The Ethical Responsibility of Companies Towards Animals: A Study of the Expressed Commitment of the Fortune Global 200

Abstract

Reasonable arguments can be advanced to show that companies have an ethical responsibility towards animals. However, hardly any empirical research has been conducted to establish whether companies acknowledge these responsibilities and how they articulate them. This study shows that 47% of the 200 largest companies in the world make statements of ethical responsibility towards animals. The findings show great divergence in the expressed commitment towards animal welfare among these companies. Companies that express responsibility show quite a high level of concern in their words, but they do so in documents of relatively low importance. Statements regarding ethical responsibility for animal welfare are generally made in consequentialist terms. The results of this study show that it is high time for the fields of business ethics and animal ethics to start working more closely together.

Corporate Reporting on Farm Animal Welfare: An Evaluation of Global Food Companies’ Discourse and Disclosures on Farm Animal Welfare

“…The overall findings are similar to findings presented by Janssens and Kaptein, who analysed the websites of the 200 largest corporations in the world (selected from the 2012 Fortune Global 500 list) for statements of responsibility towards animals [19]. Their assessment of 21 companies involved in animal-based food products concluded that 76% of these companies had made statements of responsibility towards animals, a broadly similar figure to the 71% (2012) and 70% (2013) of the companies covered by the Benchmark who acknowledged farm animal welfare as a business issue.…”

“…In addition, companies regularly put their actions or results in documents of marginal importance or ‘hidden’ documents of a low status or with a temporary nature (e.g., company magazines or blogs) rather than in online corporate-level documents. This limits communication about such actions or outcomes [19]. There may be various reasons for this.…”

“…There are compelling business reasons (or ‘business case arguments’) why companies should be concerned about farm animal welfare. These include regulation and legislation, pressure from animal welfare organisations, and brand and market opportunities for companies with higher farm animal welfare standards (see, for example, [2,18,19]). Consumer pressures are important too, with animal welfare exerting an increasingly strong influence on food purchasing decisions [20] (for a challenge to this view, see [21]).…”

“…There may be various reasons for this. The most important one is the limited information provided by companies on their overall farm animal welfare management practices and processes [19]. Another reason is the lack of tools or frameworks that enable a meaningful assessment of individual company performance (in either absolute terms or relative to its industry peers), despite Maloni and Brown providing an expansive framework for the management of social, environmental and ethical (including animal welfare) issues in the food supply chain [2].…”

The Battle for Business Ethics: A Struggle Theory

“…Over the past few decades, new, more demanding ethical norms for organizations have emerged concerning bribery (Weber and Getz 2004), insider trading (Moore 1990), salaries (Nichols and Subramaniam 2001), fair trade (Jaffee 2010), the natural environment (Gladwin et al 1995), animals (Janssens and Kaptein 2014), lobbying (Hamilton and Hoch 1997), supply chain responsibility (Van Tulder et al 2009), human rights (Muchlinski 2012), and investing (Hudson 2005). These ethical norms are developed in response to new issues (such as bitcoins), trends (such as globalization), scandals and crisis (such as the financial-economic crisis at the end of the first decade of this century), information (such as about the damage of corruption), paradigms (such as stakeholder instead of shareholder thinking, Paine 2002), and new theories (such as an ethics of care, Lawrence and Maitlis 2012).…”