Health in Non-human Organisms

Abstract

This chapter analyses attempts made to define healthHealth for non-human organisms. This could be done either as a bottom-up approach finding a common denominator that all organisms share, or as a top-down approach which starts with a certain valuable criterion that those organisms share. Through this chapter I will discuss both approaches. I will briefly discuss the concept of organism and why I only choose to discuss biological organisms. This chapter will also further develop a categorization of health definitionsCategorization of health definitions that acknowledges the variety of the different kinds of definitionsDefinition. This is done as a two-level categorization consisting of categories and versions of these categories. I will go through relevant categories and versions in order to be able to say which could be fruitful to use as well as where science needs to be heading.