Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare

Human-Animal Relations

To understand animal welfare as a consumer concern, attention has been directed to how the human-animal relationship is embedded in cultural and religious understandings. Tim Ingold contends that with the emergence of pastoral societies, humans' relationships with animals shifted from being based on a principle of trust to that of domination—humans must care for animals, but that does not necessarily question the human as the master. The treatment of an animal, and in particular how it is killed, cannot take place without symbolic precautions. Mythic and religious domains here are important to understand the process of legitimizing the killing of animals for food. Some religions treat animals as the property of their owners, codifying rules for their care and slaughter—often referred to as ritual slaughter—intended to limit the distress and pain animals feel under human control. Claude Fischler, among others, suggests that science has undertaken [Page 297]the role of legitimizing killing for food by objectifying animals through processes of “de-animation.” “In the food business,” he argues, “the animal has become an object or rather less than an object: just stuff” (Fischler 1990, 133).

As animal welfare began to take a larger place in Western public policy in nineteenth-century Britain, particularly with the emergence of the animal rights movement, the idea of animals as things or “animal machines”—as Descartes expressed it—was challenged. Since then, the welfare approach has had human morality and human behavior as its central concern. The issue of animal welfare is, however, still debated. Animal welfare can be seen as a position where it is morally acceptable for humans to use nonhuman animals, provided that adverse effects on animal welfare are minimized as far as possible. Critics have suggested that animal welfare—as a pragmatic and reformist approach—is contrasted to the animal rights and the animal liberation positions, which hold that animals should not be utilized by humans, and should not be regarded as their property.

Issues of legitimacy therefore still remain high on the agenda. The cultural influences on human-animal relations (such as the personification of animals) as well as modern production systems as such seem to produce an opening-up regarding the societal handling of animals for food, questioning norms as well as organizational procedures.

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