Source: Julie Larson Bricher, MEATINGPLACE, 4/25/18
 
 

Consumer demand for animal welfare information is driving the need for new research, coordinated policy and better science communications to the public, according to a new report Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST).  

The CAST taskforce-produced paper, Scientific, Ethical and Economic Aspects of Farm Animal Welfare (CAST Task Report 143), discusses the scientific advancements in animal welfare technologies and approaches since CAST’s 1997 report on animal well-being. It identifies the outstanding challenges in addressing animal welfare systems and production management that continue despite more than two decades of research in this area.

The report also proposes priority research areas and further actions needed to address animal welfare to ensure stable and sustainable U.S. food production, including:
• Increase capacity for scientific research on animal welfare in the United States. The U.S. lags behind from its European and Canadian counterparts in this area of study, in both number of researchers and knowledge base.
• Increase focus on trans-disciplinary aspects of animal welfare research. Help identify the role of stakeholder values, costs of new policies, welfare-friendly methods of production and sustainability of solutions.
• Develop coordinated mechanisms for policy setting. Few U.S. laws directly address on-farm practices related to animal care, welfare, housing systems and management practices. Furthermore, there is no unified process for instituting standards, which has resulted in an array of differing state-by-state and voluntary regulatory requirements.
• Develop effective communication about animal welfare to advance public understanding and improve application of science-based approaches and technologies.

In a webcast briefing earlier this week, CAST taskforce co-chair Candace Croney, director, Center for Animal Welfare Science at Purdue University, noted that despite the fact that a large body of animal welfare science has been produced in the past 20 years, science-based information is not making it into the public domain.

“We need to have more discussion about how we incorporate science and coordinate policy because people don’t understand how policies get set on animal welfare,” she said. “They need more transparency in terms on what and how animal welfare policies get set, who is setting them, what role consumers and interested members of the public have in making their voices heard — all of which is going to require different mechanisms that we don’t really have in place right now.”
Croney also noted that previous surveys have shown that consumers most frequently obtained information about animal welfare from HSUS or PETA, and fewer people looked at government, industry or academic institutions as first sources. “It’s disturbing that people still will tell us that they don’t know where to go to get information on animal welfare,” she said.

“In fact, when they do name a source, they are going to major animal protection groups for [that information],” Croney added. “How that science is filtered into a message for consumers is potentially problematic, so we want to get more objective, science-based information directly to consumers so they have good information to inform their choices, whatever those choices are.”

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