[Upcoming Event]
Special Issue on Animal Welfare, Dec 2007
Competing discourses of farm animal welfare and agri-food restructuring.
Guest Editors: Mara Miele and Bettina Bock
Animal welfare has become an important issue for consumers, producers and policy makers (Bennett, 1995) and recent years have seen a large expansion for legislation in Europe (Wilkins, 1999; Bennett, and Blaney, 2003) and in other countries and a massive increase in the activities of animal rights/ animal welfare movements. Academics have also become increasingly interested in animal welfare both as a topic in its own right and as a means of gaining insights into wider nature-culture relations. Their task has not been straightforward as animal welfare is a complex and multifarious phenomenon that has little respect for traditional disciplinary boundaries and that cuts across and links together actors from many different social fields. Recent research in this field has shown that the concept of animal welfare varies between different actors involved and according to their different practical encounters with animals. For example animal experts and ethologists may view welfare in terms of a set of reliable, valid and repeatable scientific parameters, whereas farmers and producers might frame animal welfare in more practical, experiential terms. Common people, on the other hand, might be reduced to encountering animals through images, stories and other media representations more than from direct experience, and as Baker says, the increasing disnification of animals (Bamby, Dumbo et al.) encourage ‘the making nonsense of the animal’. More generally, in everyday life, we are all sharing the experience of encountering animals as food, in supermarkets or butcher’s shops. Animal welfare issues then become limited to choices of buying or non buying and in the latter case, between different food products and their accompanying logos or shopping outlets. Despite these differences in conceptualisation and evaluation of animal welfare a common thread endures and it is a concern for the quality of life of animals. This concept allows consumers to eat meat, and allows farmers to perceive themselves as taking good care of their animals. It also enables the food industry and retailers to promote their image and their products by representing animals, in packaging and commercials, as having a good life.
This Special Issue will attempt to unravel some of the complexities of how animal welfare as it is experienced and imagined by different actors, in order to discover differences and commonalities in their value orientations and practices. The main theme of this special issue is therefore how the concept of ‘a good life for animals’ is perceived, constructed, practiced and represented by various actors.
Papers are on the following themes:
(a) Conceptualising animal welfare
• Competing discourses and definitions of what constitutes animal welfare/animal rights
• Alternative ways of theorising the relationships between humans and non-human animals.
• How human to non-human animal relationships are performed (e.g. the (ethical) embodied practices involved with keeping farm animals, companion animals or working animals).
(b) Initiatives for animal welfare
• The construction of a good life for animals in the market: labelling animal welfare, new retailers strategies, initiatives from the animal supply chains.
• Differences between farmers in their construction and performance of securing a good life for their animals.
(c) Animal welfare in the food consumption and food choice
• The embodied ethics and aesthetics of animal foods consumption;
• The consumption of welfare-friendly products;
• Consumers’ perception of farm animals’ welfare through time;
• The political consumer – who cares about a good life for animals;
• The non-consumption of meat and animal products (exploring the practical ethics of vegetarians, vegans, fruitarians etc.)
• When animals become food; edibility and acceptability of animal foods.