Farming and laboratory industries face questions about whether to breed animals with altered capacities for pleasure and pain. This paper addresses this issue from different approaches to animal welfare based on experiences, fitness and naturalness. This can illuminate both the breeding-related issues and the different approaches themselves. These differences have practical implications for decisions about animal breeding. All three approaches will agree that pleasure that is adaptive in natural environments has positive value and that maladaptive pain has negative value. However, where animals’ environments will not be natural, experiences-based approaches may support breeding animals that experience more pleasure and less pain or insentient animals; whereas, in some cases, fitness-based and naturalness-based approaches might favour the breeding of animals that experience more pain and less pleasure.

When a symbol is a marker of a primary bearer of value and, secondarily, a bearer of value itself, then it has symbolic value. Philosophers have long been suspicious of symbolic values, often regarding them as illusory or irrelevant. I suggest that arguments against symbolic values either overgeneralize or else require premises that can only be supported if the normative significance of some symbolic considerations is presupposed. Humans need symbols to represent identity facts to themselves and others. Symbolic values thereby contribute to individuals’ control over their own agency.