Animal welfare: establishing a dialogue between science and society
Animal welfare: establishing a dialogue between science and society
复制标题
动物福利：建立科学与社会之间的对话
DOI：
10.1017/s0962728600002475
复制
发表时间：
2011
期刊：
影响因子：
1.2
通讯作者：
R. Botreau
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
M. Miele;I. Veissier;A. Evans;R. Botreau
农场动物福利已成为欧洲公众的一个重要问题，特别是在过去二十年中，许多危机（如牛海绵状脑病和禽流感）影响了农场动物种群。公众对这一问题的关注导致欧洲联盟资助福利质量®项目。该项目旨在制定一项评估农场和屠宰厂动物福利的协议，以确定主要的动物福利问题，并解决可能的福利改善策略。在实现这些目标的过程中，福利质量®项目结合了科学和社会的投入。这一点至关重要，因为公众对“动物福利”的理解有时与基于动物科学的定义不同。此外，这些差异往往与更广泛的基于伦理和价值观的人类/非人类动物关系的理解的变化交织在一起。本文介绍了我们在福利质量评估协议的构建过程中为建立科学与社会之间的对话而采取的步骤。这次对话涉及动物科学家、社会科学家和公众之间的多次互动。这些互动采取了几种形式，包括：会议、研讨会、讲习班、网站、通讯、访谈、焦点小组以及公民和农民陪审团。在此，我们将讨论此次对话中的四个关键时刻：十二项福利标准的初步清单的制定;消费者焦点小组;福利质量评分系统的开发;以及公民陪审团。特别是，我们关注焦点小组和公民陪审团的结果。焦点小组在法国、意大利、瑞典、荷兰、联合王国、挪威和匈牙利进行，公民陪审团在意大利、联合王国和挪威进行。基于这项研究，我们强调了社会对农场动物福利的理解和科学专家的观点之间的相似性和差异。此外，至关重要的是，我们概述了动物科学家在开发农场动物福利评估工具时如何考虑社会舆论。
Farm animal welfare has become an important issue for the European public, especially in the last two decades when a number of crises (eg Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and Avian Influenza) have affected farm animal populations. Public concern about this issue led the European Union to fund the Welfare Quality® project. This project aimed to develop a protocol for assessing animal welfare on farms and at slaughter plants, to identify the main animal welfare problems, and to address possible welfare improvement strategies. In fulfilling these aims, the Welfare Quality® project incorporated inputs from both science and society. This was crucial, as the public perception of what constitutes ‘animal welfare’ sometimes differs from animal science-based definitions. Furthermore, these differences are often interwoven with broader variations in ethical- and value-based understandings about human/non-human animal relationships. This paper presents the steps that we adopted to establish a dialogue between science and society during the construction of the Welfare Quality® assessment protocols. This dialogue involved numerous interactions between animal scientists, social scientists and members of the public. These interactions took several forms, including: meetings, conferences, workshops, websites, newsletters, interviews, focus groups, and citizen and farmers juries. Here, we address four key moments within this dialogue: the development of the initial list of twelve welfare criteria; the consumer focus groups; the development of the Welfare Quality® scoring system; and the citizen juries. In particular, we focus on the results of the focus groups and citizen juries. The focus groups were conducted in France, Italy, Sweden, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Hungary and the citizen juries were carried out in Italy, the United Kingdom, and Norway. Drawing on this research, we highlight the similarities and differences between societal understandings of farm animal welfare and the views of scientific experts. Furthermore, and crucially, we outline how the animal scientists took account of societal opinion when developing their farm animal welfare assessment tools.