Interpretive Summary: Farmers’ attitudes toward animal welfare

By: Maria José Hötzel , Letícia Bicudo Nogueira , Matías J Hargreaves-Méndez , Elisa Cesário Pereira Stadnick

Implications

1. Farmers recognize the emotional and natural living aspects of animals as important but tend to prioritize productivity and biological functioning, especially health, when making practical decisions affecting farm animal welfare.
2. Many contextual factors shape farmers’ attitudes to animal welfare, including production systems, herd size, culture, animal species, and demographic variables like nationality, age, and gender. Understanding how demographic, regional, cultural, and economic contexts influence farmers’ knowledge, practices, and attitudes to animal welfare is essential for developing effective and locally relevant animal welfare policies and practices.
3. National legislations and certification programs are essential in driving positive changes in animal welfare practices. Farmers’ attitudes toward these schemes impact their motivation to adopt them. Economic factors are a major driver of participation in welfare certification programs. Programs that engage farmers in the audit process and are perceived as beneficial for both animals and farmers increase participation. Financial incentives, market demands and opportunities, and perceived economic benefits from improved welfare practices further influence farmers’ willingness to adopt these practices.
4. Farmers’ attitudes toward animal welfare are negatively influenced by their perception that consumers do not sufficiently recognize their efforts or are unwilling to pay for higher welfare standards. This can undermine farmers’ motivation to change practices to improve animal welfare.
5. There is growing recognition that farmers’ occupational and mental wellbeing and job satisfaction are positively linked to farm animal welfare. Addressing these issues is important for improving animal welfare outcomes.

Introduction

Farm animal production has undergone significant transformations in the last 60 years, associated with globalization, population growth, increasing affluence, and the resulting demand for animal products. Altogether, this has driven a significant growth in the global number of animals and continuous changes in the production systems in response to different environmental, social, and economic challenges. One of the main transformations can be represented by the intensification of production and a shift from small-scale, diversified, and subsistence-oriented systems to larger-scale, specialized systems that often focus on generating products aimed at competing in national and international markets. The intensification of production systems can directly affect the quality of life of animals, given that it involves loss of naturalness and changes in the animals through genetic selection for increased productivity, as well as the housing environment, diet, and management. In this process, animal welfare has also been affected by changes in the relationship between farmers and animals, in part related to the use of new equipment and technologies that changed the human–animal relationship and the modification of the size and characteristics of herds.

Read more in Animal Frontiers, Advancing Animal Welfare.