Citizens’ Views on Farm Animal Welfare and Related Information Provision: Exploratory Insights from Flanders, Belgium

Abstract

The results of two independent empirical studies with Flemish citizens were combined to address the problem of a short fall of information provision about higher welfare products. The research objectives were (1) to improve our understanding of how citizens conceptualize farm animal welfare, (2) to analyze the variety in the claimed personal relevance of animal welfare in the food purchasing decision process, and (3) to find out people's needs in relation to product information about animal welfare and the extent to which the current information caters to these needs. The first study consisted of a survey conducted in three consecutive years (2000-2002, n = 521) and was complemented with more recent qualitative data from four focus group discussions (2006, n = 29). Citizens' conceptualization of farm animal welfare matched reasonably well with those in the scientific literature, although it is clearly influenced by a lower level of practical experience and a higher weight of empathy. In general, respondents indicated that animal welfare was an important product attribute, although it was less important than primary product attributes such as quality, health, and safety. Moral issues, rather than a perception of higher quality, were the main influence on preferences for higher welfare products. At present, higher standards of animal welfare are mostly guaranteed within more general quality assurance schemes. Yet people's decisions to not choose higher welfare products seems to be related to the perceptual disconnection between eating animal food products and the living producing animals. Respondents generally thought better information provision was required and the present level of provision was strongly criticized. In combination, the findings of both studies help inform the discussion about how citizens can be informed about animal welfare and the preferred content, source, and medium of such information. The paper also provides insights into citizens' semantic interpretation of the concept of animal welfare (what wordings they use) and the range of relevance that animal welfare has for different groups that, in turn is useful in identifying which segments can be targeted. This can contribute to a more effective valorization of animal welfare as a product attribute.

Free Range, Organic? Polish Consumers Preferences Regarding Information on Farming System and Nutritional Enhancement of Eggs: A Discrete Choice Based Experiment

“…Freshness, visual characteristics, origin and price are commonly among the most important information consumer take into account in the decision making process to buy eggs, but production methods and origin of eggs gain more and more attention [9,27,34,35]. The selection of attributes for our experiment was preceded by a thorough analysis of egg market trends and consumer literature on animal welfare [2,4,7,9,13,[36][37][38], organic [8,10,20,34,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] and functional food [27,47,48] to identify the appropriate eggs attributes and dimensions that are valuable for the consumer. As a result, we decided to select for the experiment attributes such as: farming system (four levels), breed (two levels), health benefits claim (five levels), egg size (four levels), package size (two levels), price (seven levels) ( Table 1).…”

“…Consumers in all markets demand healthy and enjoyable food, but their ethical concerns are important drivers of food buying decisions [3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Therefore, parallel to the trend towards healthier food, a trend towards more environmentally friendly or "green" food products has emerged [10].…”

Societal views and animal welfare science: understanding why the modified cage may fail and other stories

“…Borgen and Skarstad, 2007;Kauppinen et al, 2010;Vanhonacker et al, 2010;Benard and de Cock Buning, 2013). Qualitative methods of inquiry can vary, but typically include interviews, focus groups and field research (ethnography).…”

“…This failing is arguably more problematic if the biases we bring to our work do not correspond with the values of the society that mandated our work in the first place. In the current example, people who buy eggs of course expect that animals will be kept healthy (Vanhonacker et al, 2010;Ingenbleek and Immink, 2011), but public concerns regarding how farm animals are reared also focus on long periods of close confinement and how this reduces opportunities for animals to live a more natural life (e.g. Boogaard et al, 2011;Vanhonacker et al, 2008).…”

Economic impact of decreasing stocking densities in broiler rabbit production based on Belgian farm data

“…Citizens ask for more animal friendly livestock production practices (María, 2006;Vanhonacker et al, 2010) and the market segment that takes animal welfare into account during their food purchasing process is steadily growing. Intensive animal production, adopted many decades ago to ensure food security and reduce production costs, is now increasingly criticised for its compromise on the farm animals' welfare.…”