Food and Animal
Welfare
Contemporary Food Studies: Economy, Culture and Politics
Series Editors: David Goodman and Michael K. Goodman
ISSN: 2058-1807
This interdisciplinary series represents a significant step toward unifying the study, teaching and research of food studies across the social sciences. The series features authoritative appraisals of core themes, debates and emerging research, written by leading scholars in the field. Each title offers a jargon-free introduction to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in the social sciences and humanities.
Kate Cairns and Jose Johnston, Food and Femininity
Peter Jackson, Anxious Appetites: Food and Consumer Culture
Philip H. Howard, Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat?
Terry Marsden, Agri-Food and Rural Development: Sustainable Place-Making
Emma-Jayne Abbots, The Agency of Eating: Mediation, Food, and the Body
Further titles forthcoming
Food and
Animal
Welfare
Henry Buller &
Emma Roe
Much of the material for this book has come from the authors experience in, and contribution to, a number of research projects undertaken over the last decade or so. First and foremost among these has been the EU FP6-funded Welfare Quality project, which ran from 2004 to 2009 under the leadership of Harry Blokhuis. Out of that large collaborative research project came more specific pieces of work both in the UK and in Hungary upon which we have drawn for much of the book, but particularly .
Through these various projects and other work, we have had the privilege of working with a large number of people (academics, scientists, activists, carepersons, farmers, veterinarians, policy-makers, consumers, etc.) as well as bodies and organizations committed to improving the lives of farmed animals. Among them, we would like to expressly thank (in no particular order) Mara Miele, Harry Blokhuis, Marc Higgin, Adrian Evans, Terry Marsden, the late Jon Murdoch, Unni Kjaernes, Christine Cesar, David Main, Andy Butterworth, Becky Whay and colleagues at Bristol Vet School, Linda Keeling and colleagues at the SLU in Uppsala, Ruth Layton, Ashleigh Bright, Roland Bonney, the late Christopher Wathes, Steve Hinchliffe, John Bradshaw, Paul Hurley, Beth Greenhough and John Law, FAWC, UFAW. We also thank our friends, colleagues and students at the Departments of Geography at Exeter and Southampton; our families including Mary Rose Roe for sharing her life-long fascination with animals and their daily experiences; and Carl Roe, a village shop keeper, who inspired academic interest in food retailing, supply and growing. Finally, we would want to thank each other for a long-standing scientific collaboration and friendship that is as energetic and stimulating today as it ever was.
We dedicate this book to the next generation of protein eaters, including Lewis, Elliot and Amlie.
We largely take farm animals lives (and deaths) for granted when we eat them and their products. For most of us, meat, egg and dairy consumption has become so distinct geographically, morally, aesthetically from livestock production that the animal disappears. The very vocabulary of food often denies its animalian origin, principally to protect our own sensibilities either as carnivores or as co-animals (Twigg, 1979; Goldenberg, 2001; Evans and Miele, 2012). Packaging, presentation and labelling intentionally obscure the animal corporeality and liveliness behind the product (Vialles, 1994). Animals, if they are represented, often take an abstract and idealized form, close enough to suggest authenticity but distant enough to absolve responsibility. The worlds of consumption and production seem further apart than ever. They have become, in Goodmans (2002: 272) words, autonomous, purified categories of social life, sites only skeletally connected through the act of purchase. If historically, domestic farm animals were considered subsidiary members of the human community (Thomas, 1983), towards the end of the nineteenth century it was already clear that the gulf was now very much wider between human needs on the one hand and human sensibilities on the other (Thomas, 1983: 191). The industrialization and intensification of animal husbandry, coupled with the increasingly cheaper cost of animal products, a rapidly expanding urban consumer market and new retail and processing technologies, have all contributed to a process that distances animals from animal products while at the same time de-animalizing the latter (Guzman and Kjaernes, 1998; Buller, 2012). Most Americans, write Singer and Mason (2008: 37), know little of how their eggs are produced. Regular annual surveys by the organization LEAF show surprisingly and consistently high proportions of young Britons unaware, for example, that bacon comes from pigs or milk from cows (LEAF, 2015). Of course, such distanciation serves the animal production sector well. As Shukin (2009: 21) puts it: Rather than undermining the hegemony of market life, the contradictions of animal rendering are productive so long as they are discursively managed under the separate domains of culture and economy. In terms of the broader universe of humananimal relations, consumers meanwhile both have their critters and eat them.
The central argument of this original book, written by two social scientists/geographers with a strong scientific and ethical commitment to bringing a social science understanding to farm animal care and welfare, is that concern for the welfare of farm animals (whether that concern is interpersonal, scientific, moral, gastronomic, aesthetic, social or economic or indeed a combination of these) constitutes a significant and vital linkage between the processes and the acts of consumption and production. Those links can be explicit or implicit, overt or hidden. They are rendered visible, or obscured, for a range of reasons, running from ethical engagement and anthropomorphic excess to economization, purposeful market segmentation and profitability. In drawing attention, first, to the corporeal materiality of animals as future food as well as to the feelings and psychological experiences of farmed animals and, second, to the practices of care, responsibility and attention afforded those animals by those who work alongside them, we argue that concern for the welfare of farmed animals fosters an inter-species communion of relationality and interdependence within the food chain that, whether we like it or not, implicates us more directly in the lives of those we eat and in the quality and value of those lives. Yet those interdependencies are mediated in a variety of different ways by different actors for different ends. Untangling such mediations is our goal.
Since the 1970s, farm animal welfare has emerged as a major consideration in the rules and standards governing animal production across a wide range of countries and global regions. In October 2016, the United Nations Committee on World Food Security published its Proposed draft recommendations on sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock (United Nations, 2016). Recommendation D of Article VIII, entitled Animal health and welfare, reads:
Improve animal welfare delivering on the five freedoms and related OIE standards and principles, including through capacity building programs, and supporting voluntary actions in the livestock sector to improve animal welfare. (United Nations, 2016: 2)
Animal welfare concerns are having an increasingly important impact upon the way animals are farmed, transported and slaughtered, upon the structures, institutions and regulations that accompany these processes and upon the individual practices of husbandry and care. Animal welfare concerns affect how animal products are prepared, selected, identified, sold and consumed. In many parts of the world, animal welfare is a significant factor in the segmentation of product markets and an increasingly important ethical concern in consumer choice. Finally, it is, we must hope, improving the lives of those animals that are farmed.
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