Individual animal welfare and the collective dimension of sustainability: the role of animal welfare in developments towards sustainable food production and consumption

Abstract

Sustainability is a broad and multi-layered concept that is not easy to define. In the practice of food production this becomes clear in a wide range of – sometimes mutually excluding – proposals to secure food production in a sustainable way. Currently there are a number of initiatives to make food production more sustainable. Animal welfare increasingly plays a role in the initiatives to come to a sustainable food production and consumption. However, in spite of the growing attention to animal welfare in sustainability debates, animal welfare quite often appears to conflict with the ideas on sustainability. On the one hand, problems occur as a result of the need to weigh different aspects of sustainability. These are questions, such as how to weigh the added value of giving animals the opportunity of free ranging against the related animal and public health risks. On the other hand, a recent proposal to make poultry meat production more sustainable shows an additional problem in the relation between animal welfare and sustainability. This is the potential conflict between the emphasis on the individual animal in the welfare debate and the orientation on collectives in the sustainability concept. An improvement of overall sustainability might still imply that the welfare problems of individual animals remain unaddressed. In this paper, I elaborate on the relation between animal welfare and sustainability. I use the debate between environmental and animal ethics – that is characterised by a similar gap – in order to look at the opportunities to deal with the tensions between individual animal welfare and the collective focus of sustainability. Finally, I propose that defining sustainability as a moral ideal is helpful to include individual animal welfare in the sustainability debate.