Negotiating Legitimacy: Neoliberal and Agrarian Strategies to Resolve the Enigma of Animal Welfare

• In Event: 2112 - Section on Animals and Society Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03: Animals, Work and Social Movements

Abstract

This paper explores how meat producers and consumers actively renegotiate the legitimacy of their meat production and consumption activities. While large producers’ goods are made affordable and accessible through economies of scale, in comparison with locally crafted goods, the ethics and cultural authenticity of these products has been subject to increasing skepticism. When the problems and criticisms associated with meat reach a tipping point, producers and consumers seek to restore the legitimacy of meat through a process of negotiation, whereby compromises are offered in exchange for the validation and approval of customers, family, peers, or community. While the industry as a whole has been quite resilient in surviving repeated controversies, producers also understand that much of the public has been disenchanted by these events, and they have taken proactive efforts to reassert their products’ legitimacy.

In what follows, we use the concept of negotiation and Appleby’s (1999) three dimensions of animal welfare (mind, body, and nature) to describe producers’ and consumers’ efforts to reconcile the controversies surrounding meat. Specifically, we examine how animal welfare is defined and either enhanced or marginalized in industrial and small-scale meat production contexts. We argue that producers must make decisions about the balance of the three domains they wish emphasize or de-emphasize, and which risks to welfare they deem acceptable and which require remediation. We find that the underlying assumption that subtends both agrarian and industrial discourses of animal welfare is that raising and slaughtering animals for food is ethically acceptable. Where the two discourses diverge is on questions of how the raising and slaughtering of animals can be done in an ethically acceptable way.

Authors

• Robert Magneson Chiles, Pennsylvania State University

• Scott Cameron Lougheed, Queen's University