The Teleonome Project — Understanding animal welfare through evolution

Why the Teleonome Project?

It began with a question about horses

The Teleonome Project began with horses — and with people who loved them disagreeing completely about what they needed.

The more closely we looked, the stranger it became. Different experts defined welfare in different ways: some emphasised feelings, others health, others behaviour, others a natural life. Each was partly right, yet they could not all be measuring the same thing.

The deeper we looked, the more one question emerged — the question the whole project turns on:

What is an animal actually trying to do?

A wild grey stallion rearing in a flowering meadow

The idea behind the name

What the name means

The teleonome is to biological regulation what DNA is to biological structure. DNA helps explain how an organism is built. The teleonome helps explain how it lives.

Telos, teleonomy, Bernard Rollin and the longer history sit one click away — for readers who want them.

The full story — A History of Teleonomy →

Behaviour

The animal’s way of acting on the world

The project grew from the conviction that much of what we punish or suppress as “bad behaviour” is not disobedience at all, but a living animal attempting to regulate its own life.

An animal cannot regulate its life through outcomes alone. It must act. It searches, chooses, moves, flees, rests, plays, communicates, courts, nurtures and learns. These behaviours are not optional additions to the animal’s life. They are the means through which the animal participates in keeping itself alive.

When behaviour is interpreted without the animal’s biology and context, it is easy to attribute human intentions such as stubbornness, defiance or malice. The Teleonome Project begins with a different question:

What is this animal attempting to accomplish or regulate?

The Evolved Regulatory Repertoire

The behavioural toolbox of a species

The Evolved Regulatory Repertoire (ERR) is the open-ended, non-exhaustive repertoire of evolved behaviours through which a species regulates its life.

It is not a list of needs. It is not a list of outcomes. Hydration, energy balance, safety and health are conditions that must be achieved or maintained; they are not tools in the repertoire. The repertoire consists of what the animal does.

Different species inherit different repertoires because they make a living in different ways. A cheetah sprints and stalks. A pig roots and investigates. A horse survives through a distinctive combination of foraging, social living, flight, exploration and freedom of movement.

These are not closed categories or a final list of domains. They are higher-order behavioural systems beneath which sit many more particular behaviours. Foraging, for example, includes searching, travelling, selecting, browsing, grazing, manipulating, chewing and learning where resources can be found.

The repertoire is what evolution gave the species. Capability is what this individual can actually do with it.

Explore the Evolved Regulatory Repertoire →

Motivation

What sets the repertoire in motion?

Behaviour does not begin without motivation. In mammals, Jaak Panksepp’s work identified seven primary affective systems: SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF and PLAY.

These systems are not the repertoire itself. They recruit the repertoire — ancient motivational and affective systems that call up different parts of it according to the situation.

One behaviour may serve several systems, and one system may recruit many behaviours. Movement can be recruited by SEEKING, FEAR, PLAY, LUST or CARE. Teeth can be used in foraging, play, social grooming or aggression. The relationship is many-to-many.

This is why the affective systems should be understood as a layer across the repertoire rather than as the backbone of it. The repertoire remains the species-specific map of what the animal can do.

Read about the primary affective systems →

Learning

Evolution also built the capacity to improve

Evolution did not merely equip animals with behaviour. Natural selection repeatedly favoured animals able to improve their behaviour through experience when that capacity increased survival and reproductive success.

Learning allows an individual to refine, recombine and extend its inherited repertoire during its own lifetime. A foal and an experienced adult share the same species-level repertoire, but they do not possess the same present capability.

Capability develops through practice. Some opportunities are time-sensitive. When play, exploration, movement or social experience are prevented during development, the harm may extend beyond a behaviour being blocked today: the animal may never fully develop the capability it could otherwise have acquired.

Put plainly: preventing important developmental experiences may permanently reduce what the animal can become.

Restriction does not only block behaviour. It can foreclose the becoming.

Capability

Being cared for is not the same as remaining capable

There is a profound difference between being cared for and remaining capable.

Care describes what people provide. Capability describes what remains possible for the animal itself.

An animal may be protected, fed and closely managed while losing the opportunity — or even the developed ability — to exercise important parts of its behavioural repertoire. The distinction does not diminish care. It explains why care alone cannot settle the welfare question.

Follow the distinction into welfare →

A behaviour in context

What is this horse attempting to regulate?

A horse repeatedly lifts a hind leg towards its abdomen and swishes its tail while tied — new to the place, not yet secure in the herd, and held where it cannot return to the others.

The movement alone cannot tell us why. But context lets us form and test hypotheses: here, plausibly, an unsuccessful attempt to restore proximity to the herd after the horse has learned the restraint prevents escape. Three questions follow:

1Which affective system may be motivating it?

2Which part of the repertoire is being recruited?

3What is it trying to accomplish — and does the environment allow it?

Context does not prove motivation, but it lets biological interpretations be compared with evidence.

Read the full example →

Why this becomes a welfare question

Understanding the animal, so we can measure its welfare

Animal welfare has long been debated. Food, water, shelter and protection from obvious harm are indispensable, but they are not a complete account of a good life.

Welfare science has made enormous progress in understanding health, affective experience, natural behaviour, resilience and agency. Yet it still confronts a difficult fact: an animal may receive excellent care while losing opportunities to develop and exercise the behaviours through which its species regulates life.

The Teleonome Project asks what remains possible for the animal itself.

Welfare depends not only on what is provided, but on whether the animal has been — and remains — capable of developing and expressing its evolved behavioural repertoire over time.

An injury, illness or temporary disruption is not itself a TFI score. The relevant question is contextual: within the reality of this injury, is the animal still able to be a horse? The answer may be yes, partly or no — and it may change as the animal recovers or its circumstances change.

The welfare question

What is animal welfare?

Give a horse a carrot and it will happily eat it. Give it a carrot every hour, in a dark stable it never leaves, and every carrot may still provide a genuinely positive experience. Yet almost everyone senses that something is still wrong.

That small unease is the problem of animal welfare in miniature.

Positive experiences matter, but they cannot define welfare by themselves. Excellent provision and excellent welfare are not the same thing. A supplied outcome is not always biologically equivalent to an outcome achieved through the animal’s own behaviour.

Our answer therefore begins with the animal. What way of living did evolution equip this species to pursue? What repertoire did it inherit? What capability has this individual been allowed to develop? What does its present environment still allow it to do?

A good life is not merely one in which needs are met. It is one in which the animal remains capable of participating in meeting them.

Read the full essay: What Is Animal Welfare? →Explore: A History of Animal Welfare Science →

Why a constellation?

A list would lie about the biology

The behavioural systems of an animal do not operate as separate boxes. Foraging depends on movement, exploration, memory and learning. Flight depends on perception, locomotion, communication and the presence of other horses. Social life shapes safety, rest, development, play and reproduction.

A single behaviour may serve several regulatory problems, and every major behavioural system influences others. A hierarchy would imply a linear order that the biology does not possess.

The constellation is not decoration. It is a way of showing that the repertoire is an interconnected living system.

The public diagram introduces the major species-defining behavioural systems. The scientific Atlas can open those systems into more detailed behaviours, evidence, anatomy, physiology, affective overlays, learning, assessment and unresolved questions.

Enter the Constellation →