Ethics, religion and farm animal welfare

Abstract

Farmed animals do not capture the ethical attention of most ordinary people. This is partly because, in the UK and other developed Western societies, the large majority of people do not live in close proximity to them. It is also because farmed animals are typically viewed at a group level rather than individually, and so do not have the personal attributes projected onto them that might suggest they are worthy of moral consideration. Nevertheless, animals that are farmed have a close relation to humans. This is shown by their vulnerability, especially their inability to defend themselves against predators and disease (Palmer 2011). It is also shown by their dependency, with farmed animals having been reared to have their needs met principally by humans. Due to this close relation with humans, farmed animals deserve a high level of ethical consideration by humans. This chapter focuses mostly on ethics, with particular reference to the UK, and then considers religious issues toward the end. This is because most people in the UK accept the validity of some kind of ethical principle to regulate human actions, whereas fewer people, at least where farm animal welfare is concerned, draw their principles from religion. Nevertheless, religion provides strong motivating principles for a minority of people and so cannot be altogether disregarded. ETHICS Consumers are increasingly concerned about the welfare of the farmed animals whose meat and other products they buy (Mayfield, Bennett, Tranter and Wooldridge 2007), and food retailers of all sizes are well aware of this concern. In order to gain and preserve market share, meat and farm animal products will need to be ethically sustainable: that is, to meet the rising ethical expectations of consumers. Although expectations will be higher among some individual consumers and consumer groups than others, ethics is an important business concern for all products and suppliers. Nevertheless, ethics can never be a matter of mere business advantage. Going beyond purely instrumental concerns, such as maximizing sales or profit, ethics concerns the fundamental principles that shape how business decisions are made. Indeed, it may well call business priorities into question. Ethical action requires i) knowledge of relevant facts; ii) the acceptance of one or more ethical principles; and iii) the capacity to relate facts to ethical principles in practice. I shall now consider each of these in turn. Knowledge Consumers have different kinds of ethically relevant knowledge about the meat and farm animal products they buy, dependent on retailer type and size. Independent retailers, such as butchers, farm shops and delicatessens, are likely to have a short supply chain and a high level of knowledge about the conditions in which their animals have been reared and slaughtered, which may therefore be presumed to be relatively good (Mayfield, Bennett and Turner 2007, 128-31). Information with ethical relevance, such as how animals have been housed or pastured, what they have been fed, and the d...