GoodAnimal: Animal Welfare for Sustainable Futures

GoodAnimal’s primary objective is to acquire knowledge that will mitigate threats and increase opportunities for sustainable farm and industry practices.

Good animal welfare in an ethically sound animal livestock production system is a basic premise in a sustainable food system. Societal values and attitudes have an important influence on food production and any shift in social attitudes about animal welfare provides both significant risks and opportunities for Norwegian farming.

GoodAnimal will:

1. Identify how societal attitudes and evaluations of AW are changing, and how this impacts on farmers’ evaluations of their practice as "good farmers".
2. Identify the key sites and places where these evaluations are being mobilised or contested and how these create changing dynamics in farming’s "social contract to farm".
3. Compare consumers’ perceptions of a "good farmer" with a biological perspective, taking physiological functioning, natural behavior, and animals’ subjective experiences into account.
4. Use these first three objectives to structure a public "deliberative engagement" process to evaluate ethical concerns, prioritize actions and design tools for use by farming and food sectors and government agencies.

GoodAnimal will identify key pressures and design tools and interventions to mitigate risks to the future sustainability of farming and food production and take opportunities for value-creation through best practice.

An international and interdisciplinary research team within social science, humanities and veterinary science will strive to achieve goals of openness and inclusiveness in research and active engagement in public debate, and to enhance socially responsible research and innovation (RRI).