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Animal welfare: establishing a dialogue between science and society
- M Miele, I Veissier, A Evans, R Botreau
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- Journal:
- Animal Welfare / Volume 20 / Issue 1 / February 2011
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 January 2023, pp. 103-117
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- Article
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Farm animal welfare has become an important issue for the European public, especially in the last two decades when a number of crises (eg Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and Avian Influenza) have affected farm animal populations. Public concern about this issue led the European Union to fund the Welfare Quality® project. This project aimed to develop a protocol for assessing animal welfare on farms and at slaughter plants, to identify the main animal welfare problems, and to address possible welfare improvement strategies. In fulfilling these aims, the Welfare Quality® project incorporated inputs from both science and society. This was crucial, as the public perception of what constitutes ‘animal welfare’ sometimes differs from animal science-based definitions. Furthermore, these differences are often interwoven with broader variations in ethical- and value-based understandings about human/non-human animal relationships. This paper presents the steps that we adopted to establish a dialogue between science and society during the construction of the Welfare Quality® assessment protocols. This dialogue involved numerous interactions between animal scientists, social scientists and members of the public. These interactions took several forms, including: meetings, conferences, workshops, websites, newsletters, interviews, focus groups, and citizen and farmers juries. Here, we address four key moments within this dialogue: the development of the initial list of twelve welfare criteria; the consumer focus groups; the development of the Welfare Quality® scoring system; and the citizen juries. In particular, we focus on the results of the focus groups and citizen juries. The focus groups were conducted in France, Italy, Sweden, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Hungary and the citizen juries were carried out in Italy, the United Kingdom, and Norway. Drawing on this research, we highlight the similarities and differences between societal understandings of farm animal welfare and the views of scientific experts. Furthermore, and crucially, we outline how the animal scientists took account of societal opinion when developing their farm animal welfare assessment tools.
5 - Experimental Adaptiveness in the Anthropocene
- Walter F. Baber, California State University, Long Beach, Robert V. Bartlett, University of Vermont
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- Book:
- Democratic Norms of Earth System Governance
- Published online:
- 12 August 2021
- Print publication:
- 29 April 2021, pp 104-122
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- Chapter
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Summary
In the context of earth system governance today, experimentation is no longer merely a virtue but a basic survival skill.Administrative professionals – understood to include administrators national, international, and subnational, both governmental and nongovernmental, across the entire range of policy arenas – are in a position to engage in this best practice for learning from experience, perhaps to a greater degree than any other agents of governance. Protected by both their relative anonymity and their institutional affiliations, they enjoy the dual benefits of relative invisibility and administrative discretion.Administrative professionals can experiment with social and political arrangements that are not only adaptive but are also democratic and effective in reconciling humans to their environment.The volatility of their environments has meant that they face devolved responsibility in governance for both acquiring resources and achieving results.Administrative professionals succeed by being scavengers par excellence, such that approaches that work well anywhere are destined eventually to be tried everywhere.
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