Defining And Measuring Farmers’ Attitudes To Farm Animal Welfare
In this study from Sweden, researchers attempt to better understand the attitudes of farmers towards the animals in their care. They say that while “consumers, veterinarians and members of various pressure groups play an important role in the debate on Farm Animal Welfare, farmers provide the actual care for the animals and thus play a special role.” They approach the issue by trying to build a method that can be applied longitudinally and in different contexts. The result of their study is a relatively small but methodologically solid baseline of data that shows that farmers’ attitudes vary depending on the kind of farming (conventional or “organic”) they are involved with, and what kind of animals they farm, among other factors.
As animal advocates try to improve animal welfare on farms or advocate for animal rights in various ways through consumer choices and campaigning, understanding farmers’ attitudes is an important factor in determining how animals can be helped in the here and now. According to the authors of this study, “farmers make the actual decisions about what Farm Animal Welfare [FAW] efforts to provide, so they play a critical role in determining the living conditions of production animals.” Here, the researchers attempted to gauge how farmers feel about the animals they work with, and also try to structure the research in a way that will allow future studies to build upon their data in a meaningful way. In their words, “there is little detail and consensus in this literature about how to conceptualise [farmers’ FAW] attitudes from a theoretical point of view and about how they can be measured.”
The researchers addressed these methodological problems in four steps. First, they “expanded a behavioural framework based on social psychology and psychometric theory to measure farmers’ attitudes to animal welfare, to include farmers’ FAW attitudes as an outcome of use and non-use values […] and to identify the relationship between the theoretical attitude construct and its empirical indicators.” In other words, they took steps to not only measure farmers’ attitudes towards animals from a use perspective, but non-use as well, and also went further in trying to understand how their stated attitude might differ from how they act in a hands-on environment. “Secondly, we outlined a framework within which the so-called explicit measurements of FAW attitude constructs could be tested for reliability and validity,” they say, again making an attempt to cross-check attitudes for their veracity. Third, researchers compared two different measurement models to identify “problems associated with model misspecification in a dataset made available to us.” Finally, they reviewed and synthesized literature related to farmers’ attitudes on FAW. Their approach was thorough and inspires confidence in the validity of their data.
With this firm methodology in place, the study reveals a small set of baseline data that suggests that farmers’ attitudes on FAW are dependent on a number of factors, though generally speaking they “cover the domains of: animal health, psychological needs of the animals, natural behaviour of the animals, living environment of the animals, humane and ethical treatment of the animals, profitability of the animals, and the farmer’s own well-being and knowledge.” More specifically, the study identifies factors that specifically affect views of FAW, including but not limited to: what kind of production farmers are involved with (“conventional” or “organic”, etc.); what kind of animals they work with; how they view the end goal of FAW (i.e. whether it is a way to increase economic efficiency, or address ethical concerns); and more. Though the data set from this study is small, the methodological approach is a good product in and of itself, and the authors of the study urge much more research into farmers’ views of FAW in the future.
Original Abstract:
Identifying farmers’ attitudes to farm animal welfare (FAW) is an important step in determining farmers’ efforts to improve FAW, knowledge of which is of particular importance for understanding how the living conditions of production animals are determined. This study developed a hypothetical model of farmers’ attitudes to FAW, including the antecedents of these attitudes and possible influences on FAW-related behaviour. Two models for empirical measurement of attitudes, namely formative and reflective models, were also evaluated and compared. The results suggested that choice of measurement model considerably influences conceptualisation of attitudes and that there may be considerable model misspecifications in previous literature relating to farmers’ FAW attitudes. Existing literature on farmers’ FAW attitudes was reviewed with the aim of providing a preliminary indication of the coverage of farmers’ FAW attitudes. A need for future research related to farmers’ attitudes to FAW was identified.