Welfare washing is a strategic response to the conflicting desires of the public: to consume large quantities of animal products at a price they can afford without endorsing the extreme welfare compromises necessary to produce them at scale.
The animal welfare standards in the UK are among the highest in the world. Both the government and the industry proudly repeat this fact, and it brings comfort to those who eat animals while being sensitive to their humane treatment.
But how much do UK citizens really know about what our impressive animal welfare standards actually permit?
In shops and supermarkets, food labels are the only direct source of information about where our products come from. Yet, current food labels offer little in the way of tangible facts about animal welfare, instead they rest heavily on buzzwords like “prime cut”, “finest” foods, and “butcher’s choice”.
Banned
The previous Conservative government, to its credit, opened a public consultation - which is still running - on improving food labelling. Proposals for improvements fall into two categories: country of origin and method of production.
Method of production labels would cover whether the product falls below, meets or exceeds the UK’s animal welfare standards. If adopted, this would be a step in the right direction – some of the countries where we import animal products from have standards that fall far below what is legal in the UK.
Take foie gras – made by force-feeding ducks and geese until their livers become diseased – which you can still buy, despite its production being criminalised here over a decade ago.
We import pigmeat from countries like the US that hold breeding mother sows for their entire lives (three to five years) in gestation crates – cages so small that they can’t even turn around – which were banned in the UK in 1999.
And we buy in eggs from countries that keep hens in barren battery cages, which we banned here over a decade ago in 2012.
Misinformation
While we continue to import such products, highlighting that they fail to meet our existing welfare standards is a vital step towards increasing consumer knowledge.
But these proposed labelling improvements alone simply won’t cut it. The public may know of a few highly publicised examples of abhorrent farming practices that don’t meet our standards, but arguably the more important question is: do people know about the farming practices that do meet our standards?
In the 1960s, the UK public turned on animal farmers for prioritising efficiency over welfare, which sparked efforts to improve standards. However, it also led to efforts to “welfare wash” the industry – to deceive the public into seeing it as a committed and trustworthy protector of animal welfare.
Welfare washing is a strategic response to the conflicting desires of the public: to consume large quantities of animal products at a price they can afford without endorsing the extreme welfare compromises necessary to produce them at scale.
We are, and have been for a long time, in a misinformation crisis about what the UK does to its farmed animals.
Suckling
The industry obviously isn’t incentivised to tell us all the details of what happens inside farms, but welfare experts and the government are also sleeping on the job of communicating to the public which practices they are in fact paying for.
This slack is only taken up by animal advocacy organisations, who among other things investigate, film and disseminate footage from the nation’s farms in exposés.
It’s tempting to assume that the exposés from animal groups show violations of stringent welfare laws and codes of practice, and that the horrors on show are the fault of a few bad apples from an otherwise welfare-focused industry. But this is often not the case.
Take the footage recently released by Animal Equality UK from Cross Farm, an intensive pig unit in Devon. The footage showed piglets on dirty floors suckling from sows confined in farrowing crates only slightly larger than their bodies.
The piglets had their teeth and tails cut off without pain relief. Weak piglets were killed by being swung by their legs onto a concrete floor, a method called ‘thumping’.
Pain
The reaction from the public indicated that they felt that their trust had been violated – “I’m not a vegetarian but I expect the animal to have been cared for and euthanised properly and kindly”, and that the footage constituted something illegal – “There needs to be a way to prosecute the supermarket, they are complicit in this”.
But these practices are legal and commonplace. Tail ‘docking’ is a legal method of preventing tail-biting, a behaviour borne out of the indoor farm environment in which 60 per cent of our pigs live.
You have to do it before the piglet is seven days old, during which time it’s legal to not give them any pain relief. Breeding mothers are legally kept in cages for birthing through to weaning. Piglet thumping is not just legal but recommended - if done hard and quick enough it is considered better than the alternative, dying by starvation or crushing.
Think back to “prime cut”, “finest” foods, “butcher’s choice”. Adding “100 per cent British grown” and “Animal Welfare Certified” onto the packet will only help to convince the consumer that the product is from an ethically reputable source that does well enough by its animals that there needn’t be any qualms about buying from them.
So if the government is serious about tackling consumer ignorance about animal products, then perhaps politicians and ministers should think of a way to properly inform the public about that packet of British ham.
Imagine a world where labels show whether pigmeat has come from a piglet who had their tail cut without pain relief, who suckled their mother while she was in a cage barely larger than her body, and whose weaker siblings were at best killed by being whacked head-first against the wall of the pig shed. Food for thought, that’s for sure.
This Author
Eva Read is a PhD student at the London School of Economics.
