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Interest in the notion of animal agency is growing rapidly in different fields of academic inquiry. A wide range of disciplines are working to articulate an understanding of animals in fundamentally active terms, as creatures capable of shaping the way they engage with the world through exertion of choice, competence, and control. This review offers an integrated perspective on this development, outlining relevant discussions of animal agency in animal science as well as the social sciences and humanities, followed by an array of practical strategies for increasing the agency of animals in human care. The growing literature in these fields suggests that giving animals greater freedom to act and live as they prefer may in due course transform their role in science and society and substantially improve their well-being as a result.
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Wemelsfelder et al. (2026) studied this question.
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