing increasingly sophisticated ways of exploiting animals.  

We want to imagine something more; a world where animals live according to their own interests, exercise their own agency, and exist for their own reasons. Because freedom is more than freedom from suffering; it’s also the freedom to live, to choose, and to be who you are. 

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