Animal Welfare, Agricultural

Abstract

Agricultural or farm animal welfare is not an absolute. There is no single definition and no universal agreement over what constitutes it, how it might be measured, and to what level it should be achieved. Human concern for the well-being of farm animals is neither new nor surprising. No farmer wants to see a productive animal suffer unduly, thereby becoming less productive. Less instrumentalist approaches to farm animal suffering emerged 200 or so years ago and, though they were largely occluded during agricultural modernization, have, over the last 50 or so years, risen considerably in prominence. Veterinary and animal science has developed complex methods for assessing farm animal welfare and popular opinion has demanded that specific practices deemed unnecessarily harmful be stopped. Farm animal welfare is currently high on the policy agenda at the national and international levels as consumers, and, in many cases, retailers, demand higher welfare conditions in production with potentially significant implications for international trade. Geographers' traditional engagement with farm animal welfare has been through agricultural geography and debates over rural/agricultural restructuring. More recently, however, geographers working in the fields of ethics and ethical consumption, society/nature, and human/nonhuman relations as well as science and technology studies have increasingly turned their attention to the issue of farm animal welfare.