Farmer approaches to animal welfare: understanding on-farm animal-human relations

In the last three decades, livestock production practices have risen to importance in scientific, political, and public debates on sustainable development. Topics of debate related to livestock farming’s environmental impact, food safety and security, and animal and human health have received considerable sociological attention. Animal welfare issues, and particularly the farm animal-human relations implicated in these, have only recently become a topic of sociological scrutiny and remain under-theorised – despite an increasing public and policy attention for animal welfare. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of approaches to animal welfare by a group of actors whose actions are particularly consequential for farm animals’ well-being: farmers. The paper argues that to date studies of farmers’ stances on animal welfare have focussed too little on how these stances are informed by farmers’ embodied, and socially and materially contextualised interactions with their animals. In this light, the paper develops a practice-oriented conceptual framework that allows for an analysis of the situated dynamics of farmers’ animal welfare approaches. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Belgian pig farmers about their implementation of EU animal welfare legislation that required them to group-house their gestating sows, the paper discusses how farmers ‘negotiate’ an amalgam of political, ethical, socio-economic, and practical demands when designing and managing their daily interactions with their sows. Furthermore, the paper analyses how farmers’ understandings of their sows’ welfare experiences and needs were affected by their daily interactions with these animals in the context of the new sow housing system. Moving beyond understandings of farmers’ involvement in animal welfare governance as economic rational actors or as rather passive recipients of governmental and market-based norms, the paper ends with a reflection on the scientific and policy implications of its more situated understanding of farmers’ animal welfare approaches