04/21/2025
Agency is a notoriously slippery concept, especially when applied to nonhuman animals. It can feel abstract, hard to define, and even harder to measure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't or even that it is!
Agency isn’t something we give—it’s something we either allow, suppress, or support. If we control the context, we shape the experience.
In their 2023 paper, Littlewood et al. offer a compelling and practical framework for operationalising agency, adapting the Five Domains Model of animal welfare to include five interrelated components:
🔹 Choice
🔹 Control
🔹 Challenge
🔹 Competence
🔹 Umwelt (the nonhuman animal's perceptual and experiential world)
These components allow us to move beyond vague ideas of “freedom” or “enrichment” and ask concrete questions about the individual dog in front of us:
🐾Are they given genuine options in their daily routines and learning?
🐾Can they exercise control over their bodies, environment, and social interactions?
🐾Are they exposed to challenges that build skills that account for their ability, learning stage, and capacity?
🐾Do they have opportunities to build competence and engage fully with their world?
🐾And crucially, are we designing experiences based on their sensory world, not just ours?
When we prioritise these elements, we invite dogs to become active participants in their own lives; not passive recipients of human direction.
And yet, agency is often unintentionally overlooked in favour of compliance. We still reward stillness more than curiosity. We often teach control, but call it connection.
It's time we start calling agency what it is: essential.
Reference:
Littlewood, K. E., Heslop, M. V., & Cobb, M. L. (2023). The agency domain and behavioral interactions: assessing positive animal welfare using the Five Domains Model. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 10, 1284869. https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2023.1284869
