Horses and People editor Cristina Wilkins opened the Animal Welfare Chapter program at ANZCVS Science Week on the Gold Coast with the first live presentation of the teleonome — a framework that asks welfare scientists to reassemble the whole animal.
GOLD COAST, 24 July 2026 — Speaking to veterinary specialists at the Australian and New Zealand College of Veterinary Scientists (ANZCVS) Science Week, Cristina Wilkins delivered the opening keynote of the Animal Welfare Chapter program, presenting the teleonome to a live audience for the first time since its publication in Frontiers in Animal Science in February.
The talk opened with an uncomfortable question. This year marks forty years since Donald Broom was appointed the world’s first Professor of Animal Welfare at Cambridge — four decades in which welfare science has built journals, methods and whole specialisations. So why do the most basic, most visible forms of suffering persist across farmed, companion, performance and wild animals alike?
Not for want of knowledge, Wilkins argued, and not because people have stopped caring: repeat surveys of Australian public attitudes show strong majority support for stronger welfare standards. Social scientists are pointing toward cognitive dissonance and the reduction strategies humans deploy to survive it — dissociation and normalisation, operating at a societal scale.
She built the case around four “keynote heroes”: the intensively farmed pig, whose tail biting is met with docking rather than a rootable substrate like straw; the brachycephalic dog, whose median lifespan sits years below that of longer-muzzled breeds; the farmed salmon, held motionless in a cage despite a biology organised around migration; and the broiler breeder hen, kept severely feed-restricted for life so that she can survive long enough to reproduce.
The teleonome, Wilkins explained, extends the late Bernard Rollin’s concept of telos — the “pigness of the pig” — into something scientifically operational. Where telos names the goal, the teleonome names the system that pursues it: the whole integrated package of anatomy, physiology, behaviour and cognition through which each kind of animal stays alive and reproduces. Like the genome or the microbiome, she argued, it is a term that can do empirical work.
Six concepts operationalise it — Ancestry, Adaptation, Affordances, Affect, Allostatic load and Agency — held in view together at the moment of welfare inference. Wilkins walked the audience through the DEFR+U cycle (Detect, Evaluate, Forecast, Respond, Update), the distinction between an affordance gap, a mismatch and an incapacity, and why identical behaviour can reflect opposite histories: habituation and learned helplessness look the same, but only one reflects the sense of control that equates with good welfare.
Her sharpest challenge was reserved for a familiar term. “Coping is the term we reach for whenever an animal survives a bio-regulatory challenge — but survival is not welfare,” she said, proposing an affective trajectory that accounts for accumulating allostatic load as the more meaningful measure.
Two companion papers are currently under review, one proposing a teleonomic welfare assessment process and another examining the welfare costs of extreme phenotypes, co-authored with canine welfare researchers Dan O’Neill and Rowena Packer.
Wilkins closed by setting the room a small experiment: to listen out, across the rest of the week, for Ancestry, Adaptation, Affordances, Affect, Allostatic load and Agency sitting unnamed inside other speakers’ data — and to make the teleonomic principle explicit.
Watch the full presentation below.
