Dr. Judith Benz-Schwarzburg gives a lecture on virtual animals at the Immersium in Vienna (Photo Credit: Oliver Hirtenfelder) On the 8th of October 2025 the Vienna Animal Studies group hosted its largest lecture yet. Held within the impressive in Immersium in Vienna Dr. Judith Benz-Schwarzburg, a Senior Researcher in Animal Ethics and Animal Cognition at the Messerli Research Institute, talked to us about the ethics of digitally representing animals. The event started with a

On the 10th of September, Dr Leonie Bossert started the Vienna Animal Studies (VAS) 2025 Winter Lecture Series by asking whether geoengineering has the potential to help animals or if it just presents another “techno-fix” informed by ideas of human domination.

Carlo Salzani, VAS member and animal ethicist, recently published Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination. We caught up with him to find out more about this open access book and his motivations for writing it.

Between May 15-16, at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, an international and interdisciplinary research project named “Contested Moral Framings: Human and Animal Life”, funded by AKTION, hosted a workshop titled “Toward an Understanding of Framing in Animal Ethics.”

On the evening of May 14th, the Vienna Animal Studies (VAS) group hosted a lecture by Dr. Samuel Camenzind of the University of Vienna. His talk, titled “Genetic Pain Surgery with Molecular Scissors,” presented the questions of ethics and science of genetic pain disenhancement in animals.

On the 12th of March 2025 Dr Doris Schneeberger discussed her recently published book Envisioning a Better Future for Nonhuman Animals.

We are now accepting chapter proposals for the edited handbook “Animals in Business Ethics: Managing Multispecies Relations in Organizations