What’s In A Label?: Deciphering And Improving Animal Product Welfare Labels
In an ideal world, everyone would have enough to eat without exploiting others, all animals would be treated ethically, and people would make the best possible decisions to maximize the benefits to themselves and their environments. While we still have a lot of work ahead to reach the ideal, we can move closer to that world with clear, meaningful, and informative labels on animal products. Unfortunately, there are currently very few guidelines around animal product labeling, leading to widespread confusion, misunderstanding, and humanewashing.
Many U.S. consumers believe that certified labels (such as those from Global Animal Partnership, American Humane Certified, and One Health Certified) guarantee certain positive animal welfare outcomes, such as being raised with constant access to the outdoors, being raised on pasture, and positive environmental outcomes. However, the U.S. does not have any specific standards or legal definitions for terms like “animal welfare,” “humane,” or “sustainable,” so producers can decide for themselves whether their treatment of animals is humane.
What Does It Mean To Be Humane?
In fact, animal-use industries and governments often mean something very different when they say “humane,” compared to when the public uses the term. Unfortunately, words like “humane” and “euthanasia” can refer to practices that most people would consider cruel. For example, most Canadians believe that killing mink and fur-bearing animals with restraining traps or drowning is inhumane, yet trappers, the fur industry, public agencies, governments, and retailers all classify these as “humane” practices. Part of the disconnect between what the public considers humane compared to industry and government is that many sectors do not consider psychological needs or mental well-being when it comes to treating animals humanely. The word “humane” often isn’t defined at all by those using it, including in many statutes and regulations that govern animal treatment.
Without consistent definitions, it can be hard to trust certification programs and their labels. Many Canadians trust certifications from animal protection organizations, but significantly fewer Canadians trust certifications from industry associations (67% vs. 51%). As it turns out, there might be a very good reason for the lack of trust.
Because there is little standardization or transparency in the industry, producers can come up with their own definitions of what is humane, leading to phenomena like the USDA approving the vast majority of claims about humane treatment (almost 85% between 2013 and 2021), even without proper evidence or justification. Not only do these definitions usually fall short, but they may even be actively harmful to animal welfare. Producers may claim that their animals are raised humanely because they don’t use antibiotics, while simultaneously completely ignoring other animal care needs (or even worse, foregoing antibiotics resulting in animals getting sick more frequently and severely without proper medicine).
According to the Animal Welfare Institute, the USDA will generally approve claims regardless of how they’re defined, so producers can easily get away with doing the bare minimum of their self-imposed definitions. It’s always possible that companies that want to do harm (or that simply don’t care how their actions harm others) may do so regardless of regulation; however, because the USDA doesn’t have specific standards or details to assess producers’ submissions, and relies on information from the producers themselves to decide if their claims are true and appropriate, the producers who do care about treating animals well have no external incentive to do the right thing.
This system is also unfair to people who think they are being ethical consumers but have inaccurate information.
Speaking Of Ethical Consumption…
Many consumers are willing to change their purchasing behavior or pay more for products if they believe the animal was treated humanely. Nearly 2/3 of Canadians say they would change their purchasing behavior based on humane labels, and 83-91% of U.K. consumers support labeling for animal products. Most New Zealand consumers (78%) say there should be defined standards for chicken welfare claims. Between 40% and 58% of U.S. consumers say they would pay more for products with redundant labeling like gluten-free orange juice or non-GMO salt, highlighting the need for better, more informative labels (salt is already non-GMO since it is a mineral and contains no genetic material, and orange juice is naturally gluten-free; these labels are largely marketing-driven).
How Do We Make Current Labeling Practices Better?
How can we create a consumer world with more meaningful labels? One thing that’s important to understand is that even with the best intentions, others may not fully understand the information we attempt to convey. One way to make information more comprehensible is to put information in factboxes rather than text. A recent study found that factboxes improve people’s understanding and memory of medical information. Factboxes are also more engaging and allow people to easily compare different aspects of information.
It’s important to do everything we can to make the information itself as digestible as possible. Using icons can convey important information efficiently. However, people often don’t understand such graphic symbols, even in context, and the animal ag industry has their own set of icons and logos which makes the landscape confusing. To make the best use of icons, researchers recommend using icons that audiences can understand without labels, and to include colors and symbols like + and – into your icons if visualizing direction or magnitude of effects. It’s also important to pre-test icons in focus groups to check how well they’re understood.
Arguably the most important thing we can do is push for standardized labels that are transparent and meaningful, and ideally not driven by industry marketing. These labels should consider all the above factors to create a system so that ethical consumers never have to guess what they’re really purchasing again.
An Easy-To-Share Factsheet
We’re always striving to make our work as accessible and readily usable as possible. If what you’ve read above is compelling, we’ve compiled a condensed version of this into an easy-to-share factsheet below. Clicking on the share button at the bottom of the graphic will allow you to easily spread the word on social media. If you’d like to download a static image of the graphic, you can click here and save it to your mobile phone or desktop computer.