The Political Science of Farm Animal Welfare in the US and EU (original) (raw)

Abstract

Beginning in the mid-20th century, farm animal welfare can be seen as rising on a broad scale of policy and societal importance in the US and Europe, as advocacy groups have campaigned for the animals’ protection, the public has expressed growing concern over their conditions, and legislation has been increasingly enacted to regulate their treatment. US and European governments have long supported scientific research that regards the animals as production units, but more recently also as beings that can subjectively experience good or poor welfare. This paper contends that these activities can be seen as enrolling farm animals into political processes, thereby imbuing them with a type of implicit or emergent political subjectivity. Further, governmental support of research can be seen as a manifestation of the Foucauldian concept of bio-power, as managing large populations of industrially-farmed animals for production requires not only knowledge of their physiologies, but also, as p...

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